AMD ATI Catalyst 7.1 (x86)

AMD has released the first set of ATI Catalyst drivers of 2007, bumping the new version number up to 7.1. The new drivers resolve issues with game titles Desperados 2, Rome: Total War, Sniper Elite and Splinter Cell Double Agent, as well as fixing the error when launching X-29 applications.

The new Catalysts also allow DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) for video playback when CrossFire mode is enabled.

There are still a small list of known issues affecting games Battlefield 2 and KOTOR II, and enabling CrossFire may still result in display corruption being noticed when playing a DVD or media clip using either WinDVD 7, Windows Media Player or PowerDVD 6. As with other recent ATI Catalyst driver releases, this version only supports AMD ATI Radeon 9500 and higher products including Radeon Xpress  X1150 and 200 series chipsets.

Highlights of the Catalyst 7.1 release include:

Performance improvements

• As with most Catalyst® releases, performance has increased in various situations. In this release of Catalyst® Dark Messiah: Might and Magic performance improves as much as 12% on all ATI Radeon X1000 Series products. 

New features

Crossfire enhancements

• Catalyst 7.1 includes Crossfire enhancements that enable the Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR) Crossfire rendering mode by default, enabling performance benefits for all AFR compatible applications immediately (including newly released applications that have not been officially profiled for Crossfire).  Future Catalyst releases will add further Crossfire performance gains once new applications have been profiled specifically for Crossfire.  Please note that applications already profiled for AFR will not see any performance benefits from this feature.