Catalyst 10.6 was released relatively early from AMD’s test lab for a monthly driver update, and is now available for download at the official website. The new driver improves the Flash 10.1 support with the company GPUs, and overall improved video playback.
Adobe Flash Player 10.1 was released earlier this month and it can use the power of GPUs to make video playback as convenient and efficient as possible. Catalyst 10.6 improves this with the three latest graphics cards family; Radeon HD 3000 (mobile), HD 4000 and HD 5000.
It has minimized the block artifacts when playing low-res video through video de-blocking support, and trimmed the mosquito noise from heavily compressed video. Both of these technologies are supported by the Radeon HD 5000 series.
We also find performance improvements with games like Crysis Warhead, DiRT2, Company of Heroes, Alien vs. Predator and Wolfenstein.
Last but not least the new drivers support OpenGL 4.0 and OpenGL 3.3, the former only with the Radeon HD 5000 family.
The Linux version of Catalyst 10.6 also support the new OpenGL specifications, while optimizing 2D performance in all affected Linux distributions.
Download the new drivers at AMD’s website.
