Introduction

Running a little late again we have with us what should be the final Catalyst driver for the year. It’s been an interesting year – who would have thought that come the end of 2006 that ATI would be well and truly sitting at number two in the graphics card arena.

Hopefully next year as the merger of ATI and AMD gets into full swing we begin to see a more interesting line up – we really do have high hopes for the R600. Crossfire is clearly moving in the right direction with the internal bridge setup seen present on the Radeon X1950PRO.

ATI mention no performance improvements this month – disappointed? Yes! Last year at this point in time we saw the Catalyst begin to make use of Dual Core processors and huge improvements across the board, unfortunately there isn’t anything that major out. While we do have Quad Cores, it’s safe to say that it’s still going to be a while till they become mainstream with it taking almost 12 months for the Dual Core to become mainstream.

There are a huge amount of bug fixes and what not, so the upgrade should be worth it so we would recommend you have a look at the latest release notes while we see if ATI threw us a little extra performance somewhere.