AMD Catalyst 12.4 drivers are now available

AMD has released the new AMD Catalyst 12.4 driver today for download. With it comes several performance increases along with the promised Windows XP support for the full line of HD 7000 series GPUs. Along with performance increases, several bugs have been fixed:

• Elder Scolls: Skyrim : flickering square corruption is no longer observed on certain AMD Graphics cards.
• Rage : Vsync is no longer disabled after task switching.
• Tearing is no longer observed on the third screen in 3x1 and 1x3 Eyefinity configurations.

Full release notes are available here and the download is available here.

The highlights are as follows:

Windows XP support for the AMD Radeon HD 7900 Series, AMD Radeon HD 7800, and AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series

• In addition to Windows 7 and Windows Vista support, Catalyst 12.4 now also introduces Windows XP (64-bit/32-bit) support for the AMD Radeon HD 7900, AMD Radeon HD 7800, and AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series

Super Sampling Anti-Aliasing: Level of Detail (LOD) Image Quality enhancements

• Supported on the AMD Radeon HD 7900, AMD Radeon HD 7800, and AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series
• LOD Image quality enhancements for Super Sample Anti-Aliasing and Adaptive Anti-Aliasing through the AMD Catalyst™ Control Center for DirectX® 10 and DirectX® 11 applications.
• Applications must support in game Anti-Aliasing for the feature to work (Forced on Anti-Aliasing through the Catalyst Control Center is not supported for DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 applications)

Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA): Significant performance enhancements

• Supported on the AMD Radeon HD 7900, AMD Radeon HD 7800, AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series, AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series, and AMD Radeon HD 5000 Series
• MLAA now operates up to 80% faster than previous versions

Texture filtering quality improvements

• Supported on the AMD Radeon HD 7900, AMD Radeon HD 7800, and AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series
• Improvements have been made to the texture filtering algorithm (for both DirectX9 and DirectX10/DirectX11 applications) to increase the quality of rendered textures, with no impact to performance