Legit Reviews

It’s been about a year since the launch of the ATI’s new user interface, the CATALYST Control Center, which means it’s about time for us to announce ATI’s next huge CATALYST release J. For the first time in the history of the graphics industry ATI has made its short-term CATALYST software roadmap publicly available! As can be seen below the next few months will deliver a lot new features, performance and stability enhancements to the CATALYST software suite.

The CATALYST version 5.6 (released today!!) will include the following features and enhancements:

CATALYST Mobility: An industry first with end users able to download the latest CATALYST release every month for their notebook PC, which will include all of the regular Desktop CATALYST features, plus all of the laptop specific features our notebook users are familiar with – Initially the CATALYST Mobility driver will be only supported on the Mobility RADEON X700 and Mobility RADEON X800 graphics accelerators, from select system builders.

CATALYST Control Center Performance enhancements: Stream-lining the CATALYST Control Center code has increased start-up time, user-interface responsiveness, and over all stability. You can expect to see the CATALYST Control Center performance and overall size to keep improving over the next few CATALYST releases.

CATALYST Control Center User Interface Enhancements: Enhancements to the user interface and new functionality added to the system tray makes configuring settings much simpler for end users

New Linux installer: ATI’s brand new installer makes installing the ATI Linux driver a much simpler and user friendly experience

New Video features for the CATALYST Control Center:

New video preview

Real-time video preview shows users the benefits of adjusting video settings without committing changes
Simpler video playback

Easily enable full-screen video playback on your second display
New video wizard

Helps users optimize their display configuration
Video de-interlacing options

Video enthusiasts can choose the which de-interlacing method they want to use
WMV9 acceleration

Full hardware acceleration of Microsoft Windows Movie files using DirectX 9 shaders – Reduces CPU usage up to 50%, and significantly reduces the probability of dropping frames while playing video

Performance gains:
Doom3 up to 7% (at lower resolutions)

As a result of efficiency improvements in the OpenGL driver
Chronicles of Riddick up to 10% (at lower resolutions)

As a result of efficiency improvements in the OpenGL driver
Halo up to 20 %, 3DMark05 up to 5 %

As a result of a generic driver Z-optimizations – removing un-seen pixels before running through pixel shaders


To celebrate the release of CATALYST 5.6 Rage3D will be making its CATALYST Control Center plug-in available for download June 9th as well

Please see the full CATALYST 5.6 release notes for more details.

The CATALYST version 5.7 and 5.8 (released July 2005, and August 2005 respectively) will include the following features and enhancements:

Microsoft Media Center Edition extensions: a set of simple controls have been added to Microsoft’s MCE 10 ft user interface to assist users in setting up and configuring there displays (TVs and HDTVs)

Full CATALYST Control Center support for Windows XP 64-bit edition: ATI will shortly be providing all of the functionality found in it’s revolutionary new user interface for the 32-bit Windows XP environment to the Microsoft’s 64-bit Windows XP operating system.

Performance improvements for 64 MB and 128 MB boards: By leveraging some portions of our HyperMemory technology, all 64 MB and 128 MB boards (for RADEON 9500 and above hardware) will see significant performance gains in memory demanding applications (Far Cry scores will increase 50%!!)

A brand new task oriented wizard for the CATALYST Control Center: This wizard uses a new approach to helping users by organizing the wizard into a list of simple tasks that users most often want to adjust. Instead of going through 30 steps (as most wizards are designed today) users can very quickly configure just what they need to configure in one or two steps!!

CATALYST 5.6 includes a number of resolved issues (in order to keep this email a reasonable size, please check the release notes for details).