AMD has enjoyed a terrific run with the Radeon HD 5000 series as it took Nvidia no less than six months to counter with its initial Fermi products.
How pleased is AMD? So pleased. Pleased enough with its video card accomplishments to issue a press release—and pretty product shots—of its 1 gigahertz ATI Radeon HD 4890. There just a slight catch.
Just because AMD’s busy with its Phenom processors doesn’t mean the company’s gone slack with driver releases for its Radeon brand of graphics cards. Hence, AMD’s just brought out version 8.2 of its Catalyst software/driver bundle.
Hardware-wise, there are a bunch of fixes for CrossFire and HDMI. On the software side, AMD’s improved the functionality and usability of the OverDrive overclocking feature.
Under known issues, Lost Planet, Quake Wars, and STALKER all received attention, with a particularly nasty one for Unreal Tournament 3 and maximum texture settings. You can learn more about this particular revision by reading the rest of the release notes.
I’ve included links to the Vista 32-bit and Windows XP versions of the drivers below. If you need anything else, best to visit AMD’s ATI site.
ATI Catalyst 8.2 for Vista 32-bit ATI Catalyst 8.2 for Windows XP [via Blue's News]
Remember AMD’s new graphics card from CES? The one that processed, sliced and diced? It’s ready for purchase. Called the Radeon HD 3870 X2, they’re claiming it’s nearly twice as powerful as the HD 3870, which was released late last year. Mainly because it is, literally, two HD 3870s strapped to a single board. It will also support DirectX 10.1, has an rrp of around $US 450 and is, according to AMD, the “first graphics processor to break the Teraflop (one trillion floating point operations per second) barrier”. Surely an overabundance of flops?
Judging by TweakTown’s analysis of the demo, if you want to push the resolution to 1280 x 1024 or higher, you’re going to need more grunt than what the mid-range GeForce 8600 and Radeon 2600 can offer.
It’s all good news for GeForce 8800 and Radeon 2900 owners, with these cards scoring in the 30-40fps range with all settings on high, and ~60fps on medium detail. Not a bad showing from the 8800, when you consider the chip is a year old.
Note that these benchmarks were performed on a system with a quad-core CPU, so you might be hard pressed to replicate the results on a dual-core.
Crysis Demo Performance Analysis [TweakTown]
