AMD has released the latest set of Catalyst drivers for ATI Radeon based graphics cards, bringing the version number up to 8.2. There are numerous bug fixes listed in the release notes as well as a couple of performance enhancements for current and previous-gen Radeons. Here’s a snip from the release notes regarding performance...
“The following performance improvements are noticed with Catalyst 8.2: Performance improvements with this release of Catalyst includes Company of Heroes DX10 frame rates increasing as much as 20% across all of the ATI Radeon™ HD 2x00 series of products and on all ATI Radeon™ HD 3x00 series of products. These performance improvements are even larger (up to 30%) for CrossFire configurations."
Now that the dual-GPU based Radeon HD 3870 X2 is AMD’s flagship graphics card, we expect constant improvements in CrossFire performance in future releases. We suspect Catalyst 8.2, is just a precursor of what’s in store.
Marco Chiappetta
Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com