We here at Neoseeker have been quite busy with various projects in the last few weeks and thus may have not been able to push out some of these smaller (but equally important) articles. The ATI Driver Update articles are something I look forward to writing, as they give us some insight, through visual media (i.e. charts and graphs), what, if anything has changed performance-wise.

After the last Catalyst update, we were able to see to nice gains and with the next set of drivers released, we were curious to see if ATI was able to repeat this with the 6.3's. Judging from the release notes, ATI has claimed to have improved Pixel Shader performance in 3DMark05 and increased framerates in Call of Duty 2 (X1800 and X1900).

Here is a list of features from ATI's site:

New Features

This release of Catalyst introduces the following new features:

• Overlay Theater Mode Enhancement
• Avivo Video Converter

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