ATI Catalyst 8.3 XP (32-bit)

AMD released it's Catalyst 8.3 drivers for Windows Vista x86, Windows Vista x64, Windows XP. this is a major Catalyst update with support for the new CrossFireX features (allowing any RV670 or R680-based graphics card to work together on one PC and in two, three or even four GPU combos) and for Hybrid Graphics (boosting PC gaming performance via AMD 780G motherboard and ATI Radeon HD 3400 Series graphics product in Windows Vista as well as support for up to four PC displays). In addition to those features as well as others, the new 8.3 drivers include performance improvements for games like Company of Heroes and Crysis in DirectX10 along with improvements for Call of Juarez, Lost Planet and Unreal Tournament 2004. This new release comes with support for the Radeon 9500 series cards and up (up to the HD 3000 family) and boasts quite a few big features like:

CrossFireX Quad support - up to 3 or 4 GPUs through combinations of Radeon HD 3850, 3870 and HD 3870 X2 cards)

Hybrid Graphics support - Hybrid Graphics delivers a significant 3D performance boost for systems featuring an AMD 780G integrated graphics motherboard and an ATI Radeon HD 3400 series graphics accelerator.

DirectX 10.1 Support - Catalyst 8.3 introduces WHQL certified support for the DirectX 10.1 API found in Windows Vista Service Pack 1 update for all ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series products.

Anti-Aliasing Enhancements - Introduces anti-aliasing support for all Unreal Engine 3.0 based games (running in DirectX 9 mode). Users can enable Anti-Aliasing for titles such as Gears of War and Unreal Tournament 3 by simply enabling Anti-Aliasing within the ATI Catalyst Control Center.

HydraVision support for Windows Vista

Tessellation support in the Catalyst driver for the ATI Radeon HD 3800 Series of products. Tessellation has the potential to simplify development efforts and improve application performance by creating high polygon models from low polygon models all within the GPU.

Performance Improvements:

• Call of Juarez: Up to 20% improvement is noticed on ATI CrossFireX configured systems containing an ATI Radeon HD38x0 cards
• Company of Heroes DX10: Up to 17% improvement is noticed, especially at lower resolutions, on ATI Radeon HD38x0 cards
• Crysis DX10: Up to 15% improvement is noticed on all supported ATI Radeon cards
• Lost Planet DX9: Up to 36% improvement is noticed across all supported ATI Radeon cards and in ATI CrossFireX configured systems
• Shadermark 2.1: Performance scores increased up to 35% across all supported Radeon cards and in ATI CrossFireX configured systems
• Unreal Tournament 2004: Up to 10% increase in performance is noticed on systems containing an ATI Radeon HD2400, HD2600, or HD3400 cards on ATI CrossFireX configured systems