Introduction

Last week we saw the release of another monthly driver set from ATI, in this case the Catalyst 4.8's. While normally we would have them all ready for the moment when ATI release them to the world, due to other events like Quakecon we and other companies have been a little busier then usual hence the reason we are a little behind the times this time around.

While we would normally only choose to include results from official releases, with the amount of hype surrounding the 4.9 public BETA drivers, we decided to include these results as well. The 4.9's are designed to help increase the performance of Doom 3 with high-end Radeon graphics cards. They arrived on the ATI website just before the official 4.8's so we will see if they have done some last minute tweaking on the 4.8's when it comes to Doom 3 or see if ATI are simply going to leave the Doom 3 performance gains to the 4.9's with are due out next month.

We will have a quick look at the release notes before we get into the benchmarking side of things.