ATI Catalyst 9.7 – WHQL Windows7 Driver

ATI Catalyst™ 9.7 – AMD’s first official unified Windows7 / Windows Vista Microsoft WHQL certified graphics driver for the Windows 7 RTM

AMD has delivered its first official unified WHQL certified graphics driver designed for the Windows 7 RTM (Release To Manufacturing) ATI Catalyst™ 9.7 delivers a superior Windows 7 experience:

• Great gaming performance – superior performance compared to Windows Vista for single GPU configurations and ATI CrossFireX™ configurations
• Stability – through AMD’s WHQL certified, unified Windows 7 / Windows Vista graphics driver
• Leadership in Innovation – support for all the Windows 7 WDDM 1.1 features and AMD ATI Catalyst  features on the ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series, ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series, and ATI Radeon HD 2000 Series of products

ATI Catalyst™ Control Center Updates

• The ATI Catalyst™ Control Center now features:
• A newly designed Desktops & Displays Manager – enabling users to more quickly configure and arrange their displays
• Full support for HydraVision under Windows 7
• The new ATI Catalyst™ Control Center is supported under Windows 7 and Windows Vista

ATI Video encoder update – support for Windows 7

• ATI Catalyst™ 9.7 introduces support for the ATI Video converter under Windows 7 32-bit and Windows 7 64-bit
• Using ATI Stream technology, owners of ATI Radeon™ HD 4800 Series and ATI Radeon™ HD 4600 Series of graphics cards can take advantage of this video conversion tool (found in ATI Catalyst™ Control Center Basic View) to achieve substantial performance improvements when transcoding video files

Performance Improvements

Catalyst™ 9.7 brings performance benefits in several cases where framerates are CPU-limited. Some measured examples are:

1. Crysis – performance at very high quality preset increases by up to 8% on HD4800 series products
2. Lost Planet Colonies – performance increases by 7-11% when 8x Anti-Aliasing is used on the HD4800 series product

Read the full release notes here http://www2.ati.com/relnotes/Catalyst_97_release_notes.pdf
or download the driver here http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx