Driver Update: ATI Catalyst 9.8

Last weekend was the 2009 edition of the QuakeCon in Dallas, Texas. Present on behalf of AMD was Ian ‘Cabrtosr’ McNaughton, who holds the position of senior manager of advanced marketing. He has on his blog about this written and as a nice touch, he has already provided download links for the upcoming version 9.8 of the Catalyst drivers. As usual, the drivers are suitable for all Radeon models from the HD 2400 series; older maps rely on the 9.3 release. Downloads on this page are only available for Windows XP, Vista, and 7, in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Mobility and XP MCE users will therefore have to be patient. Ian did not disclose the changes made in version 9.8.

This release of the ATI Catalyst driver provides OpenGL 3.1 extension support. The following is a list of OpenGL 3.1 features and extensions added in ATI Catalyst 9.8:

• Support for OpenGL Shading Language 1.30 and 1.40.
• Instanced rendering with a per-instance counter accessible to vertex shaders (GL ARB draw instanced).
• Data copying between buffer objects (GL EXT copy buffer).
• Primitive restart (NV primitive restart). Because client enable/disable no longer exists in OpenGL 3.1, the PRIMITIVE RESTART state has become server state, unlike the Nvidia extension where it is client state. As a result, the numeric values ​​assigned to PRIMITIVE RESTART and PRIMITIVE RESTART INDEX differ from the NV versions of those tokens.
• At least 16 texture image units must be accessible to vertex shaders, in addition to the 16 already guaranteed to be accessible to fragment shaders.
• Texture buffer objects (GL ARB texture buffer object).
• Rectangular textures (GL ARB texture rectangle).
• Uniform buffer objects (GL ARB uniform buffer object).
• SNORM texture component formats.