ATi released new Catalyst drivers. This particular posting updates the ATI Display Driver to version 8.042. This unified driver has been further enhanced to provide the highest level of power, performance, and reliability.

The CATALYST software suite 4.8 contains the following:

• RADEON display driver 8.042
• ATI MULTIMEDIA CENTER 9.02
• HydraVision 3.25.0006
• HydraVision Basic Edition 3.25.9006
• ATI REMOTE WONDER 2.3
• WDM version 4.07
• Southbridge/IXP Driver

ATI CATALYST drivers provide fully qualified display support for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004 systems with Radeon display cards, but requires a special version of ATI's Video Capture (WDM) drivers for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004 systems with All-in-Wonder boards, which will be provided by your computer manufacturer.

Geometry Instancing

This release of CATALYST introduces the support of Geometry Instancing. This new feature provides assistance when a game has to render many objects where the geometry is highly similar. Geometry Instancing allows the VPU to create multiple objects from a single geometric model, rather than passing an entire new model for each item on the screen. This increases the rendering speed of images such as leaves, or grass.

VPU Recover Enhancement

VPU Recover has been improved in this release of CATALYST. In most cases, VPU Recover will fully recover instead of switching to software rendering mode. This enhancement is supported under the Windows XP operating system.

Performance Improvements

As with most CATALYST releases performance has increased in various situations. The following performance gains are noticed:

• Direct3D driver efficiency has improved considerably. Significant performance gains are noted in multiple "CPU-bound" cases, including 3DMark2001, Aquamark 3, Comanche4, Dungeon Siege, and Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004. Typical improvements are in the 1-5% range.
• OpenGL driver efficiency is also improved. Older OpenGL games such as Quake III Arena and Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory show small improvement (1-2%) at low resolutions. Call of Duty framerates are up approximately 4%. Doom3 improves considerably more (as much as 12% on some product configurations) as a result of the same software efficiency improvements.

Issues Resolved in CATALYST Version 4.8

The following section provides a summary of the issues that have been resolved in the latest release of CATALYST 4.8. These include:

• 3D Mark03: Display corruption is no longer noticed when running the Trolls Lair test 3 under Windows XP
• Beyond Divinity:Playing the game with FSAA set to 2x no longer results in display corruption when scrolling the display by moving the mouse to the left of the display
• High Heat Baseball 2003: The display no longer loses sync when exiting or changing player characters in the game High Heat Baseball 2003 under Windows XP with an ATI RADEON X800 series installed
• Madden NFL 2003: The game no longer fails to respond under Windows XP when an ATI RADEON 9800 XT is installed and attempting to set the Truform slider to Application Preference
• Need for Speed Underground:Playing the game under Windows XP with an ATI RADEON 9000/9200 installed no longer results in the road ahead not being lit up by the car's headlights
• Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow:Display corruption is no longer noticed when launching a multiplayer game under Windows XP with an ATI RADEON 9200 installed
• Thief 3:Inconsistent lighting and shadow flicker is no longer noticed when playing the game under Windows XP
• Unreal Tournament 2004: Playing the game under Windows XP with an ATI RADEON X600 series installed no longer results in game corruption being displayed when setting Anti-Aliasing to 4x and having the display properties set to 1600x1200 32bpp