ATI Catalyst 4.6 and Omega 2.5.51

ATI has released version 4.6 of its Catalyst driver suite for its Radeon range of products. We are also offering a link to the very highly regarded Omega version (2.5.51) of these drivers, for those of you who wish for a tweaked gaming experience.

Omega 2.5.51

Based on the official Catalyst 4.6 drivers.

- Updated the Omega version of RadLinker (1010), now Radlinker includes a new skin option and adds support for x800 overclocking.

- Added some tweaks for OLG. Enabled OGL Triple Buffer by default.

- Added support for MANY NEW Radeon cards, FireGL cards and Mobility chipsets.
ANY card should be supported now and the drivers will always install.

- Now the drivers should work a LOT better on laptops.

- Fixed FireGL card support, now it has full CP support and fully working OGL.

- Changed the installer graphics.

- Added a new option in the installer to select a faster OLG driver instead of just using the latest one, this driver runs Counter Strike like butter. Important note: The special OGL driver will NOT work on x800 cards. Many thanks to NGO for their input, this was their idea.

- The package keeps growing in size, the drivers will keep being distributed in compressed CAB format to save some bandwidth, it must be decompressed using one of these tools (latest version): WinAce, WinRAR or WinZip. Then run the extracted file to start installation of the drivers.

Catalyst 4.6

This version of the drivers includes several X800 improvements and fixes for games such as Call of Duty, Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory, Star Trek - Elite Force II, Serious Sam, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Quake III Arena.

The full list of foxes and improvements is as follows:

Performance Improvements

-Pixel Shader compiler improvements bring significant performance gains to PS 2.0 applications such as Halo (2-3%), Tomb Raider (4-5%) and Mother Nature (4-5%).
-ShaderMark 2 shows numerous gains in the 3-6% range. The High Dynamic Range scenes in ShaderMark (Tests 20 & 21) gain 10-15%.
-RADEON X800 driver tuning improves performance for several Vertex-Shader-heavy tests. For example, Battle of Proxycon, Troll's Lair and Mother Nature gain 9-15% on the RADEON X800 PRO.
-Improvements in our surface allocation and texture management code have increased performance for resource-challenged cases. Re-Volt scores improve 25% at 1600x1200 across several RADEON configurations. ShaderMark Test 14 (Veined Marble) improves dramatically (up 380% at 1600x1200) on some 256MB products.
-Improvements in OpenGL driver efficiency bring numerous small gains (1-3%) in Call of Duty, Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory, Star Trek - Elite Force II, Serious Sam, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Quake III Arena.
-X800 memory tuning improves Anti-Aliasing performance in a number of games and benchmarks. For example, at 4xAA, 3DMark2001 gains 4-7%, UT2003 Antalus and Asbestos
-Flybys improve 2-7%, and the CodeCreatures score rises 15%.

Resolved CATALYST Driver Issues

-Display corruption is no longer seen when rotating the primary desktop 90 degrees or 180 degrees under Windows 2000 with extended desktop enabled
-Display corruption is no longer seen when running the ATI demo Dolphin v1.1 with the Truform option set to Application Preference
-The operating system no longer fails to respond when doing a monitor swap while running an overlay image on the secondary display
-Rotating a display of 1024x768 60Hz followed by entering standby mode no longer results in display corruption being seen briefly when resuming
-Using the ATI icon in the system tray or using a hotkey stroke to rotate the display image no longer results in the operating system intermittently failing to respond for approximately 90 seconds
-Playing a DVD with DXVA enabled and attempting to rotate the display 90 degrees no longer results in the operating system failing to respond
-Moving an OpenGL window around the Windows desktop no longer results in the operating system intermittently failing to respond

Resolved Game Issues

-While playing the game Halo, under certain conditions, images that should be hidden behind solid foreground objects are no longer showing through
-Starting a game of Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow under Windows XP with an ATI RADEON 9000 PRO installed and the display set to 1024x768 and the graphics quality set to high no longer results in flickering textures
-Display corruption is no longer seen when using particular air craft in "Century of Flight" games found in Flight Simulator 2004
-Textures are now applied correctly in the game Silent Storm when setting the resolution to 1024x768 32bpp and the quality option set to high
-Enabling AF to 8x and running the game Battlefield Vietnam with the graphics set to high and the display set to 1280x1024 32bpp no longer results in display corruption being seen at a certain point of the game
-The display menu for the game 4x4 EVO 2 is now available when the rotation option is used to set the display to 180 degrees
-Circular grid corruption is no longer seen when launching World Fables under Windows XP with Anti-Aliasing enabled at 4X
-The Windows XP operating system no longer intermittently fails to respond when restarting the game Homeworld 2
-Adobe Gamma and other colour calibration software now have the ability to adjust their independent gamma values. Note: In certain situations when closing the application, the default desktop gamma is not restored.

The full list of release notes is available by following the download tab above.