Catalyst 12.8 CAP 3 improves support for Guild Wars 2, Borderlands 2

Ahead of next week's expected release of the Catalyst 12.9 beta, AMD has updated its existing WHQL driver with a fresh set of Catalyst Application Profiles. Although it's not a major overhaul, Catalyst 12.8 CAP 3 offers a few improvements that are worthwhile if you're playing certain titles including the recently released Guild Wars 2 and Borderlands 2. The former has received a bug fix that caused texture corruption grass when changing graphics settings on a CrossFire setup, while the latter receives a new CrossFire profile.

Some older titles have also received tweaks. AMD has resolved a flickering problem that arose when World of Warcraft's view distance was set to fair with CrossFire enabled, as well as other CrossFire-related flickering issues in Depth Hunter, an "underwater simulator" that launched earlier this year and is currently vying for a position on Steam; Dirt Showdown; S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat; and War of Roses, an action title that is being developed by indie studio Fatshark and is scheduled to launch on October 2.

Catalyst Downloads
CAP 3 (0.5MB installer for all Radeon users who are already running Catalyst 12.8)
Catalyst 12.8 (sans CAP 3): XP 32-bit | XP 64-bit | Vista/7/8 32-bit | Vista/7/8 64-bit
Catalyst 12.8 for notebooks (again, sans CAP 3): Vista/7/8 32-bit | Vista/7/8 64-bit

That's the extent of this week's CAP 3 update, though it's worth noting that folks who are still running Catalyst 12.6 can look forward to many more improvements when upgrading to 12.8, including up to 25% more performance in Skyrim, 15% in Shogun 2, 10% in Dirt 3, 8% in Crysis Warhead, and 3% to 6% in Crysis 2, Batman: Arkham City, Just Cause 2, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Battlefield 3. It also enhances single-GPU performance in Torchlight 2, which happens to be launching this Thursday.