AMD's Catalyst driver suite for ATI Radeon graphics cards has just been updated for the final time this year, bringing its revision to 8.12.

Going out with a bang for 2008, the new drivers bring some very nice benefits which include full ATI Stream support and the ability to also harness Stream technology when using the AVIVO Video Converter.

Further to that, there are a ton of substantial performance increases in many of today's hottest games. Here's just a taste of what's in store :-

- Call of Duty: World at War DX9 - performance gains of up to 21% for Single and Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD48xx.

- Crysis DX10 - performance gains of up to 25% for Single and Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx.

- Far Cry 2 DX10 - performance gains of up to 10% for Single card mode and up to 57% in Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx and HD38xx.

- Left 4 Dead DX9- performance gains of up to 10% for Single card mode and up to 5% for Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4870 series.

And there's plenty more increases to be seen which you can read more about within the release notes linked off this page.

We will have our performance analysis article up very soon which will confirm whether or not the performance increases claimed are in place over the previous drivers, so stay tuned for that one.

Grab the latest drivers here.