Tag Archive for 'catalyst'

AMD/ATi Radeon HD3870X2 Review Roundup

AMD/ATi Radeon Logo

The first dual-core AMD/ATi graphics card has arrived on shore. Gamers have been looking forward to this new graphics card as it is 2 HD3870 combined onto one PCB, Crossfiring on 1 graphic card. This is the first dual core graphics card since the NVIDIA GeForce 7950×2 in 2006.

HD3870×2 is made up of 2 RV670 graphics chip used in HD3850 and HD3870 graphics card.

There are several reviews going around the net regarding this highly anticipated graphic card.

For the reviews, I gathered that this new graphics card need a new driver to enhance its performance as well as providing CrossFireX support to Crossfire 2 or more HD3870×2 for godly performance. Currently, HD3870×2 is on par with CrossFire HD3870 but slightly behind NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra SLi, which is an aging graphics card, on some of the tests. We will be looking forward to the new driver release as soon as possible.

ATI Catalyst™ 8.1 Display Driver

The Catalyst™ software suite 8.1 contains the following:

  • Radeon™ display driver 8.451
  • Multimedia Center™ 9.16 (Windows XP only
  • HydraVision™ (Windows XP only)
  • HydraVision™ Basic Edition (Windows XP only)
  • Remote Wonder 3.04 (Windows XP only)
  • WDM Driver Install Bundle
  • Southbridge/IXP Driver
  • Catalyst™ Control Center Version 8.1

Catalyst 8.1 introduces MultiView™ support:

  • Provides for hardware accelerated OpenGL rendering across multiple graphics adapters

Catalyst 8.1 also introduces Folding@Home:

Folding@Home is a distributed computing project designed by the Stanford University. The application performs intensive simulations of protein folding. This simulation will help researchers uncover how certain diseases develop. Folding@Home uses distributed computing to simulate protein folding, the workload is broken up into small work units and distributed across hundreds of thousands of computers over the internet.

This driver includes many fixes to issues regarding applications/games running under Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Windows XP (32-bit/64-bit), Media Center, Vista (32-bit/64-bit) Driver download