Spotted over at Hardocp that ATI has released the new expected set of Catalyst drivers bringing them up to version 3.5.

Terry Makedon of ATI: Keeping the tradition of frequent CATALYST updates, I would like to announce the availability of CATALYST 3.5.

This posting updates the driver to version 7.90 and Hydravision to version 3.3. The focus of this posting is compatibility and stability improvements.

I loaded the new drivers. didnt see any increase in performance via benchmarks but no problems either. I used the driver cleaner for the first time to clean out all the ati files before installing the new cats. I was very impressed with it did an excellent job better than hunting all that stuff down yourself. it did such a thurough job I was even prompted to register my new card after loading the new drivers. first time that has happened.

Driver cleaner v 1.7

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=3214

I just did a normal uninstall and I got that register message too. Must be a new feature. I haven't had any problems with the new drivers playing Splinter Cell, but haven't played any Open GL games. I've been seeing over at Rage3D that a lot of people are having problems with Open GL and these new drivers. Gained about 25 points in 3D Mark 03, but that really doesn't make any difference anyway.

Just heard that the new Cats came out recently.

Anyone wanna try them out and see what it fixes and/or screws up?

-Aaron

You first hehe. I'm very tempted, but as always I'm going to wait a little bit before I try them out.

Well, that seems odd since they promised to remove their "cheats" or whatever it was which should have decreased performance by 5% or so...

Guess they implemented some other tweaks somewhere...

So far, I played Splinter Cell, RTCW, MOHAA, Unreall II, and C&C Generals with no problems. Although if there are any improvements, I can't see them. Seem to be about the same. I think some of the fixes are for games that I don't play.

Forgot to mention, I did have a slight problem with MOHAA. The opening cut scene was upside down, but when I got to the menu section, everything was okay. Don't know if the was a driver problem or what, it was a fresh install of the game. The game played okay thought.

25 points in a benchmark sounds like a normal variance to me. Of course if you wanted to, you could test it ten times a row and calculate the average

Absolutely right.

Yup, Futuremark says a variance of 1-3% is fine. Thought it's pretty amusing to then read in the release notes of the 15%+ performance improvements in specviewPerf & vulpine glmark (I think).

Steve Jobs came over and benchmarked the speed of the new drivers and said that the CATALYST 3.5 drivers make my ATI Radeon 9700 faster than Jesus.

I'm not even sure what he even means by that. Now he won't leave my house. Doesn't he have a Pixar movie to finance or something else he can do?

Just be glad you dont have a mac if you did he would want to charge you for visiting you.