Download Driver For ATi Catalyst 5.13 beta

The German Chip.de has put a beta version of the Catalyst 5.13 drivers online on its site. The drivers are via this page to download and consists of the Catalyst variant with Control Center. It is customary for ATi to release a new set of drivers in the first week of every month, but especially for Christmas, the Canadian company has compiled Catalysts dedicated to playing (high-definition) video on the Radeon X1000 video cards . The exact changes of Catalyst 5.13 beta are not yet known. The final changelog and final version of 5.13 will most likely be released on Thursday, December 22. This day has already been baptized ‘dominATIon day’ by ATi. According to Chip.de, deinterlacing has been optimized in this beta version and HDTV support has been added for the X1000 video cards.

In addition to new Catalyst beta drivers, ATi has also released a first version of its Avivo Xcode, which is parked at this location. Avivo Xcode can be used to hardware encode movie files to a different format using the GPU. This requires a Radeon X1000 series card; video cards from older series are not (yet) supported by the software. According to various tests, this hardware encoding is up to five times faster than software encoding. This is partly due to the support of the H.264 format in the R520 core. On, among other things AnandTech, Firing Squad and EliteBastards you can go for previews of the Avivo Xcode software.

December 22, 2005 – dominATion day?