News From Inside The Industry

Catalysts Includes Built-in Overclocking

ATI Technologies today announced the release of Catalyst 3.8, a new unified software suite update that delivers higher levels of performance, stability and innovation to the Radeon family of desktop graphics products. ATI has committed to update Catalyst 12 times a year.

The Catalyst 3.8 software suite includes a number of new features. ATI's Overdrive enables Radeon 9800 XT users to safely maximize the performance level of their graphics processor. Overdrive operates by dynamically over-clocking the graphics processor, while always ensuring that it stays at a safe temperature.

The VPU Recover feature that enables the display driver to gracefully recover from graphics hardware hangs. This feature also offers a direct feedback and bug report mechanism and marks a major step towards crash-proof PCs.

"One of the biggest problems with Microsoft Windows has been stability and one of the biggest causes of instability, until now, has been graphics drivers," said Rob Enderle, President and Principal Analyst, Enderle Group, a firm focused on emerging personal technologies. "ATI's successful progress in addressing this problem is impressive. The 3.8 version of Catalyst now represents the state-of-the-art in terms of providing a stable, reliable, and feature-rich PC graphics solution".

ATI also introduced SmartShader Effects, a feature that delivers high-end shader effects to older games that lack this functionality. Gamers can now experience their favorite games in a totally new visual environment with stunning new shaders such as Inverse-Color, Sketch, Stylized Black & White and ASCII.

A new sleek re-designed 3D control panel that allows users to create 3D game profiles for their Direct3D and OpenGL applications. Using profiles, users will no longer have to reconfigure every setting each time they use a different 3D application.

ATI also announced dedicated Linux support with driver releases six times per year.