AMD has released WHQL-certified ATI Catalyst graphics drivers for Windows 7 Release to Manufacturing (RTM). ATI Catalyst drivers are reportedly designed to deliver a single, unified driver installation for both Windows 7 and Windows Vista.
Coming from a six-year collaboration between Microsoft and AMD, Windows 7 is designed to utilise the AMD mainstream multi-core and 64-bit microprocessor technology along with 3D and video processing products to deliver a computing experience on a consistent platform, the companies said.
According to AMD, the new drivers, combined with its own platform, deliver: stability and compatibility for AMD platforms running Windows 7; support for the desktop environment of Windows 7; game performance improvements in Windows 7 compared with Windows Vista in single card and multi-GPU configurations employing ATI CrossFireX technology; Windows 7 support for video transcoding tasks utilising the system CPU and GPU via ATI Stream technology; and Windows 7 support for ATI FirePro professional graphics.
Ben Bar-Haim, corporate vice president of software at AMD products group, said: “As we approach the final release of Windows 7, possibly Microsoft’s most visually impressive operating system to date, we continue to improve upon the industry leading stability and reliability of ATI Catalyst drivers in order to consistently deliver an incredibly immersive, high performance graphics experience to our customers.
Today’s release of ATI Catalyst 9.7 and ATI Catalyst 8.632 drivers does exactly that, delivering incredibly stable and reliable graphics drivers.”
The company said that its AMD-V, a feature on all its Phenom, Phenom II, Turion, Athlon and Athlon II processors, provides hardware virtualisation support to help streamline PC management through Windows 7 Virtual PC and Windows XP mode. The compute shader, a feature of DirectX 11, is also expected to enable AMD DirectX 11 graphics cards used in Windows-7 capable systems to enhance Windows 7 applications.
Jon DeVaan, senior vice president of Windows Core OS division at Microsoft, said: “AMD continues to be an important Microsoft technology partner. We’ve worked closely with AMD through all of the Windows 7 milestones to ensure that Windows 7 supports the latest high-performance graphics features such as tessellation and shader model 5.0, which will deliver a stunning visual experience when running Windows 7 with AMD graphics.”
