Catalyst 6.9 has just been made official by ATI and its latest driver for the Radeon family looks very promising. ATI has first of all managed to solve the problems with CrossFire support for Intel’s latest chipset series Intel 965. Catalyst 6.9 will support CrossFire with these platforms and this perhaps overshadows what MSI reported about yesterday. ATI writes that the technology is available for Direct3D applications which makes us quiestion if the support is really all that ready. In any case, it seems to be coming.
Unfortunately, Intel 965 CrossFire configurations are somewhat limited as they only seems to work with x16 bandwidth for thie Crossfire card, while the slave card has to settle for x4 PCIe bandwidth (16x+4x). Exactly how this will affect performance is a bit uncertain, but our internal tests show that this is a far from satisfying solution.
ATI has also managed to cram some extra performance in there and amongst others ATI has managed to get better performance with 3DMark06 when using antialiasing but also the performance with Doom3 have been improved with up to 9.3% when using X1000-based graphics card. More information about the new drivers can be found at ATI.com.
