Just in time for the launch of the new high-end Radeon GPUs, AMD has released a preview version of its latest Catalyst driver suite.
Catalyst 10.12 makes some major changes to the Catalyst Control Centre (CCC) which we went into more detail on earlier in the week. The much needed redesign brings the control panel up to date and should make settings easier to find and the menus quicker to navigate. One thing to note is that, since it's based on the Windows Presentation Framework (WPF), users who are still clinging onto Windows XP won't be upgraded and instead have to make do with the older interface.
The drivers also introduce support for OpenGL 4.1, DivX GPU acceleration on HD 6000-series cards and the Stream 2.3 SDK. For anyone using Linux, these drivers will officially support the production version of Ubuntu 10.10, Maverick Meerkat.
Of course, there a handful of application tweaks and fixes with this release, most of which address issues and glitches rather than providing major performance boosts. However, it will also mark the start of weekly updates for the Catalyst Application Profiles (CAPs), which should deliver better performance for the newest games, especially in multi-GPU systems.
A full list of changes is available from AMD, or you can go and grab the preview drivers for Windows systems here. The package should be compatible with most cards from the HD 2400-series onwards, including notebook and integrated variants.
Note: at time of writing, the AMD support site is having some problems. The download pages aren't affected, but a cached version of the change log can be found here.
