It's the last Catalyst driver suite release of the year, but what does it provide?
According to ATI's release notes a number of programs experience performance improvements in the latest driver release, most notably Far Cry, which ATI say yields 25% boosts in some circumstances. These performance increases, however, are mainly from new dual-core optimisations. As such, hyperthreaded and dual-core processors only will benefit. The degree by which you'll benefit depends on your system and how CPU-bound the game is as a result. Here's the full list of improvements:
3DMark05 gains as much as 5.7%
3DMark03 gains as much as 3.3%
3DMark2001 SE gains up to 10%
Aquamark 3 gains up to 16%
Comanche 4 improves as much as 20%
Far Cry gains as much as 25% on some product configurations
Half-Life 2 performance improves as much as 8%
Splinter Cell improves as much as 8% in certain parts of the game
Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness runs as much as 10% faster
Unreal Tournament 2004 framerates improve as much as 10%
There's an array of bugfixes, many of little significance to most. The biggest two are fixes for Far Cry on Radeon Xpress 200 chipsets and Quake 4 in Ultra Quality mode.
Grab the control center version of the drivers if you have .net and all the usual gubbins installed, otherwise meander over to ATI's support pages and poke around for the release notes or different driver flavours.
