AMD today released new ATI Catalyst drivers for all current Microsoft Windows operating systems. The new driver supports ATI Radeon 9500-series and newer desktop products, and ATI Mobility 9550 and newer mobile products.
Users with ATI Radeon X1950 XT graphics cards in Windows Vista are left out in the dark, as the card is currently unsupported under Windows Vista at the time. As with the previous Catalyst 7.1 release, ATI All-in Wonder and VIVO-equipped ATI Radeon users will have to look elsewhere for VIVO and tuner support under Windows Vista.
New features to the Catalyst 7.2 driver-set include:
- Significant performance gains; Catalyst™ Control Center start-up time has been substantially reduced, and overall responsiveness has improved.
- Reduced system resource usage
- New 3D preview, which significantly improves the ability for users to understand the benefits of enabling the many Catalyst™ features of their ATI Radeon™ graphics accelerator
- Increased stability
- Native 32 and 64-bit support
AMD has improved OpenGL performance on ATI X1000-series products with Catalyst 7.2. “Gains of up to 25% in Doom 3, 48% in Quake 4 and 21% in Prey can be seen on a variety of ATI Radeon™ X1000 cards. These performance gains are noticed under the Windows Vista operating system,” according to the ATI Catalyst 7.2 release notes.
AMD ATI Radeon users can download the new Catalyst 7.2 for Windows XP 32-bit, Windows XP x64, Windows Vista 32-bit and Windows Vista x64.