As was expected, the official 4.12 Catalyst drivers from ATI were released today, making this ATI's final driver release for the year. As the driver revision numbers are based upon calendar notation, in the month of January next year we'll see the 5.1's emerge.

Head on over here for the release notes containing a listing of bug fixes, performance adjustments and other relevant information regarding the latest 4.12's.

- CATALYST 4.12 Driver Download - Win2K
- CATALYST 4.12 Driver Download - WinXP
- CATALYST 4.12 Driver Download - WinXP Media Center Edition 2005

If you're keen to see how they fair to the previous beta 4.12's and earlier official CATS, Rage3D.de have completed the time consuming task over here folks.

· Driver efficiency has improved considerably for both Direct3D and OpenGL.

· Numerous D3D games show 2-3% gains at low resolution. The small batch size tests in 3DMark05 show improvements as large as 15% on some products.

· In OpenGL, several game titles show improvements in the lower settings. Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory, for instance, shows gains as large as 15% in low resolution (driver-bound) cases. Doom III performance improves 5-10% at low settings. Call of Duty improves 5-6%.

· Half-Life 2 performance also improves as much as 20% over Catalyst 4.11 in certain sections of the game.