AMD is already looking beyond Vista with its latest Catalyst release.
As the world prepares itself to say 'Hasta la Vista', AMD has announced it already has Windows 7 driver support in its latest ATI Catalyst 9.3 unified graphics driver.
Bombastically claiming to be the industry's first such unified driver installation package to bundle Windows 7 support with Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) 1.1 compliance, ATI also reckons Catalyst 9.3 is sending out a clear message that any and all upcoming releases will be Windows 7 ready.
The move will purportedly let developers play with DirectX 10.1 API, used by the Vole to design Windows 7 Aero desktop in the first place.
AMD reckons graphics with hardware support for the DirectX 10.1 API will now offer a full Windows 7 Aero desktop PC experience, including support for features like Aero Peek and Aero Shake.
Matching ATI Radeon graphics with Windows 7 also purportedly means support for the Direct2D API, giving third-party applications the ability to up the ante on things like ClearType text rendering and hardware-accelerated vector graphics. Playback of multimedia, including high-def films, is also apparently smoother.
"We led the Windows Vista transition with a WHQL-certified unified driver that delivered industry-leading stability," said Ben Bar-Haim, AMD's corporate VP of Software Engineering and the Graphics Products Group.
Bar-Haim added, "The advanced state of our Windows 7 drivers this far ahead of the final Windows 7 release is yet another proof point of our graphics industry leadership."
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Issue: 137 | June, 2012