Special Forces Training Ground

AMD released the final iteration of Catalyst 10.4 graphics driver suite. The WHQL-signed drivers keep up with the company’s one month update cycle, and introduce a wide range of changes. To begin with, game-specific performance improvements in this release are confined to STALKER – Clear Sky, with up to 6% improvement in frame-rates for the Radeon HD 5970, and up to 3% for HD 5800 and HD 5700 series GPUs. There are changes to the video-decoding features, namely addition of H.264 Level 5.1 support, and a fix that reduces the ”mosquito noise” seen in highly-compressed video.

Improvements to the video-transcoding capabilities are also a highlight of this release, with enhanced support for Windows 7 drag-and-drop video converter, namely performance increment, support for new H.264 formats such as MTS and WMV9 Complex profile interlaced content, and the ability to toggle GPU-acceleration from Catalyst Control Center. Support for the ATI Video converter is now available in the advanced view of the ATI Catalyst Control Center.

A list of minor fixes follows.

* Desktop mouse cursor will no longer intermittently appear enlarged
* Pressing the ”Page Down” button while configuring the last display in Eyefinity group will now properly switch to the next display instead of closing the bezel user interface
* Shortcut keys to configure the bezel now functions properly
* ”Battlefield 2: Bad Company” maps no longer takes unusually long to load for ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series
* Performance on 2D applications and benchmarks has now been fixed
* Flashing no longer visible in ”Shattered Horizon” game with CrossFire™ enabled
* Changing in-game resolution in ”Alien vs. Predator” no longer causes screen flickering under multi-GPU configuration
* Tint setting under Catalyst Control Center – Basic Color now displays smooth transition when adjusted for Blu-ray playback
* In-game anti-alias now functions properly when other in-game options like Volumetric Effects are enabled in ”Empire: Total War” and ”Napoleon: Total War”games
* Flickering corruption and flashing textures are no longer visible in ”Battlefield 2: Bad Company”

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