New Features


OpenGL™ 3.1 extension support

This release of ATI Catalyst™ provides OpenGL™ 3.1 extension support. The
following is a list of OpenGL™ 3.1 features and extensions added in Catalyst 9.8:

• Support for OpenGL Shading Language 1.30 and 1.40
• Instanced rendering with a per-instance counter accessible to vertex shaders (GL ARB draw instanced)
• Data copying between buffer objects (GL EXT copy buffer)
• Primitive restart (NV primitive restart). Because client enable/disable no longer exists in OpenGL 3.1, the PRIMITIVE RESTART state has become server state, unlike the NV extension where it is client state. As a result, the numeric values assigned to PRIMITIVE RESTART and PRIMITIVE RESTART INDEX differ from the NV versions of those tokens
• At least 16 texture image units must be accessible to vertex shaders, in addition to the 16 already guaranteed to be accessible to fragment shaders
• Texture buffer objects (GL ARB texture buffer object)
• Rectangular textures (GL ARB texture rectangle)
• Uniform buffer objects (GL ARB uniform buffer object)
• SNORM texture component formats

Performance Improvements


The following performance gains are noticed with this release of Catalyst™ 9.8:

• Battleforge DirectX 10/DirectX 10.1 - performance improves up to 15-50% in CPU limited settings with the largest gains in CrossfireX configurations
• Company of Heroes DirectX 10 - performance improves by up to 10-77% in CPU limited settings
• Crysis DirectX 10 - Dual CrossfireX performance improves as much as 10% and Quad CrossfireX performance improves as much as 34% in CPU limited settings
• Crysis Warhead DirectX 10 - Dual CrossfireX performance improves as much as 7% and Quad CrossfireX performance improves as much as 69% in CPU limited settings
• Far Cry 2 DirectX 10 - Dual CrossfireX performance improves as much as 50% and Quad CrossfireX performance improves as much as 88% in CPU limited settings
• Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. DirectX 10/DirectX 10.1 - Dual CrossfireX performance improves up to 40% in CPU limited settings with Quad CrossfireX performance improving up to 60% in CPU limited settings
• UnigineTropics OpenGL - performance improves 5-20%
• UnigineTropics DirectX 10 - Quad CrossfireX performance improves 5-20% in CPU limited settings
• World in Conflict DirectX 10 - performance improves by 5-10%

• ATI Catalyst 9.8 Display Driver [Windows 7 32-Bit]
• ATI Catalyst 9.8 Display Driver [Windows 7 64-Bit]


• ATI Catalyst 9.8 Display Driver [Windows Vista 32-Bit]
• ATI Catalyst 9.8 Display Driver [Windows Vista 64-Bit]


• ATI Catalyst 9.8 Display Driver [Windows XP 32-Bit / MCE]
• ATI Catalyst 9.8 Display Driver [Windows XP 64-Bit]

• ATI Catalyst 9.8 Mobility Kompatibilitätsprüfung

• ATI Catalyst 9.8 Mainboard/IGP [Windows 7 32-Bit]
• ATI Catalyst 9.8 Mainboard/IGP [Windows 7 64-Bit]


• ATI Catalyst 9.8 Mainboard/IGP/Southbridge [Windows Vista 32-Bit]
• ATI Catalyst 9.8 Mainboard/IGP/Southbridge [Windows Vista 64-Bit]


• ATI Catalyst 9.8 Mainboard/IGP/Southbridge [Windows XP 32-Bit / MCE]
• ATI Catalyst 9.8 Mainboard/IGP/Southbridge [Windows XP 64-Bit]

• Release Notes Catalyst 9.8


• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1