This month we are seeing a further performance increase with Company of Heroes and some significant performance increases for Crysis Warhead, Crysis and World in Conflict, compared with last month’s ATI Cataylst 9.5 driver. Following are some of this month’s highlights. Detailed release notes are available here.

* Company of Heroes – performance gains of up to 25% for the ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series, and performance gains of up to 10% for the ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series
* Crysis Warhead – performance gains of up to 11% for ATI CrossFireX technology in dual configuration.
* Crysis – performance gains of up to 13% for ATI CrossFireX technology in dual configuration.
* World in Conflict – performance gains of up to 30% for high settings that were previously CPU limited with the ATI Radeon HD 4800 series.
Of course, your performance may vary, depending on your particular system configuration.

The runtime should enable quicker transcoding with lower CPU loads as the company’s technical manager explained that AMD “unlocked” the video processor in order to enable non-real-time decoding. He also added how resolution scaling on the GPU saves a lot of memory bandwidth but he did say that the CPU still handles tasks such as entropy estimation.

The hotfix is located here.

As for the general tendencies, the programmers from AMD graphics division who are responsible for Catalyst drivers and Catalyst Control Center development are evidently focusing their main efforts on improving the performance of the CrossFireX technology, although single-GPU solutions also get some. Moreover, they keep fixing a lot of small and not very small issues in the new Catalyst and CCC versions, and even though these issues are not fatal, they are in fact pretty annoying. All of the fixes are described in detail in the driver release notes and it is certainly a great thing.