As promised, ATI has finally released its latest ATI Catalyst pack, the 8.12. This is the famous driver that everyone has been waiting for, as it's meant to bring perfomance optimizations which should put the HD 4870 back in front of Nvidia's GTX 260 216 card. The performance optimizations are just a part of the new Catalyst 8.12, as it also comes with some new features.

The new Catalyst pack supports all cards from Radeon 9500. The new features include ATI Stream Computing support. ATI Stream Application can accelerate the conversion of standard and HD video via the ATI Stream support and it can also do noise reduction on progressive video content, which should help remove ghosting artifacts while preserving details levels.

The performance improvements include various performance gains in 3DMark Vantage, Call of Duty: World at War, Crysis and Crysis Warhead in DirectX 10 mode, Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, Left for Dead, and many other games. As far as we could see, these improvements are mostly limited to the HD 4xxx and HD 38xx series of cards.

According to early reports and results that the guys from PCGamesHardware.com did, the new ATI Catalyst 8.12 WHQL improvements are hardly noticeable, and they are probably not enough to challenge the GTX 260 with a new driver.

You can find the new drivers here