AMD has just released its ATI Catalyst 10.9 drivers and they are available for download on its AMD Game website over here for Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP and Linux.

Besides the usual bug fixes and game performance increases, the big news with this driver release is that 10.9 comes with support for the Internet Explorer 9 beta that was released today.

IE9 includes not only HTML5 support, but also hardware GPU graphics acceleration. AMD has a HTML5 game called AMD Space Command to demonstration how a GPU in a browser can help accelerate and improve visuals using Direct2D. Give it a try over here and compare the difference with GPU acceleration on and off.

Update 14:18 US PST: Not only will the 10.9's provide GPU acceleration to IE9, but all browsers with HTML5 / Direct2D support. Such as Chrome and that is evident as Chrome v6 also saw an improvement in performance under AMD Space Command. It performs much better than IE9 in my opinion, but that is probably because IE9 is still in beta.