ATI
has released Catalyst 7.4 for Vista, XP and Linux. This monthly update became a
tradition. The new driver increases the Open GL performance in Vista on all
Radeon X1000 series on a single cards and Crossfire setups. You should typically
expect about 15 percent in games such as Doom 3, Quake 4 and Play. With high
end cards you can reach a 30 or more percent increase.
The
new driver has a new feature, Avivo video converter for Windows Vista 32 bit.
This is a cool transcoder that can easily and quickly convert your videos from
one format to another. It is part of the Catalyst control center and it
supports formats such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4/DivX, WMA,
H.264/AVC and more.
The
Linux driver called 8.36.5 supports Kernel 2.6.20 and it has beta version 0.9
of AMD catalyst control centre for Linux. The new driver has language
localization in Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech,
Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian,
Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Swedish,
Spanish, Thai, and Turkish. Only Bosnian / Croatian and Serbian are
missing.
The
Linux driver resolves an issue with certain AGP cards and now works well after
switching from X-Server to a text console.
In
windows Vista 64 / XP there is no support for X1600
Pro with HDMI and ATI advises you to continue using Catalyst 7.3.
You can download the XP version here and the
Vista 32 bit here. Vista 64 bit driver is here and finally the Linux X86 driver is
here.