Legit Reviews

ATI CATALYST 10.2 & 10.3 Driver Preview - Application Profiles

ATI will be releasing 10.2 Catalyst video drivers later today and this driver unlocks many new features that AMD has been working on for some time. Read on to see how ATI Catalyst 10.2 and even next months 10.3 drivers do when we fully test them. Read on to see what the new ATI CrossFireX profiles, Ultra Low Power States and other new features are all about.

Using the application profile for the Unigine "Heaven" benchmark provided us with significant gains. Gaining a 66.7% increase in frame rates is no small feat. Updates like this one will available much more frequently than new drivers will be.

Article Title: ATI CATALYST 10.2 & 10.3 Driver Preview - Application Profiles
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1216/1/

I only skimmed so shame on me if I missed it. How far back of ATI graphics card series would be served to update? Just 4XXX and 5XXX series? or back to the 2XXX and 3XXX series? or all of them? This rig will have windows 7 on it soon with an ATI x1800xt still does it support old cards or do you need legacy drivers separately?

based on the review, i feel 10.2 and 10.2 are almost exclusively designed to run the 5000 cards. im feeling somewhat disappointed because im holding on to my 4670 for a long time, however i did have several issues installing 10.1 so this could save me some frustration again.

I already asked ATI for the answers on those questions as they release notes and 10.2 drivers are not posted on AMD.com yet as I just checked. I'll let you know when I hear back from them.

dgood wrote:I only skimmed so shame on me if I missed it. How far back of ATI graphics card series would be served to update? Just 4XXX and 5XXX series? or back to the 2XXX and 3XXX series? or all of them? This rig will have windows 7 on it soon with an ATI x1800xt still does it support old cards or do you need legacy drivers separately?

The answer straight from the guys at ATI:

These drivers will support any of our DX10 and up products (i.e. HD 2xxx series and up). CrossFireX Profiles and Catalyst Mobility will apply to all of the products supported but yes most of the features are focused to the HD 5000 series since they are Eyefinity centric which is exclusive to the HD 5000 series.

For products prior to the HD 2xxx series you will have to fall back to our legacy drivers

Thanks for that, just figured that with updates to general crossfire it would go back a while. Very interesting.

Application profiles should make crossfire a much more ideal option for people looking to upgrade. Good work ATI!

I got a nice boost with the 10.3 preview, very nice driver...