AMD today released the twelfth and final Catalyst release of this year for its ATI Radeon graphics cards with version number 8.12. The drivers are available for Windows XP and Vista, in both 32-bit, 64-bit and Media Center versions of Windows. The new drivers are suitable for all Radeon models from the 9500 series and the All-in-Wonder cards from the 9600 series. As usual, at the bottom of this posting you can find direct links to the pages where the available downloads are.
In this release we include support for Stream Computing on, the picture quality of progressive video content has been improved and the performance in various applications and games has been greatly improved. In addition, of course, the changelog again contains the usual list of changes and improvements, followed by a collection of problems that are already known, but for which no solution is yet available:
New Features
- ATi Stream Computing Support
With the release of ATi Catalyst 8.12 users can unlock the potential of accelerated applications enabling ATi Stream technology for millions of ATi Radeon graphics processors worldwide
- ATi Stream computing harnesses the tremendous processing power of the graphics processing unit (GPU) for high-performance, data-intensive computations over a wide range of scientific, business and consumer applications.
- ATi Stream technology enables the hundreds of parallel Stream cores inside AMD graphics processors to accelerate general purpose applications. These capabilities will allow ATi Stream-enabled programs, for a variety of different tasks and from a growing number of software vendors, to operate with optimized performance or with new functionality.
Using ATi Stream technology, owners of ATi Radeon HD 4800 Series and ATi Radeon HD 4600 Series of graphics cards can help accelerate the conversion of standard and HD video into multiple formats for use on differing consumer electronics devices
This release of Catalyst introduces a new advanced video quality control: Noise Reduction for progressive video content, which removes ghosting artifacts while preserving details of the original video. The slider control can be found in the All Settings page of the Avivo Video tab found in the Catalyst Control Center
The following performance gains are noticed with this release of Catalyst
- 3DMark Vantage DX10 – performance gains of up to 5% for Single and Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on HD46xx, HD4550 and HD4350.
- Call of Duty: World at War DX9 – performance gains of up to 21% for Single and Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD48xx.
- Crysis DX10 – performance gains of up to 25% for Single and Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx.
- Crysis Warhead DX10 – performance gains of up to 13% for Single card mode and up to 16% for Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx.
- Devil May Cry 4 DX10– performance gains of up to 6% for Single and Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx and HD38xx.
- Fallout 3 – performance gains of up to 15% for Single card mode.
- Far Cry 2 DX10 – performance gains of up to 10% for Single card mode and up to 57% in Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx and HD38xx.
- FEAR DX9 – performance gains of up to 6% for Single and Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on Radeon HD4870X2 and HD4870.
- Hellgate: London DX10 – performance gains of up to 6% for Single card mode and up to 10% for Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx.
- Left 4 Dead DX9– performance gains of up to 10% for Single card mode and up to 5% for Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4870 series.
- Lost Planet Colonies DX10 – performance gains of up to 10% for Single and Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx and HD38xx.
- Prey OGL – performance gains of up to 15% for Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on Radeon HD4870 1GB products, HD46xx, HD45xx.
- STALKER: Clear Sky – performance gains of up to 10% for Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx and HD38xx.
- Unreal Tournament 3 DX9 – performance gains of up to 18% for Single card mode and up to 15% in Crossfire mode, especially in cases where AA is enabled. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx and HD38xx.
