ATI has launched its newest Catalyst pack, the 8.10. Without any significant performance improvements over the older 8.9 version, the new Catalyst brings two new major features, the CCC Fan speed control and option to force component video detection.

The new Catalyst has been launched at the same time with Geforce 178.24 drivers, and supports almost every card since the 9500 series. Unfortunately, this new update doesn't bring any significant performance improvements, at least not according to the release notes. The only new thing that we are aware of is the support for the HD 4670 when running Windows Vista 64 OS. According to certain forum posts, there is some performance gain in Crytek's Crysis: Warhead.

The new 8.10 version brings two new features, manual fan speed control and force component video detection. The first one gives users ability to control the speed of the GPU fan when running in accelerated graphics, which is something that ATI users were waiting for, for a long time. Unfortunately, according to various forum posts, this option is limited to the HD 4000 series.

The second feature allows users to force the Component Video detection in Catalyst Control Center, which means that you can adjust all the settings without attaching the device.

You can find the new driver version here.