ATI today released a new version of its Catalyst driver package. The eighth update for this year focuses on OpenGL and Direct3D applications which improve game performance by up to 30%, ATI claims.

The company said that Radeon X1000-basec cards can accelerate game speed by 6.5% in Doom 3, by 18% in Quake 4, by up to 20% in Chronicles of Riddick and up to 16% in Prey. Overall 3DMark06 performance can jump by 22% in single-card, 256 MB configurations, with the largest gains being possible with X1800 and X1900 series cards, according to ATI. Call of Duty 2 may run up to 30% faster on single Radeon X550 cards or higher with 256 MB of video memory at 1280x1024 and anti-aliasing enabled, the firm said.

There also is a new Linux Catalyst driver (v8.28.8), which introduces Pairmode support, which allows users to enable BigDesktop mode with two different screen resolutions. When using Xrandr, users can now dynamically switch between BigDesktop and Clone mode without having to restart the X Server.Fedora Core package support.

The Linux driver also enables systems to maintain the display device status between restarts supports the Radeon Xpress 1200, Xpress 1250 and Xpress 1300 devices.

The driver can be downloaded from ATI's website.