Introduction

As the second month of the year rolls on by us, we sneak our monthly AMD Catalyst driver update in. Running a bit late with the performance improvements we can see below (mostly in Windows Vista it seems) it looks like it might be worth the upgrade from previous versions.

There is only one way to find out, so let's get stuck straight into it.

Performance improvements

Open GL performance improves for all ATI Radeon™ X1000 series products. Gains of up to 25% in Doom 3, 48% in Quake 4 and 21% in Prey can be seen on a variety of ATI Radeon™ X1000 cards. These performance gains are noticed under the Windows Vista operating system.

New features

Catalyst™ 7.2 introduces a brand new version of the Catalyst™ Control Center for Windows XP. The new Catalyst™ Control Center delivers a number of significant enhancements:

- Significant performance gains; Catalyst™ Control Center start-up time has been substantially reduced, and overall responsiveness has improved.

- Reduced system resource usage

- New 3D preview which significantly improves the ability for users to understand the benefits of enabling the many Catalyst™ features of their ATI Radeon™ graphics accelerator

- Increased stability

- Native 32 and 64-bit support