AMD Catalyst 8.3 and CrossFire X Announcement

AMD Takes the Ultimate Visual Experience  in PC Gaming to New Heights with CrossFireX

Milestone ATI Catalyst  8.3 release unlocks quad- and triple-GPU performance and ATI Hybrid Graphics for Windows Vista

Hannover, Germany (CeBIT 2008)   March 4, 2008   AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced its latest graphics driver release to advance the Ultimate Visual Experience  for PC gaming enthusiasts and casual gamers alike. Expected to be available for download starting March 5, ATI Catalyst 8.3 is a milestone software update in delivering both CrossFireX  for Windows Vista  -- the world s first quad-GPU support, and scalable, cost-effective three GPU support -- as well as ATI Hybrid Graphics Technology for casual gamers. These multi-GPU capabilities provide gamers a more realistic and immersive experience allowing them to play at high resolutions with demanding image quality settings, and at a better value than competing multi-GPU solutions.  AMD packed ATI Catalyst 8.3 with a double-barreled set of leading technologies to simultaneously push the Ultimate Visual Experience  to new heights and to a wider population of PC users,  said Rick Bergman, senior vice president, AMD Graphics Product Group.   We deliver industry firsts that make a visible difference to PC users, whether it s CrossFireX and the first ever quad-GPU performance on Windows Vista, or ATI Hybrid Graphics that bring a new level of performance to mainstream PC platforms.

Advancing Multi-GPU Gaming with CrossFireX Through three- and four-GPU configurations in CrossFireX, gamers can see multi-GPU performance scaling across a range of today s most popular DirectX  9 and DirectX  10 games on Windows Vista -- up to 3.2 times the performance over a single GPU2 in some scenarios. The flexible architecture of CrossFireX allows for the mixing and matching of high-performing ATI Radeon  GPUs. Any ATI Radeon  HD 3850, ATI Radeon  HD 3870 or ATI Radeon  HD 3870 X2 cards can be combined to harness the power of up to four GPUs. CrossFireX also supports a wide range of platforms, enabling many gamers to take advantage of three- and four-GPU gaming on their existing hardware.

HotHardware's ATI Catalyst 8.3 Sneak Peek