New ATI Catalyst 9.8 brings HUGE performance boosts in many different games

2875 Views 18 Replies 6 Participants Last post by -StrikE-, Aug 16, 2009

bkwegoharder

Discussion Starter · Aug 15, 2009 (Edited)

Catalyst 9.8 out, boosts CrossFireX with AMD chipsets - The Tech Report

AMD has released a new set of Catalyst graphics drivers, and there's a twist. The drivers shouldn't hit the AMD Game website until Monday, but AMD marketing chief Ian McNaughton has posted links to them on his blog.

You can grab the drivers right now for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 in their 32-bit and 64-bit variants. We can't link the actual files, though; some sort of anti-leeching technology is afoot. (Oh, and we were asked not to post hard links, too.)

AMD tells us the drivers deliver "enhancements specific to Performance Platforms that improve system performance in CPU bound situations." What does that mean? Well, using a system based on the Dragon platform (so Phenom II, 790GX, and Radeon HD 4800 graphics), the company says it measured considerable gains with multi-GPU configurations running at resolutions of 1680x1050 and higher.

Purportedly, performance can increase by as much as 50% in Far Cry 2, and you can also expect meaty gains in Battleforge, Company of Heroes, Crysis, H.A.W.X., S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, and World in Conflict. AMD notes that the gains apply to both conventional CrossFire setups and the single-board Radeon HD 4870 X2.

Not only that, but from what I and many other people are seeing. There are massive performance boosts in Grand theft auto 4. The frame rate may or may not increase, but the overall smoothness of the game goes up BIG time. I'm able to set my settings over 2 times higher than I normally have them, and the game is still very smooth. It is like how in Crysis where even if you get 20fps in the game, the game still is pretty smooth. The game just doesn't stutter anymore. So even if you have 20fps the game is more than enjoyable. I'm over the amount of vram I have available on my card by like 2 times and i'm still going strong.

And I'm not using a crossfire set up. I have a single 4850 and an i7.

They also added new OpenGL 3.1 extensions and they improved Linux support

http://www.pcper.com/comments.php?nid=7641

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

Here is the blog page that gives has the links to the drivers

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

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