ATI Catalyst 10.4 WHQL Drivers Released
New official, final 10.4 Catalyst drivers hit for Windows and Linux.
After a couple of preview releases, AMD has released the final version of the ATI Catalyst 10.4 drivers. While the previous preview release also addressed loading times for most of the Radeon line, only the loading fix for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for the 5000 series was included in this 10.4 WHQL version. Those of you with cards below the 5000 line should stick with your preview release if you're fond of playing BC2.
Aside from that, here's what's new:
New Windows Features
ATI Catalyst – Video enhancements
- H.264 Level 5.1 support
- ATI Catalyst can now playback 5.1 level streams on all support players
- Allows for playback of high resolutions (4Kx2K)
AMD video transcoding updates
- This release of ATI Catalyst provides enhanced support for the Windows 7 Drag and Drop video converter
- Performance improvements
- New formats supported (H.264 file formats – MTS, WTV, and WMV9 Complex profile interlaced content)
- ATI Catalyst Control Center™ option for enabling/disabling GPU acceleration
Support for the ATI Video converter is now available in the advanced view of the ATI Catalyst Control Center
New Linux Features
Support for new Linux operating systems
- This release of ATI Catalyst driver for Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems:
- Ubuntu 10.04 early look support

"Performance on 2D applications and benchmarks has now been fixed"
http://www2.ati.com/relnotes/Catalyst_104_release_notes.pdf
"Performance on 2D applications and benchmarks has now been fixed"
http://www2.ati.com/relnotes/Catalyst_104_release_notes.pdf
either way its nice it works now, though we dont get the same benefits as previous clocks... toms needs to do the benchmark run and do the power consumption i bet it went up due to the higher core and mem speeds
also dual displays seems still to be a bit bugged the throttled speed would not go down even after stopping play of HD content for example...
Hopefully it was not mentioned because there is another article in the works...
If not, might want to hop to it
I got that.
No Mac support?
Oh, sorry, Mac gamers,
Unless I am missing something?
Times eleventy-billion
Honestly and evidently, the fact of whether what ATI claims is true or not does not belong in a news piece, but in a future article.
That does not however have anything to do on reporting ATI's claims, which are newsworthy, especially for a site that brought up the problem.
What I cannot understand is what kind of obscure journalism this is - one that stays absolutely quiet about ATI's claims in the official driver release notes. I don't expect testing in a news article, I expect reporting the claims.
It's a one sentence job, really, "ATI claims the 2D performance issue has been fixed and we're testing these claims right now, so we'll have an article on it soon."
I'm baffled, really.
http://blogs.amd.com/play/2010/04/28/ati-catalyst%E2%84%A2-10-4-driver-%E2%80%93-what%E2%80%99s-new/
He says at the end "For more information on ATI Catalyst 10.4 (for Windows® 7, Windows Vista®, Windows® XP, and Linux® versions), including all of the resolved issues in this release, please see the ATI Catalyst 10.4 release notes."
And it appears you didn't. And still don't. Despite the fact I mentioned it more than a day ago, after another user alerted me to it.
Doesn't this also include OGL 4? Or is that still in Beta?