Resolved Issues for the Windows Vista Operating System
- Setting shadow quality to high or medium may cause flickering in World of Warcraft
- Age of Conan DirectX 10, may intermittently become unresponsive during game play
- Catalyst Install Manager, the ‘Deselect All’ button will improperly mark installed packages
- The display driver may fail after being installed on an ATi Radeon HD 4800 Series or ATi Radeon HD 4870 adapter
- Returning from system standby may cause some video corruption to occur on some OpenGL games
- Catalyst Control Center, AVIVO video settings are disabled under MS Vista
- Catalyst Control Center, “Unsupported file formats” error message displayed when selecting H.264 files for transcoding
- HD video file playback may cause the operating system to stop responding
- On some Crossfire configurations the OS may become unstable while running auto-tune when Crossfire is enabled
- “Crossfire” hot key shortcut settings are not retained on reboot
- Catalyst Control Center Setup Assistant may intermittently cause Catalyst Control Center to fail
- Catalyst Control Center, Digital Support Panel, predefined and custom HDTV formats description has been updated
- Catalyst Control Center, resetting the application back to factory defaults does not rest the application skin
- Help documentation for “Enable Geometry Instancing” and “Triple Buffering” is unavailable in help page
Resolved Issues for the Windows XP Operating System
- Using an HDMI cable to connect an ATi All-in-Wonder to a Yamaha receiver may result in the display resolution being limited to 1280×1024 and audio failing to function
- Catalyst Control Center, some of the 3D settings are not displayed on ATI Radeon HD 4870 adapters
- The operating system may fail to start after installing the display driver with some configurations of “Crosfire” with Radeon X1900 Series devices
- The operating system may intermittently fail when exiting Test Drive Unlimited after extensive game play
- Dual display, playing multiple video files on each monitor may cause the system to stop responding
- City of Villains: Attempting to launch the game on a system running Windows XP and containing either two ATi Radeon HD 38×0 or 46×0 products may result in the game failing to load and the operating system failing to respond
- Some OpenGL applications may cause the OS to stop responding on some ATi Radeon HD 45xx adapters
- On some configurations, the display driver may stop responding when resolution is set to 2048×1536 with 8X Anti-Alias and Edge Detect filter enabled
- Exiting some games may intermittently cause the following error message when 8X anti-alias edge detection is enabled: “Display Driver stopped working”
- Hot unplugging a HDMI connection during video playback may cause system instability
- Catalyst Control Center: Enabling pulldown setting may not work on all video formats
- Systems configured with Overlay Theater Mode enabled may intermittently become unresponsive after playing video
- Catalyst Control Center, setting the de-noise slider does not affect the quality of progressive video content
- Intermittent flickering may be noticed on the TV out display when playing a DVD using Cyberlink PowerDVD
Known Issues Under the Windows Vista Operating System
- Catalyst Control Center , some screen corruption may be noticed after enabling 1080p HDMI support and adjusting the scaling options
- Tomb Raider Underworld, some video artifacts may be noticed during game play
- When using PowerDVD to play certain Blue-ray DVD titles, the lower portion of the player window may intermittently appear shaky when playing Special Features
- Video combining effects may be noticed during movie playback while fast forwarding or rewinding
- Video corruption may occur when playing back 1080i MPEG2 content
- Catalyst Control Center, error message ‘CCC Host Application’ may be displayed when canceling a transcoding process
Known Issues Under the Windows XP OperatingSystem
- Catalyst Control Center, the deinterlacing option under AVIVO video is not available after returning from VPU recovery
- Video corruption may be noticed during certain MPEG-2 file playback
- Playing some Blu-ray HD titles on multi head displays may cause the system to stop responding
- Previous transcoders may cause the ATi AVIVO Video Converter to not use the GPU for trancodiing
- Transcoding multiple times may cause the ATi AVIVO Converter to not use the GPU
[break]The following downloads are available:
ATi Catalyst 8.12 for Windows XP (32bit)
ATi Catalyst 8.12 for Windows XP (mobility)
ATi Catalyst 8.12 for Windows XP (64bit)
ATi Catalyst 8.12 for Windows XP (Media Center Edition)
ATi Catalyst 8.12 for Windows Vista (32bit)
ATi Catalyst 8.12 for Windows Vista (64bit)[break]
| Version number | 8.12 |
| Release status | Final |
| Operating systems | Windows XP, Windows XP x64, Windows XP Media Center 2005, Windows Vista, Windows Vista x64 |
| Website | AMD |
| Download | |
| File size |
36.40MB |
| License type | Freeware |