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Page 1 of 2   Ever since they were first presented, what may now seem as the long gone 2002, ATI Catalyst have been the most frequently updated graphics drivers. When the company first came out with the Catalyst bundle, which consisted of four components, ATI officially left its troublesome driver history behind. Of course, there have been ups and downs, but the overall quality of ATI graphics card support rose dramatically since. The largest problem for ATI at the time was the fact that NVIDIA Detonator and later ForceWare drivers were much less buggy, whereas the current situation is somewhat reversed. Anyhow, the fact that the Catalyst drivers are refreshed on a monthly basis has produced, according to our calculations, some 95 driver revisions up to now. As the Catalyst 10.1 revision was already completed before the end of 2009, ATI left major developments to be integrated in 10.2 and 10.3 revisions, thus starting the year in a revolutionary manner.
Novelties
One thing needs to be cleared up first – ATI didn’t focus on performance increase. Yes, they state performance improvements of 5-10% in certain games, but that doesn’t portray well the extent to which the drivers have changed. The benefit of the new Catalysts is newly introduced possibilities and features, mostly revolving around the very young Eyefinity technology and an entirely new CrossFireX architecture, making a major component change in the drivers. Some global improvements were also implemented, but first things first.
CrossFireX
The initial and lesser changes in the CrossFireX technology concern the use of multiple Radeon HD 5000 series cards, which has now become an even less demanding “sport” as far as power consumption is concerned. The reason behind this is that the second card in a CrossFireX system will now be almost completely turned off in desktop (2D) mode. When we say turned off, we mean a maximum downclock of memory and GPU, which also enables the use of minimum voltages for both. According to people from ATI, this state is akin to some sort of hibernation, while a complete shutdown of the second accelerator isn’t, and probably won’t be possible at all. However, only Windows Vista and 7 users will be able to make use of this new feature. Effective savings of around 12 W aren’t too impressive, but can’t hurt on a larger scale either.
The next innovation in the CrossFireX field is the increased driver flexibility through different game profiles. CrossFireX profiles will be available as separate downloads and will be released in case they’re needed. The point of the profiles is ad-hoc optimization of Radeons in Multi-GPU mode. If you’re wondering why game profiles are so important, the answer is simple. Even though new Catalyst drivers appear on a monthly basis, there is always the possibility of a game appearing exactly when new drivers are released. Since users are hardly going to wait patiently another month for the required CrossFireX optimizations, profiles will enable instant fixes to be released within a minimum timeframe, since profile releases have their own timelines, bringing a much faster overall support for users with multiple graphics cards. New optimized algorithm profiles will be downloadable in the form of an .xml file. Also, users of Eyefinity will be glad to hear that both cards will be used for rendering even if Eyefinity is active and the picture is being displayed on multiple monitors. Truth be told, we think that this should’ve been present from the ground up and the very premiere of the HD 5000 series, but better late than never.
The third and most important feature is the completely new CrossFireX technology architecture. This was accomplished by extracting the Multi-GPU component out of the 3D driver. This made it much easier to experiment with different algorithms and should eventually lead to the possibility of running two completely different Radeon cards in CrossFireX. In practice, that would mean that the user would be able to interconnect a Radeon X800 and an HD 5870, which would, of course, make zero sense, but from the mid class products upwards, starts gaining momentum. The Radeon 4000 series is quite strong and would make for an easy upgrade by simply adding a DirectX 11 pair from the HD 5000 series to it (for example, an HD 4870 with an added HD 5770). DirectX 11 in games would be unavailable to you, but DirectX 10 and 9 titles should show a significant performance improvement. The category that will perhaps benefit the most from this is the IGP and mobile IGP systems, since performance would “add up” when a discrete graphics solution is inserted into the system.
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Graphics cards 
