Introduction

As we near Christmas, we had another ATI Catalyst driver release hit our inbox but this one did come through at the very last minute. With the recent releases of F.E.A.R. and Quake 4, our monthly Catalyst analysis has grown.

We struck a deal with our friends at ATI to post our driver article 24 hours before the official launch of the driver. For this reason, we don’t have the usual release notes this time around but we’ll update this article once they become available.

There’s a big bonus for you all this month! We’re hosting the driver and our monthly performance analysis exclusively on TweakTown one day before the actual launch through ATI’s website. The driver is just like the final version except it is not WHQL approved by Microsoft in its current state and it is not officially supported by ATI. You can pickup the Windows XP CCC version of the driver from our brand new File Library; it weighs in at around 36MB and we have a few other sites that kindly helped us with mirroring, so everything should go fine... *fingers crossed*

The biggest addition in the Catalyst 5.11 (November 2005) driver we think is going to be the bug fixes with the OpenGL code. We hope to see some nice performance increases in the newly released Quake 4 game. One of the biggest additions is also the fact that they are the first official driver to support the new Radeon X1800XL and X1800XT graphics cards. We will see how the latest drivers impact the performance of the X1800XT in another article to be posted later today but for now let’s have a look at the latest driver to come from the boys at ATI in Canada and see how it performs with the previous generation cards.

Should you update your drivers? Well, let’s find out!