Battleangel

Catalyst 3.2 is out and it apparently fixes A LOT as usual. So far I’m very impressed with the quality and effort of the ATI drivers team. The biggest “fixes” this time around is the strange stuttering problem a lot of people have been experiencing and Framebuffer read-back performance.

I also noticed that the Remote Wonder control software has been updated to v.1.4. I presume (haven’t tested) that it requires a previous installation of v.1.1.

The really interesting part of this release if really what ATI is promising for the next driver incarnation though. Since the “discovery” of the hardware similarity between the R300 and the R350 GPUs, software driver interoperability has been put into focus. There were rumours flying around that someone had succeeded in hacking the Radeon 9800 (R350) drivers to work with the Radeon 9700 (R300). Now, an official ATI Catalyst technician has responded to this over at DriverHeaven and the Rage3D forum basically confirming the performance boost and that it will be included in the next (v.3.3) Catalyst.

I wish this would happen with a Matrox card once in a while .. getting a performance boost and a proper bug fix I mean ..