ATI Releases New Catalyst 9.6 Videocard Drivers

AMD/ATI this week released new Catalyst drivers, now in version 9.6. The new driver package sports a number of performance improvements, including:

• Company of Heroes - up to 25 percent better performance with HD 4600 series
• Crysis - up to 13 percent better performance in multi-GPU configurations
• Crysis Warhead - up to 11 percent better performance in mutli-GPU configurations
• World in Conflict - up to 30 percent better performance in settings that were previously CPU limited

In addition to goosing performance in a handful of titles, Catalyst 9.6 also squashes a boatload of bugs and resolves a ton of issues across all current Windows operating systems. Some of these include:

• Opening Crossfire pages no longer causes Catalyst Control Center to stop responding (all Windows OSes)
• Catalyst Control Center no longer appears interlaced when automatic deinterlacing is enabled (all Windows OSes)
• On some configurations, video artifacts are no longer visible during playback of transcoded video files (Vista)
• Team Fortress 2 some slowdowns no longer occur during gameplay (XP)
• Catalyst Control Center no longer shows Crossfire as disabled (Windows 7)

For a full list of improvements (and there are many), refer to the release notes (PDF). Driver downloads available here.