Following yesterdays coverage on AMD's plans to significantly enhance its Catalyst Drivers in its next two driver sets (10.2 and 10.3), today sees the 10.2s officially released.

As mentioned, the 10.2s are a significant update with a much improved feature-set, especially for CrossFire users. The new features found in this release include the following :-

• ATI Catalyst application profiles for ATI CrossFireX supported configurations
• ATI Catalyst support for PowerPlay on ATI CrossFireX technology supported configurations
• Support for DisplayPort audio
• Support for ATI CrossFireX on Eyefinity configurations

We covered all of the above in more detail in our Future ATI Catalyst coverage yesterday.

Further to the above, the 10.2s also bring more application-specific performance improvements for the following applications and setups :-

• DiRT 2 - Overall performance improves up to 8% on ATI Radeon HD 5970, ATI Radeon HD 5800 series, and ATI Radeon HD 5700 series products
• Battleforge - CrossFire ATI Radeon HD 5870 performance improves up to 6%
• Unigine Heaven - DirectX 9 CrossFire performance has improved significantly on ATI Radeon HD 5700 and ATI Radeon HD 5800 series products
• The Chronicles of Riddick - Assault on Dark Athena - Overall performance on ATI Radeon HD 5970 improves up to 4%

There's also a number of OS related fixes and additions in this driver set including the ability to send audio via DisplayPort.

You can download the Catalyst 10.2 driver suite from AMD's Game website here for Windows 7, Vista and XP in both 32 and 64-bit formats.