With the release of CATALYST 5.3 today, ATI is pleased to announce support for Open GL 2.0. The addition of Open GL 2.0 provides a platform to further leverage the power of our latest hardware to enhance the realism of Open GL-based games and applications. Users have the ability to enjoy increased visual realism in how scenes are rendered and in the use of shadows - bringing a cinematic gaming experience that much closer.

This is a significant addition to CATALYST and further strengthens ATI's position as providing the most stable, high performance driver in the industry today.

The addition of Open GL 2.0 offers a number of key benefits for CATALYST and ATI hardware, including:

1. Programmable shading - With this new release, both OpenGL Shading Language and its APIs are now core features of OpenGL. New functionality includes the ability to create shader and program objects; and the ability to write vertex and fragment shaders in OpenGL Shading Language.

2. Multiple render targets that enable programmable shaders to write different values to multiple output buffers in a single pass.

3. Non-power-of-two textures for all texture targets, thereby supporting rectangular textures and reducing memory consumption.

4. Two-sided stencil with the ability to define stencil functionality for the front and back faces of primitives, improving performance of shadow volume and constructive solid geometry rendering algorithms.

5. Point sprites which replace point texture coordinates with texture coordinates interpolated across the point. This allows drawing points as customized textures, useful for particle systems.