Written by Nicolas Gridelet
Published on July 21, 2008

URL: http://www.behardware.com/news/lire/21-07-2008/#9841

ATI has just put the Catalyst 8.7 online. The main innovation is that there is support for the Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 which up until now had to use the beta version of a Catalyst specifically devoted to them. This came in the form of a CD or just recently a "Hotfix Driver". As usual, the driver is compatible with all DirectX 9/10/10.1 GPUs from AMD’s graphic division and they function with 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows XP and VISTA. Otherwise, there is an improvement of the Catalyst Control Center Information Center which provides rather complete information on each physically present graphics accelerator.

In terms of performance improvements, there are gains from 3% to 12% in Company of Heroes and 4% to 15% in Lost Planet. In both cases, this involves DirectX 10 and only with certain Radeon HD 3600, 3800 and 4800s. In DirectX 9, the Radeon HD 4800 can be up to 4% faster in Call Of Duty 4, still only with certain cards, and in Lost Planet, CrossFire seems to finally be active as multi-card configurations can be up to 70% faster with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering activated.

Finally, a series of bugs has been remedied. Amongst those games concerned in Windows Vista, there is Assassin's Creed (with the Radeon HD 2600, edge detection in Crysis in DirectX 9 with the UBM activated), Frontlines Fuel of War, Hellgate London, Mahjongg Artifacts, Rainbow Six Vegas 2, World In Conflict as well as World of Warcraft. In Windows XP, ATI mentions City of Heroes, Enemy Territories Quake Wars, Lost Planet, Google SketchUp and World of Warcraft to name just a few. For all the details, do not hesitate to consult the Release Notes.