Catalyst 9.8 from Quakecon

[Siskods9]

http://blogs.amd.com/play/2009/08/14/what’s-a-good-title-for-a-quakecon-blog/

Scroll down to the links

[Siskods9]

Seems like it offers some substantial FarCry2 performance gains

[fasedww]

Got it yesterday, from same place. I've been playing Call of Duty 4, Works great on my 4870X2's for quadfire.:D

[Heinz68]

ATI Catalys 9.8 Driver and Release Notes should be listed at AMD site on Monday Aug-17-09
PCPerspective (http://pcper.com/comments.php?nid=7641) article shows shows impressive performance improvements with some games.

ATI Catalyst™ 9.8 Driver - Everything you want to know and why you should care

With five months of ATI Catalyst driver blogs under our belt, we are seeing a growing engagement from the community via this blog site. Please keep up the great comments and suggestions and we will endeavor to answer as many as we can. So, without further ado – let me introduce the ATI Catalyst 9.8 Driver Release!

Game Optimizations: ATI Catalyst™ 9.8 Driver

Our test system configuration is: AMD Phenom II 940 (3.0GHz) processor Asus M3A79-T(790) motherboard 4GB DDR2-800 5-5-5-18 memory Windows VISTA Ultimate SP1 64bit

This month we are seeing a massive performance increase with a whole host of games as compared to the ATI Catalyst 9.7 driver. Detailed release notes are available for most of the game optimizations; here are the highlights:

* Battleforge DirectX 10/DirectX 10.1 performance improves of up to 50% with the largest gains in configurations using ATI CrossFireX™ technology.
* Company of Heroes DirectX 10 performance improves of up to 77%.
* Crysis DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 10% and quad mode performance improves of up to 34%.
* Crysis Warhead DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 7% and quad mode performance improves of up to 69%.
* Far Cry 2 DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 50% and quad mode performance improves of up to 88%.
* Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. DirectX 10/DirectX 10.1 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 40% and with quad mode performance improving of up to 60%.
* UnigineTropics OpenGL performance improvements of up to 20%.
* UnigineTropics DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in quad mode improvements of up to 20%.
* World in Conflict DirectX 10 performance improvements of up to by 10%.

It’s fitting that last weekend AMD was in attendance at Quakecon 2009 in Dallas,Texas where the world’s most prolific OpenGLsupporters gathered for 4 days of ‘peace, love and rockets,’ that we are announcing support for OpenGL 3.1 and the following details:


This release of the ATI Catalyst driver provides OpenGL 3.1 extension support. The following is a list of OpenGL 3.1 features and extensions added in ATI Catalyst 9.8:

* Support for OpenGL Shading Language 1.30 and 1.40.
* Instanced rendering with a per-instance counter accessible to vertex shaders (GL ARB draw instanced).
* Data copying between buffer objects (GL EXT copy buffer).
* Primitive restart (NV primitive restart). Because client enable/disable no longer exists in OpenGL 3.1, the PRIMITIVE RESTART state has become server state, unlike the Nvidia extension where it is client state. As a result, the numeric values assigned to PRIMITIVE RESTART and PRIMITIVE RESTART INDEX differ from the NV versions of those tokens. o At least 16 texture image units must be accessible to vertex shaders, in addition to the 16 already guaranteed to be accessible to fragment shaders.
* Texture buffer objects (GL ARB texture buffer object).
* Rectangular textures (GL ARB texture rectangle). o Uniform buffer objects (GL ARB uniform buffer object).
* SNORM texture component formats.

And last but surely not least, my favorite community: ATI Catalyst™ 9.8 driver for Linux!

Support for new Linux operating systems
This release of ATI Catalyst driver for Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems:

* RHEL 4.8 production support
* Ubuntu 9.04 production support

ATI Catalyst™ Control Center - Linux Edition support for RandR 1.2 This release of the ATI Catalyst driver for Linux introduces ATI Catalyst Control Center - Linux Edition support for the RandR 1.2 extension API. The following new features are now available in the ATI Catalyst Control Center - Linux Edition Display Manager:

* Display rotation
* Multiple display arrangement and desktop sizing

[LordJuanlo]

At last ATI gives us a big improvements list, will try those drivers when I get home but people are reporting those are great drivers for multiGPU systems

[a12ctic]

ATI Drivers that support new Linux kernels. Sweet deal. Time for an upgrade.

