Catalyst 10.4 WHQL available

AMD has released April’s WHQL driver, Catalyst 10.4 package.

ATI Catalyst – Video enhancements:

H.264 Level 5.1 support

• ATI Catalyst™ can now playback 5.1 level streams on all supported players
• Allows for playback of high resolutions (4Kx2K)

AMD video transcoding updates

This release of ATI Catalyst™ provides enhanced support for the Windows 7 Drag and Drop video converter

• Performance improvements
• New formats supported (H.264 file formats – MTS, and WMV9 Complex profile interlaced content)
• ATI Catalyst™ Control Center option for enabling/disabling GPU acceleration

Support for the ATI Video converter is now available in the advanced view of the ATI Catalyst Control Center.

The following performance gains are noticed with this release of Catalyst™ 10.4:

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – Clear Sky

• Improves up to 6% with ATI Radeon™ HD 5970 graphics products
• Improves up to 3% with ATI Radeon™ HD 5800 graphics products
• Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon™ HD 5700 Series products

Note: This release only resolves the long loading time issue on BattleField: Bad Company 2 for HD5000 Series cards.

Download @ AMD

ToMMTi-Systems SSAA-Tool v1.0

ToMMTi-Systems has released version 1.0 of their SSAA (SuperSampling Anti-Aliasing) tool. Great little tool to force SSAA on basically anygame, most image quality gains being on games running deferred rendering engines.

• support for SSAA (defined by a user value from 0.0 to 999999.99999) (dx10-dx11)
• force tripple buffered rendering (dx8-dx11)
• force vsync rendering (dx8-dx11)
• simple SLI/CF FPS Limiter to reduce Microstuttering – the FPS can be defined by a user value (dx8-dx11)
• experimental option for rendering a game (dx8-dx11) via the reference rasterizer or for dx10 only, rendering via the WARP renderer

Please read the ReadMe.txt / LiesMich.txt to understand how to configure the Tool properly!

If it does not work, please disable the Steam Overlay, Fraps, XFire and all other Gaming Overlay Applications!

Download @ ToMMTi-Systems

Catalyst 10.4a Preview available – Fixes long BFBC2 loading times

Terry Makedon and his colleagues made available the much awaited fix for the long loading times in BattleField: Bad Company 2.

• Long load times for new maps in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 when using a Windows 7 / Windows Vista based system with an:
  

  • ATI Radeon HD 5xxx series graphics card
  • ATI Radeon HD 4xxx series graphics card
  • ATI Radeon HD 3xxx series graphics card
  • ATI Radeon HD 2xxx series graphics card

• The XP driver is provided only as an early look of Catalyst 10.4

Download @ AMD

Nothern Islands GPUs to be built by GlobalFoundries?

While current rumors suggest that AMD is readying a facelift for the HD5000 Series dubbed the Southern Islands which will be possibly made at TSMC using their 40nm process… there was one fact announced yesterday by AMDs own Dirk Meyer: “The first intersection of our AMD GPUs and GlobalFoundries are on the 28nm. We haven’t been public with respect to any timing there.”

So AMD will use GlobalFoundries  28nm HKMG manufacturing process, and the 28nm-HP (High-Performance) variant of it. The later is targeted for high-performance general-purpose applications such as graphics, consoles, multimedia and networking. They are planing to crank up 28nm production for commercial product early 2011, so AMDs Nothern Islands generation could be made on 28nm @ GlobalFoundries.

MSI AfterBurner 1.6.0 Beta5

The guys over at MSI made the responsible for all the over-voltage overclocking that was done by Guru3D, and also Kombustor got updated to 1.07.

Notes on AfterBurner 1.6.0 Beta5:

• Over-voltage support for GTX470 & GTX480 cards.
• Adjustment range on the GTX470: 0.825~1.087V
• Adjustment range on the GTX480: 0.825~1.138V
• Clock adjustment upperlimit extended to 150% on GTX470 & GTX480.

Notes on Kombustor 1.07:

• Change: updated to win32 installer to overwrite existing files.
• Bugfix: When renamed in etqw.exe (for multi-GPU purposes), Kombustor crashed due to some OpenGL instructions that worked differently with etqw profile in Catalyst drivers. The crash only occured when Post-FX was checked.

Download @ MSI