You have to wonder what the boys over at AMD did over the New Year’s break - did they fix a few minor issues in the drivers and put their feet up and relax for the rest or did they find some new way to squeeze some extra performance out of those Radeon cards?
As we roll into 2007 and a new month we of course have with us a new set of Catalyst drivers for Radeon graphics cards. Coming in the shape of the 7.1 they are the first driver of the year and we hope that there is something a little more exciting than some bug fixes but we’ll find out soon enough.
First up let’s check out some information from the release notes!
Performance improvements
As with most Catalyst® releases, performance has increased in various situations. In this release of Catalyst® Dark Messiah: Might and Magic performance improves as much as 12% on all ATI Radeon X1000 Series products.
Crossfire enhancements
Catalyst 7.1 includes Crossfire enhancements that enable the Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR) Crossfire rendering mode by default, enabling performance benefits for all AFR compatible applications immediately (including newly released applications that have not been officially profiled for Crossfire). Future Catalyst releases will add further Crossfire performance gains once new applications have been profiled specifically for Crossfire. Please note that applications already profiled for AFR will not see any performance benefits from this feature.
