ATI Introduces Catalyst 8.12

Driver releases are not something we cover as a routine matter, but this time around ATI has thrown in enough freebies into its latest driver update, Catalyst 8.12, to make it worth talking about. The first and foremost change that has taken place is that ATI has enabled its new driver suite with stream support which allows their existing GPUs to function as GPGPUs. This simply means that now it is possible to utilize your GPUs for specialized functions such as converting video from DVDs to compressed video for handheld media devices such as iPods. This change is available for the Radeon 4600 and 4800 series of cards with the noticeable exception of the flagship 4870 X2. This card will get this functionality in March 09.

The process of using the GPUs allows you to dramatically cut down the encoding time by as much 75 percent in some cases. A standard 700 MB file which could take 30-35 minutes can be encoded in under a minute and a half to an iPod ready format. While this is nothing new as rival Nvidia has had its CUDA program out for a while now, the program that utilizes it, is a paid product. In comparison ATI has chosen to bundle a new convertor tool “Avivo Video Converter”, which is available along with the driver for free and can be accessed in the general settings of the driver under basic mode. We have been playing around with this tool for the past week and have seen some encouraging results. We will be comparing it to Nvidia’s product and will be posting the results here pretty soon.

This is not the only change that has been made available due to the availability of stream. Expensive consumer product such as Adobe Photoshop CS4, Flash 10 Player and other related software are now able to use the GPU for many of their rendering functions. This functionality was earlier an Nvidia exclusive and is now available to ATI card users. The other set of changes are fairly standard. There is the standard of performance improvements for top games, including Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, Far Cry 2, Call of Duty: World at War and benchmarking applications such as 3DMark Vantage. ATI claims an increase of about 10-15%, and crossfire gains are there as well, including up to 57% on Far Cry 2. These figures are of course indicative as initial tests showed gains more in line with a 5-7 percent increase.

Head on over here for the drivers.