CATALYST 9.6 OFFICIALY OUT

There u go
http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx

Performance Improvements
Catalyst™ 9.6 brings performance benefits in several cases where framerates are CPUlimited.
Some measured examples are:
Company of Heroes – performance improves up to 25% with HD 4600 series
products and below as well as improvements of up to 10% on HD 4800 series
Crysis – performance improves up to 13% in multi-GPU configurations
Crysis Warhead – performance improves up to 11% in multi-GPU configurations
World in Conflict – performance improvements of up to 30% can be seen in settings
that were previously CPU limited

the 9.6 are as bad as all the other ati drivers so dont bother

Hmm, will give these a try, of course like apache i wonder what they are comparing them to for the frame boosts.

You may want to refresh your memory going through this thread.

Great news! I'll install them and let you know of performance changes.

If these drivers are as "bad" as the previous set of drivers than they'll work great for me since Cat 9.5 fixed couple of game bugs for me and have been working flawlessly.

Cheers

Well, i ran the crysis benchmark, and i gained 1fps on my minimum, lost 1 fps on my average and lost 2-3fps on my max.

There will always be a small percentage of people experiencing issues with any drivers and any hardware. But bluntly stating that these drivers are crap is just plain ignorant and stupid.

Go search for problems on Nvidia Drivers, as a mater of fact go searching for problems on any device, maybe your HDTV or DVD player and you'll find people experiencing problems.

It might be many things as mentioned before in other posts on these forums... People overclock, install RivaTuner, they tweak and change their Windows system configuration, so all of these variables can cause instability or errors.
Personally I haven't had a bit of problems with any of the drivers since I switched from Nvidia to ATI six months ago. They've increased stability and they've fixed the HDMI sound bug on FarCry 2, so I am a happy camper. Sorry about your problems though.

Cheers

Im inclined to agree. Im thinking its more OS changing than anything. Maybe I should run a poll

So i'll concede that ATIs drivers are inconsistent and plenty of times ive been thoroughly pissed at its refusal to work with dual monitors in linux. 9.6 wrote to my xorg.conf file flawlessly where 9.5 bricked my system on two seperate occasions in three different distros, even if my attempts to force AA and texture filtering through CCC led to it sometimes mirroring my display across both monitors on startup. The only real issues ive ever had with ATI drivers in Windows came while I was running the PDC build of Windows 7. It led to explorer.exe refusing to start, and random arbitrary issues. Performance gains are usually neglegible but even i believe i saw a small increase from 9.4 to 9.5.

But what dishonest soul would use a hacked, cracked or otherwise non pukka OS?

Great news i tested WIC and Crysis (Original) and FarCry 2 and here is the result:

PC specs:
Q6600 @ 3.4
ATI HD 4870X2 Stock
4GB DDR2 800 RAM
VISTA ULTIMATE X64 SP1
1920x1080 resolution

Crysis
I used the benchmark tool with a costume config called BLUESKY and ran a 3 loop test and here is what i got :

CAT 9.5:
Run #1- DX10 1920x1080 AA=No AA, 64 bit test, Quality: ~~ Overall Average FPS: 38.95

CAT 9.6:
Run #1- DX10 1920x1080 AA=No AA, 64 bit test, Quality: ~~ Overall Average FPS: 42.59

I was a little surprised by the results because the benchmark ran alot smoother compared to 9.5 but i only got 4 more FPS,so i decided to run the game itself and bingo i got 10 FPS more compared to 9.5 which is very good

Map Island :
CAT 9.5 : 34.8


CAT 9.6 : 45.3


Map rescue:
CAT 9.5 : 41.5


CAT 9.6 : 50.7



Company Of Heroes(No patches):
Settings used: Everything maxed out @ 1920x1080 + 16xAF/0xAA + DX10
I ran the benchmark tool and i was very impressed with the results:

CAT 9.5:
Average:44
Minimum:22
Maximum:104

CAT 9.6:
Average:54
Minimum:28
Maximum:122


FarCry 2:The FPS was the same as Cat 9.5 (and its normal though because FarCry2 wasn't in the release note)

Overall i am very impressed with this new driver good job ATI

Do you have an alternative link (eg: from overclocker3D) because it's giving me that "invalid link" message again. Thanks!

I installed the driver yesterday....I was trying to download 9.5 and 0.6 was there.

The following games work crysis, stalker, half-life 2. The frame rates are better but nothing that my eyes can appreciate or detect. It is still an improvement

9.6 addressed one of my viewsonic LCD issue. 9.4 don't turn on my LCD display when the computer WAKE UP from SLEEP mode. Thats good.

PowerDVD 7.3 don't recognize the driver revision. It stop playing HDCP compliant disc such as Blue-Ray and HD-DVD. There is no update from Cyberlink as of yesterday. PowerDVD don't have 9.6 on its list of HDCP compliant driver. This is an UPDATE related problem. NON-HDCP HD-Video worked just fine.

Visual Studio 2008 eventually started after some -reconfiguring. My softwares still works but these are for controlling different hardware(USB, Serial Ports, GPIB). I don't have any high graphics application to be affected by the new driver.

So far im indifferant with them, they dont show any improvement and havent changed anything else. I was hoping for better performance for the 4770, well it does seem very slightly more stable. On the whole i see no reason to change back to 9.5 but i see no reason to change to 9.6 on the other PC.
Just need to decide if im going to bother with the W7 drive or not
Mactronix

+1 (and +1 more for impartiality)

Several bugs not fixed:
http://forums.amd.com/game/message [...] erthread=y
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/sho [...] p=16245053

Catalyst 9.6 not good for playback of HD contents in Full HD display in Windows Vista & 7(Catalyst still have conflicts with Windows Aero).
Need to switch back to XP.

Here is the fix for Windows Aero theme when using PowerDVD.

This is not related to ATI driver....

• This was a problem back in vista, you can fix it with a few registry tweaks (always backup before playing with the registry) The following keys need to be edited:


(32bit)
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Cyberlink\PowerDVD

UI_AskAero=1
UseNVDWMOn=1 (For Nvidia) <--- this set to 1 if you have a nvidia card
UseATIDWMOn=1 (For ATI) <------ this set to 1 if you have a AMD (ATI) card

(64bit)
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Cyberlink\PowerDVD8
UI_AskAero=1
UseNVDWMOn=1 (For Nvidia)
UseATIDWMOn=1 (For ATI)

Tested here
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/v [...] html#sect0

What about tests with HD4850 on 1920x1080?

I'm having some problems with my new display(1920x1080)... i don't know what coz the problem... done Prime95 and memtest without failure... next thing to check is GPU, GPU driver, O.S and the display itself....