Introduction

Last month I was a bit harsh on the Catalyst driver suite; they felt a bit rushed and while we don't blame ATI and its driver team for taking time off over the holidays, I got the feeling that the 10.1 driver was only released to keep up with the monthly releases that ATI have been committed to for the past few years.

In saying that, it wasn't a bad driver. It did have a few bug fixes, but outside of that we didn't really see much else. Does the fact that the driver only had a couple of bug fixes warrant a new version? To be honest, if you're playing one of those games and experienced the bug that was present which is now fixed, then yes! It means that you can enjoy what you're playing now and not two, three or four weeks down the track.

In the January Catalyst drivers I made a note that Terry Makedon said on Twitter "10.1 is just a standard release to fix up some bugs, but 10.2 and 10.3 will indeed have some major new features".

To be honest, I was a bit skeptical that "Major New Features" were going to be a bit of marketing fluff. However, I'm here today to tell you it's not. ATI are introducing what they call the 1-2 Punch for the Catalyst 10.2 and 10.3 driver set. Today we're going to run through the new features the next two sets of drivers are going to offer and show why you should be excited about owning an ATI based graphics card.