AMD has posted a new set of Catalyst graphics drivers on its 'Game' website today, bringing the monthly release up to version 10.6. The new driver supports all cards in the Radeon HD 2000, HD 3000, HD 4000 and HD 5000 series for desktops and laptops as well as Radeon HD 3000 and HD 4000 IGPs. In addition to the bunch of performance improvements, Catalyst 10.6 also brings a couple of new video filtering options, and OpenGL 4.0 support on 5000-series Radeons.
Among the titles receiving a bump in performance is Company of Heroes, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Crysis Warhead, DiRT 2, World in Conflict, and a handful of other. Most of the improvements are reserved for Radeon HD 5800 or HD 5970 cards in either single or Crossfire mode, with quoted frame rate speedups of anywhere from 3% to 18%.
Meanwhile, the new filtering options include video de-blocking support, which reduces blocking artifacts seen in low bit-rate video during playback, and Mosquito noise reduction support to help prevent the shimmering noise often found around the edges of sharp outlines in highly compressed progressive video. Both these features are only available to owners of Radeon HD 5000-series cards. AMD also mentions support for Flash 10.1 GPU acceleration.
As usual, the new driver is available for Windows XP, Windows XP 64-bit, Windows Vista/7 32-bit and Windows Vista/7 64-bit. You can find the full release notes detailing all the new features here.