While final versions of the drivers were linked on the Catalysts Crew blog late last Friday, we held off posting the announcement until it was officially confirmed by AMD/ATI directly, and the release notes were publicly available.
Today is that day, and the 9.8 brings quite a few changes to the table, most notably the inclusion of OpenGL 3.1 and performance improvements for Crossfire.
OpenGL™ 3.1 extension support
This release of ATI Catalyst™ provides OpenGL™ 3.1 extension support. The following is a list of OpenGL™ 3.1 features and extensions added in Catalyst 9.8:
- Support for OpenGL Shading Language 1.30 and 1.40.
- Instanced rendering with a per-instance counter accessible to vertex shaders (GL ARB draw instanced).
- Data copying between buffer objects (GL EXT copy buffer).
- Primitive restart (NV primitive restart). Because client enable/disable no longer exists in OpenGL 3.1, the PRIMITIVE RESTART state has become server state, unlike the NV extension where it is client state. As a result, the numeric values assigned to PRIMITIVE RESTART and PRIMITIVE RESTART INDEX differ from the NV versions of those tokens.
- At least 16 texture image units must be accessible to vertex shaders, in addition to the 16 already guaranteed to be accessible to fragment shaders.
- Texture buffer objects (GL ARB texture buffer object).
- Rectangular textures (GL ARB texture rectangle).
- Uniform buffer objects (GL ARB uniform buffer object).
- SNORM texture component formats.
Performance Improvements
The following performance gains are noticed with this release of Catalyst™ 9.8:
- Battleforge DirectX 10/DirectX 10.1 – performance improves up to 15-50% in CPU limited settings with the largest gains in CrossfireX configurations
- Company of Heroes DirectX 10 – performance improves by up to 10-77% in CPU limited settings
- Crysis DirectX 10 – Dual CrossfireX performance improves as much as 10% and Quad CrossfireX performance improves as much as 34% in CPU limited settings
- Crysis Warhead DirectX 10 – Dual CrossfireX performance improves as much as 7% and Quad CrossfireX performance improves as much as 69% in CPU limited settings
- Far Cry 2 DirectX 10 – Dual CrossfireX performance improves as much as 50% and Quad CrossfireX performance improves as much as 88% in CPU limited settings
- Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. DirectX 10/DirectX 10.1 – Dual CrossfireX performance improves up to 40% in CPU limited settings with Quad CrossfireX performance improving up to 60% in CPU limited settings
- UnigineTropics OpenGL – performance improves 5-20%
- UnigineTropics DirectX 10 – Quad CrossfireX performance improves 5-20% in CPU limited settings
- World in Conflict DirectX 10 – performance improves by 5-10%
- Windows 7 32-bit
- Windows Vista 32-bit
- Windows XP 32-bit
- Windows 7 64-bit
- Windows Vista 64-bit
- Windows XP 64-bit
