Just squeaking in before the end of the month, AMD has released the Catalyst 11.1 driver set, which introduces a number of performance tweaks and general fixes.
Users should see frame rates in F1 2010 increase by up to 12 per cent on systems with a single 6000-series GPU or 10 per cent running a single 5800-series GPU with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering disabled. Performance in Left 4 Dead 2 should also improve to the tune of 17 per cent on 6800-series GPUs and 8 per cent on 6900-series GPUs, as long as the eye-candy is similarly disabled.
There are also a number of OS specific fixes that should improve performance and stability on some less common configurations. Anyone upgrading from pre-Catalyst 10.12 drivers will also get the benefit of the redesigned interface, assuming that they're running Vista or Windows 7.
This is also the first driver package to support all of the company's current graphics cards. The last few releases have forced owners of certain 6000-series GPUs to stick to a specific version, but Catalyst 11.1 is compatible with all AMD graphics cards.
However, owners of 6000-series are recommended to grab the 11.1a hotfix as well, which is also available today. As well as some card specific performance improvements, the fix will allow manual control of the tessellation factor through the Catalyst Control Centre, potentially boosting performance in tessellation-heavy games. There are also changes to the Catalyst AI texture filtering settings that should improve image quality at the 'Quality' and 'Performance' settings.
Catalyst 11.1 is available for 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows from the download page, along with full release notes. The 11.1a hotfix is only available for Windows 7, and can be found here along with more detailed info on the included changes.
