AMD releases updated Catalyst drivers

Technical goodness but not for the average punter yet.

Chip designer AMD's ATI graphics division has released updated versions of its Catalyst drivers.

Normally the outfit makes a few monthly tweaks but Catalyst 10.2 brings some significant changes.

The Crossfire multi-GPU architecture that used to be part of the core Direct3D and OpenGL drivers has been been moved to a new Crossfire DLL file in the Windows drivers. This means that AMD can make future improvements to the way Crossfire works.

Crossfire game profiles will now be distributed as a small encoded XML file separate from the driver. This means that if a game does not work well with Crossfire multi-GPU setups, ATI can quickly test and distribute a small executable to get it working and improve performance. This can be done without needing to test the whole driver stack. The theory is that you will have more Crossfire support for games that demand fewer resources.

Catalyst 10.2 now has support for Crossfire in Eyefinity setups and has also added a tweak to power utilization. If you don't use that second GPU it enters an ultra-low power state.

Finally, ATI will support audio through DisplayPort. There aren't a lot of DisplayPort monitors that accept audio over the DP connection, but if you have one, it should work now.

There appear to be more changes coming in March. Eyefinity users will get bezel correction that be added to Catalyst 10.3. There will also be per-display colour adjustment added, as well as the ability to make multiple display groups on multi-monitor setups. Switching from one display mode to another will gets hotkey support.

AMD will also be adding a stereoscopic 3D driver hook to Catalyst 10.3. This will allow quad-buffering to enable stereoscopic 3D on 120Hz monitors.

While the great unwashed are unlikely to notice many changes from all this, it means that we might start to see some interesting gear coming out from middleware and monitor vendors who provide 3D graphics that will run with ATI graphics cards.