Introduction

It's been a fairly quite year for the Catalyst driver set so far and while AMD have indeed been busy with the latest crop of Radeon HD 7000 series video cards that we started seeing in December, there hasn't been much on the software side of things that really stands out.

Looking through the latest release notes it feels very much the same with not much in terms of specific performance improvements outside of some Morphological Anti-Aliasing tweaks that are seeing a strong boost. If that translates over to the more traditional AA method we won't know until a little later.

Outside of that, though, there's a huge amount of bug fixes in some popular games and applications which will no doubt be the thing that drags you to the latest driver.

Release Notes Highlights

NEW FEATURES

Windows XP support for the AMD Radeon HD 7900 Series, AMD Radeon HD 7800, and AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series

In addition to Windows 7 and Windows Vista support, Catalyst 12.4 now also introduces Windows XP (64-bit/32-bit) support for the AMD Radeon HD 7900, AMD Radeon HD 7800, and AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series

Super Sampling Anti-Aliasing: Level of Detail (LOD) Image Quality enhancements

Supported on the AMD Radeon HD 7900, AMD Radeon HD 7800, and AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series

LOD Image quality enhancements have been improved when enabling Super Sample Anti-Aliasing and Adaptive Anti-Aliasing through the AMD Catalyst™ Control Center for DirectX® 10 and DirectX® 11 applications.

Applications must support in game Anti-Aliasing for the feature to work (Forced on Anti-Aliasing through the Catalyst Control Center is not supported for DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 applications)

Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA): Significant performance enhancements

Supported on the AMD Radeon HD 7900, AMD Radeon HD 7800, AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series, AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series, and AMD Radeon HD 5000 Series

MLAA now operates up to 80% faster than previous versions

Texture filtering quality improvements

Supported on the AMD Radeon HD 7900, AMD Radeon HD 7800, and AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series

Improvements have been made to the texture filtering algorithm (for both DirectX9 and DirectX10/DirectX11 applications) to increase the quality of rendered textures, with no impact to performance

Resolved Issues for the Windows 7 Operating System

Elder Scrolls: Skyrim: no longer hangs on single GPU configurations when used with AMD Catalyst 12.3 CAP1 and later CAP releases

Elder Scolls: Skyrim: flickering square corruption is no longer observed.

Rage: Vsync is no longer disabled after task switching.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars: no longer crashes when launched in High Performance Mode.

Stalker - Call of Pripyat: flickering is no longer observed in trees with specific Catalyst Control Center settings.

Tom Clancy HAWX 2: no longer crashes on game launch.

Windows Media Center: no longer crashes when run in Eyefinity mode and High Performance mode settings.

AMD Steady Video: an error message is no longer displayed when enabling AMD Steady Video for the Microsoft Internet Explorer 9.0 plugin.

Duplicating displays no longer generates random corruption.

Tearing is no longer observed on the third screen in 3x1 and 1x3 Eyefinity configurations.

A system crash is no longer experienced when enabling Crossfire in a 4 display configuration.

The advanced video quality settings are now correctly displayed in the Catalyst Control Center.