I love new video card driver. I used to update to the latest display driver when it came out. However, most of the enhancements do not support previous generation video card like ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series. Most of the enhancements are focused on current generation ~ ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series.
ATI Catalyst version 10.7 New Features
- ATI Eyefinity – HydraVision enhancements
- Enhanced Pull-down detection
- ATI CrossFireX technology – support for rotated displays
- ATI Radeon GPU acceleration of VLC 1.1.1 Media Player
Only 1 feature applicable on my Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4870 ~ Enables GPU acceleration of h.264 video content when using the VLC 1.1.1 Media Player – delivering a better user experience by consuming less system resources.
End result… No visible improvement on VLC 1.1.1 Media Player. It is still at 20% CPU processing power on the latest video display driver version 10.7 compare to previous version 10.6. Anyway, it is great upgrade for those uses ATI Eyefinity features…
Download ATI Catalyst version 10.7 here.
Yeah… The wait is finally over. Here come the new 3D display card from AMD ~ ATI Radeon HD 5870. There are lot of ATI Radeon HD 5870 Review in the Internet now. I read through some of the reviews. The performance is really good ~ almost same as ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2. It is a good deal for new computer setup. However, I am not going to buy this ATI Radeon HD 5870 soon. But might get another Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB to enable CrossFireX when price go down. Nvidia GT300 will be released on Q1 2010. The price will be even lower then. 
ATI Radeon HD 5870
Do check out AnandTech and Guru3D for ATI Radeon HD 5870 Review.
Really can’t wait to get my hand on another Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB. Want to play games on 1920×1200 with my latest LCD monitor ~ Dell UltraSharp U2410. It should be able to run smoothly at 60 fps on most of the games. 
My IBM ThinkPad T42 has been with me for more than 4 years. I changed its main board, hard drive, CPU fan during these years. It is still okay for normal daily office use. But cannot use it to play 3D games at all. The display adaptor ~ ATI Radeon 7500 mobile edition cannot play most of the 3D games nowadays.
Lenovo ThinkPad T400
Yeah… I love to benchmark PC performance. Here is another nice tool to benchmark your PC ~ Rank My PC in Facebook. It is a tool sponsored by Intel. And it is really simple to use it and fast too. The most important part, you can compare your PC performance with your friend. 
Rank your PC
Have you download the latest AMD display driver ~ ATI Catalyst Software Suite Version 9.3? No for me. AMD comes out a new ATI Catalyst Software Suite every month. And the naming conversion is based on year and month. For example, the current version 9.3, 9 == year and 3 == month. Normally, new features or performance improvement will be added on each display driver release. For ATI Catalyst Software Suite Version 9.3, the major feature is Windows 7 support and is a unified driver with Windows Vista. Besides, it also improves on Folding@Home (which I did not try at all for the moment). Windows Vista HDMI audio driver support
integrated into all ATI Catalyst 9.3 packages and new AMD Display Library (ADL) SDK. Finally, Lost Planet: Colonies gains up to 20% on 4800 series products.
Based on these features, I will skip this release. Looking forward for the next release that has 64 bit hardware support on ATI AVIVO Video Converter. Right now, it is still using CPU processing instead of GPU power. Luckily, I have a very powerful CPU ~ Intel Core2 Extreme quad-core processor QX9650. 