[mtl]

Funny how the claim of improvements from ATI"s marketing guy doesn't match independent site .

http://www.hardware-infos.com/tests.php?test=73&seite=13

[Heinz68]

@mtl, funny is replying to a post without reading it first. Are you ever going to stop the ATI bashing? Looks like that is the only reason you come to visit this "Other Desktop Graphics Cards Forum".

Since you didn't read or conveniently overlooked the differences in the PCPerspective article and your so called Hardware-Infos independent site article, here I make it easy for you.

1.) The Hardware-Infos used completely different config set-up for the testing.
2.) Most of the games are not included in the Hardware-Infos article.
3.) PCPerspective article shows most of the big improvements in the Crossfire and Quad-fire, NONE included in the Hardware-Infos article.
4.) The rest of the PCPerspective article is about better support for for OpenGL and Linux.

[a12ctic]

Heinz, do you know if there is a permalink to the Linux driver?

[mtl]

Many times when I've read analyses of ATI-AMD claims they've been found to be inflated.
They have a history of this. They still can't get over losing the performance crown to Intel and Nvidia. Years ago, they did have the best tech for a while and the gloating was endless. Now they just have to eat crow. Maybe they'll catch up eventually. Competition is excellent.

[Heinz68]

Heinz, do you know if there is a permalink to the Linux driver?

The drivers just got listed at AMD site
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx

[Heinz68]

Many times when I've read analyses of ATI-AMD claims they've been found to be inflated.
They have a history of this. They still can't get over losing the performance crown to Intel and Nvidia. Years ago, they did have the best tech for a while and the gloating was endless. Now they just have to eat crow. Maybe they'll catch up eventually. Competition is excellent.
Just another negative post from you about AMD/ATI without any prove. I don't feel like turning this into another NVIDIA vs ATI thread to show how wrong you're, we already have too many off them.

The fact is ALL you post is negatives about ATI sometime even inventing stories and lies.
Than you say competition is excellent, you must be kidding. It's more like a dead wish you have for AMD/ATI. Go read your posting history if you don't believe me.

[mtl]

predictable

[Siskods9]

Funny how the claim of improvements from ATI"s marketing guy doesn't match independent site .

http://www.hardware-infos.com/tests.php?test=73&seite=13

I've noticed some tangible improvements and am very pleased with the latest Catalyst offering. Out of interest do you own an ATi card?

[Heinz68]

XbitLab 9.8 driver review shows 50% Far Cry 2 boost with HD 4870 X2. The other games benchmarks also show some performance increase.

Here is the Conclusion (http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/catalyst-9-8_8.html)

The results of my test session suggest that AMD/ATI programmers have done a good job to optimize the graphics card driver for the new OS (and not only for it because Windows Vista and Windows 7 share the same Catalyst driver pack). The Radeon HD 4890 and Radeon HD 4870 X2 perform faster with the newer driver than with Catalyst 9.7 in Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X., Far Cry 2, and Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor. A smaller performance growth could also be observed in Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason, Lost Planet: Colonies, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky. In the other games and benchmarks the two versions of the driver are equal to one another. The new version does not provoke a performance hit in any game, except for a minor reduction of speed in Stormrise. I noticed no image defects with the new version of the driver during my tests, so Catalyst 9.8 is undoubtedly a step forward and I recommend it for installation and use under Windows 7 and Vista.

[LordJuanlo]

ATI just released a 9.8 hotfix (an entire new driver package) with the following fixes:

- Anti-Aliasing support for Ghostbusters
- ATI CrossFireX™ support for Resident Evil 5
- Graphics corruption fix for Sims 3
- Bug fix for Company of Heroes – Tales of Valor expansion pack

Download here (http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/Hotfixfor3DGames.aspx)

[K007]

hmm that re5 thing for xfire...does it actually fix that strange framerate drop in demo 3?

[nekrosoft13]

how the hell did they jump from 67mb to 99.9mb

[Heinz68]

I think it's because it includes the "Hydra Vision" which I believe is optional download with the regular CCC download (http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=vista64/common-vista64), at least I don't remember seeing the "Hydra Vision" pull down menu in the CCC before this HotFix install.

You can also choose custom installation if you don't have any use for it.