Fresh for the new year AMD has kicked off a new set of Catalyst drivers which take the revision to 8.1. Alongside the usual bug fixes and minor improvements, a major addition has been implemented this time around which multi-monitor users will benefit from.

Catalyst 8.1 introduces MultiView support. This feature provides for hardware accelerated OpenGL rendering across multiple graphics adapters. MultiView will provide hardware accelerated 3D rendering in a system containing multiple graphics cards on an extended desktop arrangement. This feature will allow for the rendering performance and additional frame buffer resources to be evenly shared with the second and third graphics adapters. This allows for a 3D application to have the same performance running on a secondary or third display device as if it were running on the primary display device. This feature will be supported under Windows XP (32 and 64 bit versions), Windows Vista (32 and 64 bit versions), and the Linux operating system.

You can learn more about whats been changed / fixed in the official release notes here.

The drivers are available for both 32 and 64-bit versions of XP and Vista here.

Oddly at the same time we also see an 8.1 hotfix driver released which is said to provide the following :-

• Fix for users having issues with their AGP ATI Radeon graphics card
• Crysis DirectX 10 Crossfire performance optimizations

You can download the hotfix driver here.