ATI Catalyst 10.6 Released

Like the OpenGL support. And those are some nice performance increase numbers. Shame I don't play any of those games...

Wow, video cards can repel mosquitoes now?! talk about innovation, GO ATI! forget onboard audio, nVidia needs to get on this ASAP!

Yay crossfire improvements.... I just need to pick up a second card first...

Can anyone confirm if the idle speed is still ramped up from the last release? I remember they increased clock frequency on idle to prevent the flicker on dual screens but this affected single screen setups as well and increased power consumption. I didn't upgrade because of this as my machine idles much of the day and I like the very low idle consumption.

Finally, ATI guys did some improvement in CF scaling,although I believe it doesn't catch up to nVIDIA's SLI scaling yet!! Come on ATI, give me better drivers and I'll buy another 5870..But first improve the performance and CF scaling in metro2033 and other games that matter today!!

Will Catalyst 10.6 support HDMI audio in Linux? If no, they can keep it! LOLz

I like how they included the "up to x%" but that could still mean 0%...can anyone confirm any of these percentages?

Tell me what cards do support hdmi audio in Linux? None that I am aware of. So guess you are going to be without a video card for a while.

Looks like no more improvements for hd 4000 series from now on. The champ may have matured..

Anyone in the same boat as me running on 8.6 mobility drivers that Dell has available? Anyway to use these on a laptop with a 3650 card?

There's a thread in the forums on 10.6. I just installed them but haven't had a chance to do some tests. I'll run a few benchmarks and compare to my 10.5 CF results and post in the forum thread.

He was referring to the drivers, not the card.

I wonder if they've made further improvements to 2D performance.

Anyone else notice a massive temp spike with these drivers? My 5870 jumped up 12C on idle!

No address to the 4000 series card issues? Like the Battlefield lag? It was not fixed with 10.4a or 10.5a, the load times were taken down but the spawn lag immediately after loading for 10 seconds was so outrageous

A lot of people have it working with hand built drivers... I am hoping for a solution that doesn't require downloading 200mb worth of source code and spending two hours testing different compile options until it magically works. The support is ready in the Linux sound tools but the ATI-supplied driver is just a piece of crap. My other option is to use an Nvidia card. Such is life.

it´s any improvements to ati 4890???

WOW, that is the dumbest thing I have seen all week. I thought my cat meowing while yawning was a dumb sight.

Anyways on topic: Nice to see improvements. I'm buying a 5000 series card after the summer, and it is always nice to see that my investment is going to be even better spent.

Yeah dxva was messed up last patch for SD. Hopefully this'll fix it with no other side effects lol.

A cat meowing while yawning is the cutest thing a human can witness! !0.6 already I feel like it was quite sudden.

This set of drivers gave me problems. When installing on an X58 with a 5970 my monitors go black as if to reset windows rendering like drivers normally do, but the display of windows does not come back... I have to restart by keyboard navigation because i cannot see anything... once restarted everything is fine and catalyst says 10.6, just though t i'd mention in case anyone else has similar problem... btw this didn't happen with previous drivers...

EDIT: These drivers are crappy, back to 10.5s

They even say in the release notes that this happens, also any game i run gives me crashed / recovered video driver... and if i use 32xAA 16xAF = Blue Screen...

My next card will be nVidia, i'll never buy a radeon graphics card again, nVidias are simply superior and more mature

So Dirt is improved in DX9 by 10% on my almost $400 DX11 card. Yay?

Would have loved to see some Metro 2033 improvements.

I've had the complete opposite experience than you've had. My experience with ATI has been a far better than nvidia (except for my Geforce4 Ti, that was an awesome card).
To me it seems that nvidia is the inferior and the less mature brand nowadays, but if I'm being honest I think both brands are more or less equal, people just like to claim one is better than the other based on their personal experience.

I agree with you, I particularly mean driver development, not really the hardware... i've always been particularly impressed with ati hardware over nvidia but couldn't really afford their latest until this generation

don't get me wrong i love the fps i get in just about any game... but its so quirky and i have to use workarounds here and there... and i don't particularly like the idea of ati's catalyst ai wielding so much power in terms of what it enables or disables... adds modifies or trys to "replace rendering techniques for better performance"

anyway, now i have a personal preference

AMD Rocks man

Can confirm that it does fix alot of BC2 issues. No more jackass grass, no more texture artifacts in DX9 mode. Map loading in DX10 and DX11 has finally been fixed.

But... Now I get real bad screen flicker with HBAO on. But turning it off is better than going back to 10.5 for sure.

ATTN: curnel_D, does that BFBC2 fix work with 4000 series?

Yep. I use a 4850x2 and a friend of mine uses a 5870 and all issues are gone aside from my HBAO problem. He doesn't seem to have it, so it's hard to tell whether it's a 4000 series problem or a CF problem.

I see you said load times are fixed with DX10, does that include DX9? Then again I'm not sure how to load it with DX10 or 9, or how to tell which one it IS running on.

Ive had HDMI audio in linux since day 1 upgrade your version of ALSA or get a modern kernel, hell it takes 15 minutes to build a kernel these days. Just choose HDMI on Ati (or similar) as your sound output device, works fine with my 2494HS and 5870.

DX9 never had long loading issues. BC2 runs in DX10 mode by default on the 4 series. To change it, go to Documents>BF:BC2>settings.ini Find the line that says "DxVersion=auto" and change it to either "DxVersion=9" or "DxVersion=10"