AMD/ATI's 10.3 Catalyst Driver to bring extra surprises!

Following on from our 1-2 Punch article that went up over a month ago, Our VGA reviewer Shane has been made aware of some more exciting details via access to the release notes for the soon to be released ATI Catalyst 10.3 driver suite.



Along with all the aforementioned additions in the way of superior Mobility support, extended Eyefinity features and 3D Stereoscopic driver hooks, the release notes give a very pretty picture on the performance side of things from this new driver as well; not just for HD 5000 series owners, but for those with HD 4000 series cards. too.

The ATI crew have made sure to focus on some of the best and most popular gaming titles right now and worked real hard in squeezing every bit of performance they could out of their current and previous generation models. Check this out for size :-

3DMark Vantage

Overall scores increase by up to 8% with ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics products
Overall scores increase by up to 4% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series products and up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series products

Aliens vs. Predator

Overall performance increases 5% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products

Battleforge

Improves up to 8% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Call of Duty: World at War

Improves up to 2% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series products
Improves up to 6% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Company of Heroes

Improves up to 6% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Crysis and Crysis Warhead

Improves up to 6% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 2% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Devil May Cry 4

Improves up to 10% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 6% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

DiRT 2

Improves up to 30% on ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics products
Improves up to 20% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series and ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series products
Improves up to 10% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Improves up to 5% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series products
Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series products
Improves up to 2% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Far Cry 2

Improves up to 6% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 4% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2

Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Call of Pripyat Benchmark

Improves up to 10% with Anti-Aliasing enabled on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Clear Sky

Improves up to 2% with ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics products
Improves up to 2% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series products

Resident Evil 5

Improves up to 5% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.

Improves up to 15% with ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics products
Improves up to 20% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series products and ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series products
Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Unigine Tropics

Improves up to 5% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products

World in Conflict

Improves up to 5% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series products
Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series products
Improves up to 5% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Wolfenstein

Improves up to 4% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 4% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products


And guess what? If you're itchin' to get in on some of these performance improvements right now, you can! - The driver team has made available a preview driver to the public to get a taste of what's on the horizon. It is of course considered a beta so allow for weirdness, but Shane says he's been using it for a couple days now without issue.

Certainly, this is a great time for AMD/ATI to pull out the guns and fire away everything they have in defence of what NVIDIA is about to unleash a week from now.