Yeah… If you are StarCraft II gamer and having ATI graphics card, here is a beta driver for you. It supports Anti-Aliasing through the ATI Catalyst Control Center for StarCraft II. This beta driver supports ATI Radeon HD 2xxx, 3xxx, 4xxx and 5xxx series graphics card and ATI Radeon Mobility. It also improves performance for Quad ATI CrossFireX for Eyefinity supported configurations.
I updated the display driver to 10.7a beta. But my poor ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB cannot perform well even with 2x AA enabled. Getting less than 30 fps when turn AA on. I think that I need to upgrade to ATI Radeon HD 5870 in order to enable AA and play it smoothly. Anyway, StarCraft II is great to play even without AA turn on.
Download ATI Catalyst 10.7a Beta Driver for StarCraft II here.
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
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.
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.