Future ATI Catalyst Drivers - Why you should be excited!

Catalyst Mobility

This is something that's really cool for laptop users. From March you'll be able to enjoy all the benefits that desktop users get with monthly updated drivers. In saying that, not every laptop user will be able to use the driver.

Let me just give you a quick rundown about this. For starters, this isn't something new; ATI tried this a while ago, but the way they approached it was different. Last time they went down this path of emailing a bunch of laptop manufacturers. What they did was ask if they wanted to be a part of the monthly laptop drivers. The problem was that most companies didn't really get back to them and the feature / idea never took off.

This time ATI thought they'd just tell everyone that they're adding them and if they didn't want to be part of it, to let them know. What this means is that just about everyone is a part of it. The only manufacturers that aren't are Sony, Toshiba and Panasonic. While a bit disappointing, this is in no way ATIs fault.

This is a great feature for ATI Mobility users, especially ones in the higher end segment who do game on their laptop and I suppose it becomes another reason why you might buy an ATI video card based notebook over an NVIDIA or Intel one.

3D Stereoscopic support

While ATI won't be offering their own 3D support like NVIDIA does with its 3D Vision, they will be updating their D3D driver to enable 3rd party middleware vendor support such as iZ3D. They'll be able to offer support for 120 Hz screens and output 60 Hz per eye.

ATI have said they don't want to lock users into only one option like NVIDIA do with 3D Vision. This isn't the first time we've seen ATI say this; in the past they said how they didn't want to lock users into an ATI branded only physics support like NVIDIA do with PhysX.