AMD Releases Catalyst 9.7 Drivers for Win 7

By Marcus Yam
published

Drivers released for the freshly minted OS.

Hot on the heels of Windows 7 going gold, AMD today released its first WHQL-certified ATI Catalyst graphics drivers for Windows 7 RTM. For ATI Radeon customers, the ATI Catalyst 9.7 driver is immediately available for download from game.amd.com.  Simultaneously, the ATI Catalyst 8.632 driver has been made available for ATI FirePro professional graphics customers.

Even if you're not running Windows 7 RTM (and you probably won't be for a while), you can still grab today's Catalyst 9.7 file for a single, unified driver installation for both Windows 7 and Windows Vista.

Windows 7 users will supposedly get "performance improvements" compared with Windows Vista in single card and multi-GPU configurations employing ATI CrossFireX technology. The drivers also include Windows 7 support for accelerated video transcoding tasks utilizing the system CPU and GPU via ATI Stream technology.

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
12 Comments Comment from the forums
  • curnel_D
    Fixed some random stuttering and crashes I had in both Far Cry 2, and Crysis. As usual, the performance isnt close to noticable, but the stability is, this round.
    Reply
  • Shnur
    ATI Stream technology implemented in Windows 7?
    Awesome :D
    Reply
  • Honis
    Hope this fixes the random crashing of my Win 7 RC. Had no problems with Beta.
    Reply
  • apmyhr
    I think AMD deserves some props for how proactive they have been with driver support for Win 7. It's good to see companies exert that kind of quality with driver support.
    Reply
  • salem80
    their is big performance up in this release everyone have ATI Card can notice that .
    ATI FTW .
    Reply
  • tipmen
    Its nice to update and notice improvements!

    Crysis
    Far Cry
    less crashes in other games like CS:S or Left4dead.

    +1 for ATI
    Reply
  • itsme
    I'm having a problem with the new drivers. I can't get it to fill full screen on my flat screen at 1360x 768. Also CCC won't open so I can try to set it there. So I had to revert to old drivers.
    Reply
  • anamaniac
    I used the 8.x drivers over 9.x for a while because of issues... so I guess it's time to try again. =D

    ...
    Granted, the only gam I have played in a month on my PC is WC3...
    Reply
  • belardo
    How about crahes with UT3? I'm on XP and UT3 is the ONLY game that crashes. Totally locking up the computer 2~30 minutes into playing.

    For newer games, using 8x drivers can cause problems. I'm not looking forward to the new ATI driver's new interface. Looks like a pin in the butt!

    PS: I guess they're making a big deal because its 9.7! YEah 7!

    Reply
  • dman3k
    This is more of a testimony to M$ than it is to AMD. M$ is actually getting third-party drivers to work for the 7 prior to release. Vista's problem is that third-party drivers sucked for a long time.
    Reply