AMD’s monthly driver updates fixes major bugs and touts significant performance increases, among other things.

Last week was a relatively quiet one for the AMD camp, but they released a beautiful piece of software that on paper would seem to please everyone running around with an AMD/ATI video card. The Catalyst 8.2 drivers were released to the public last week to relatively little fanfare. Although this event should be looked upon as a more than stellar achievement, AMD seems very quiet about this. In the release notes, AMD claims that the Catalyst 8.2 driver will bring a performance increase of up to 20% higher frame rates, specifically in Company of Heroes. The performance increase applies to cards from the Radeon HD 2×00 series to the Radeon HD 3×00 series.

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The notes also mention that these performance increases could go up to as high as 30% in CrossFire configurations. Bells seem to be ringing for the people in charge of driver development at the AMD headquarters. Not only do they increase the frame rates, but there are fixing multiple bugs which will make HD owners very happy. Specifically, corruption during editing levels for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, is no longer noticeable. Flickering and missing objects in World of Warcraft running in OpenGL mode was also fixed. Alongside corrections they made to games, AMD decided to throw in some CrossFire enhancements (further elaborated in the release notes). This was supposed to be the driver that made CrossFireX a very viable option over NVIDIA’s SLI. But does it really yield all the extra benefits that AMD is claiming?

One might think AMD is shooting for the top in all areas, but they seem to be focusing on the more “mainstream” market. Further solidifying their move to dominate the mainstream market, AMD has recently released the HD3600 and HD3400 series. This would make CrossFire affordable and still give great performance benefits in almost all areas. I believe that this release of the Catalyst 8.2 drivers will help balance things out, but AMD is definitely going to have to show some spirit and come up with something that will get the scale tilt completely in their favor. NVIDIA still holds most of the market share for GPU sales, but as I’ve said before and will say again, AMD is taking a step in the right direction. All we can do for now is wait until true CrossFireX testing has been done with the new set of drivers.

The release notes are available here, and the drivers, which support a plethora of operating systems (including Linux) are located here.

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