ATI's just posted their third Catalyst driver release of the year to ati.com, and this release comes with new features and (according to ATI) performance enhancements. From the Catalyst 6.3 release notes:

Overlay Theater Mode Enhancement
This release of the Catalyst® introduces an enhancement to the Overlay Theater mode found in the Catalyst® Control Center. This enhancement allows for higher resolution than the current desktop setting to be available for the Overlay Theater mode.

Avivo™ Video Converter
This release of Catalyst® introduces the Avivo™ Video Converter. The Avivo™ Video Converter is a transcoder tool that provides a quick and easy way of converting videos from one format to another. The Avivo™ wizard found in the Catalyst® Control Center, allows the user to select the input file, and output format, along with the quality level and file location. The Avivo™ Video Converter accepts a wide variety of file formats as a source, and outputs to file formats such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4/DivX, WMA, H.264/AVC and more. Click on How to use the Avivo™ Video Converter, for more information.

Performance Improvements
As with most Catalyst® releases, performance has increased in various situations.

3DMark05: Pixel Shader test runs as much as 1-2% faster, primarily when Anisotropic Filtering is enabled
Call of Duty 2: Framerates are up 5-10% on the enthusiast-class ATI Radeon® X1800 and ATI Radeon® X1900 products

The new driver is a 34MB download and like all recent ATI releases, is only available with Catalyst Control Center. The Avivo video converter engine is also available as a 1.7MB download. All the goodies can be found here:
https://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&questionID=640

3/8/2006 11:49:45 PM