Introduction

Last month brought one of the worst Catalyst driver updates we've seen in a long time. Across the board we saw a performance drop on all cards that we tested across a number of different resolutions. While there aren't any performance improvements promised in the release notes this time, we're hoping that the performance drops we saw last month have been fixed.

There's no doubt that ATI recognized the issue with the last driver set and this is one of the main reasons we're seeing the new 9.4 set come out so early in the month. This driver set also marks the release of the first official driver for the newly released HD 4890 which we've included in our benchmark line-up.

As far as new features go, ATI has expanded on Overdrive functionality which now offers the ability for the driver suite to auto overclock your graphics card. This feature is designed for the HD 4000 series of cards.

Apart from that there isn't a whole lot else going on in the drivers; the only other benefits we have are a number of resolved issues under Vista, XP and Windows 7.