AMD has released information on its upcoming driver, the last update for this year, Catalyst 8.12 and fittingly it has focused on the right now hottest topic, General Purpose GPU. In other words, using graphics processor for other tasks than rendering 2D and 3D graphics. NVIDIA calls its concept CUDA while AMD uses the name ATI Stream. Catalyst 8.12 contains ATI’s Compute Abstraction Layer (CAL) that activates the Stream technology. At the same time it as released an updated Stream version of ATI Avivo Video Converter that can transcode video with the power of the Radeon HD 4800/4600 GPUs.
AMD has also added better technology for optimizing the image quality of progressive video signals through a noise reduction controller in Catalyst Control Center.
At the same time it has revised the performance of its drivers and managed to improve it several big games like Crysis, STALKER, and Devil May Cry 4. Multiple titles will see improvements by up to 10% while Far Cry 2 can get up to 70% better performance in CrossFire configurations without antialiasing.
AMD has informed us that the new Catalyst drivers will become official on December 10.
