ATI has released the latest version of the official Catalyst video card drivers. The Catalyst 5.7 drivers can be downloaded from ATI. Of course the driver release notes are also available.
Highlights from the release notes include the following:
1080p Display Support Option
Catalyst 5.7 introduces support enhancement to the display support options found in the Digital Panel Properties of the Catalyst Control Center. This enhancement will offer a 1080p standard format option for a displays that are reporting incomplete or incorrect capabilities in their EDID information. This feature will be supported on ATI Radeon X300 products and above, and will be supported under the Microsoft Windows XP, 2000 and the next release of the Windows XP Media Center Edition operating systems.
Catalyst Control Center Un-install Option
Catalyst 5.7 introduces a clean un-install option for the Catalyst Control Center. When a user chooses to remove the Catalyst Control Center, all desktop shortcuts, user defined profiles, and hotkeys will be completely removed from the system. All custom setting will need to be recreated when the Catalyst Control Center is installed once again.
Performance Improvements
Enhancements to our driver's internal memory management bring significant benefits to 64MB and 128MB framebuffer configurations in Catalyst 5.7.
The resulting performance gains are most apparent in high resolution, everything on modes, when running applications that use a significant amount of graphics memory. Examples include:
5-15% gains in 3DMark05 on some products
20-60% gain in Far Cry Regulator across multiple settings
25-60% gains in Half-Life 2 at 1600x1200 4xAA 8xAF
40-60% gains in UT2004 at 1600x1200 6xAA 16xAF
50-100% improvement in Comanche4 at 1600x1200 6xAA 16xAF
50-200% gains in certain ShaderMark tests at high resolution
Additionally, an improvement in our OpenGL driver brings a gain of approximately 10-15% to the Unigraphics test in SPECviewperf. This improvement is not framebuffer-specific.
The new ATI Catalyst 5.7 video card driver also includes numerous fixes and improvements.
