Catalyst 9.3, reviewed by HEXUS earlier this week, is now available to download at game.amd.com.
The release, dubbed by AMD as "the industry's first unified graphics driver for Windows 7 and Windows Vista", offers a handful of new features and serves to deliver an important message; AMD's officially ready for Microsoft's forthcoming operating system.
It's a message justified by our in-house analysis, as we found AMD's driver to be "slightly more robust with respect to performance" than NVIDIA's latest offering.
If you're looking to put the drivers to the test on Windows 7, or you're just keeping up to date on XP/Vista, here's an AMD-provided list detailing Catalyst 9.3's new features:
ATI Catalyst™ 9.3 – the industries first Unified graphics driver for Windows 7 and Windows Vista
- AMD has delivered a single unified graphics driver for both Windows 7 and Windows Vista – demonstrating AMD’s Windows 7 graphics driver leadership and focus on delivering a stable and robust Windows 7 experience on AMD hardware
- Delivers full WDDM 1.1 support under Windows 7 on the ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series, ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series, and ATI Radeon HD 2000 Series of products
- All future ATI Catalyst postings will deliver one single unified driver for Windows 7 and Windows Vista
- Please note that the AVIVO Video Converter is not currently supported under Windows 7
ATI Catalyst™ 9.3 Folding@Home performance enhancements
- Using ATI Stream™ technology, owners of the ATI Radeon™ HD 4000 Series, ATI Radeon™ HD 3000 Series, and ATI Radeon™ HD 2000 Series of graphics accelerators will see a performance boost in their Folding@Home scores when running the latest Folding@Home client and upcoming cores in conjunction with ATI Catalyst™ 9.3
ATI Catalyst™ 9.3 – Windows Vista HDMI audio driver support integrated into all ATI Catalyst 9.3 packages
- As of ATI Catalyst 9.3 and future ATI Catalyst releases, the AMD Windows Vista HDMI audio driver is automatically included
- The HDMI audio driver will only be installed if the AMD graphics accelerator has an HDMI display connector and there is no 3rd party HDMI audio driver installed.
New AMD Display Library (ADL) SDK
- AMD Display Library (ADL) SDK is designed to access display driver functionality for all ATI Radeon graphics accelerators and FirePro graphics accelerators
- The SDK supports Windows XP, Windows Vista and Linux - 32 and 64 bit variants
- The SDK can be used from both unmanaged (C/C++) and managed (C#) applications - samples are provided within the SDK
- The ADL SDK is available to the public via the Developer relations site
Linux users, fear not, a 9.3 release will be heading your way soon and it'll introduce support for RedFlag DT 6.0 sp2, RedFlag DT 7.0, and SLED and SLES 11.
For a complete breakdown of what Catalyst 8.12 has to offer, including a number of resolved issues, please refer to the official release notes at game.amd.com.
To find out more about AMD graphics performance on Windows 7, feel free to take a look at our high-end benchmarks.
Useful links
Download Catalyst 9.3
