Released late last month in preview form for 64-bit Windows 7 users, AMD's Catalyst 11.8 driver suite has now received Microsoft's nod of approval. If you installed the prerelease build a few short weeks ago, you'll probably still want to grab today's update as it contains some new features for AMD Overdrive, numerous bug fixes and additional gaming performance tweaks. Likewise, folks running Catalyst 11.7 and earlier stand to gain many improvements.

Performance-wise, 11.8 grants Radeon HD 5000 and 6000 series owners a 10% boost when playing Crysis 2 in DirectX 11 with anti-aliasing enabled and disabled. You'll also get up to 8% more frames when running F.E.A.R. 3 with DX11 and AA enabled, up to 20% in Call of Duty: Black Ops for both single and multi-GPU configurations, and as much as 30% more performance when AMD's morphological anti-aliasing (MLAA) is enabled through the CCC.

Download Catalyst 11.8
Desktop: Windows XP 32-bit | Windows XP 64-bit | Windows Vista/7 32-bit | Windows Vista/7 64-bit
Mobile: Windows Vista/7 32-bit | Windows Vista/7 64-bit

Beyond raw speed increases, Catalyst 11.8 also receives an update to AMD Overdrive that includes both CPU and GPU overclocking controls in the Vision Control Center (CPU overclocking is limited to Black Edition chips). There are around a dozen bug fixes, many of which caused BSODs, black screens and video corruption in various applications and games including 3DMark 11, StarCraft 2 and F.E.A.R. 3. You can view the full release notes here or on our download pages.