AMD outs Catalyst 10.5 for adoring Radeon fans

Robert Hallock 26 May, 2010 at 2:17pm ET Article published in Tech

Hot on the heels of NVIDIA’s major overhaul of their ForceWare drivers, AMD has announced that their newest Catalyst driver, version 10.5, is ready for download starting today.

The new driver adds support for 120Hz displays, as well as overclocking enhancements for multi-monitor users and the raft of Windows 7 bug fixes outlined below:

“Battlefield 2: Bad Company” maps no longer takes unusually long to load.
Enabling hardware shaders (perfect mode) no longer causes text and on-screen menu corruption while loading missions in “IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946” game.
Re-logging into a system after a Remote Desktop connection no longer results in “Catalyst Control Center is not supported…” warning message or the Graphics menu for Catalyst Control Center Advanced view to go missing.
HDTV resolutions are now properly reported by the tooltip when the mouse cursor hovers over the CV display icon under “Desktops & Displays” in Catalyst Control Center.
Alt-Tabbing to desktop and back into “Mass Effect 2” game no longer causes the display to go black.
In-game Anti-Alias can now be applied when other in-game options like Volumetric Effects are enabled in “Empire: Total War” and “Napoleon: Total War” games.
Enabling Anti-Alias in “Empire: Total War” no longer causes a performance drop.
Running “Unigine Heaven Benchmark 2.0” in wireframe mode with tessellation enabled no longer causes the application to fail on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series cards.
Changing in-game resolution in “Alien vs. Predator” no longer causes the screen to flicker under Multi-GPU configurations.
Catalyst Control Center now remembers the position of fourth monitor in Eyefinity group.
Black screen no longer observed with “Unigine Heaven Benchmark 2.0” application with OpenGL mode settings.
Enabling dynamic contrast in Catalyst Control Center video settings no longer causes vertical stripes to appear during XVID content playback.

Get some

Windows XP: Catalyst 10.5
Windows XP x64: Catalyst 10.5
Windows Vista: Catalyst 10.5
Windows Vista x64: Catalyst 10.5
Windows 7: Catalyst 10.5
Windows 7 x64: Catalyst 10.5

Comments

26 May 2010 ~ 9:45pm NullenVoyd Don't get me wrong, I enjoy my ATI cards, but it's amusing most of the NVIDIA update was "We're making THIS faster, and THIS thing is even better now..." and the ATI update is all "THIS doesn't cause crashes anymore and THIS thing actually works properly now..."

I'd just be happy if I could see CCC load as fast on my newish computer as it does on an older machine I have with CCC 8.something and a Radeon x1950... or maybe I'm doing something wrong.
26 May 2010 ~ 11:22pm Thrax AMD had their big "WE MADE EVERYTHING BETTER" release with Catalyst 10.3 in March: http://tech.icrontic.com/news/amd-catalyst-10-3-receives-whql-cert/
27 May 2010 ~ 12:47am Cliff_Forster NullenVoyd, AMD has had a commitment to releasing a new driver every 30 days for a while now. Sometimes they amp up performance, sometimes they just fix some bugs, occasionally they hit a little of each.
27 May 2010 ~ 10:15am M46h1n3 Im still victim to random crashes/blue screens/smoke effect lag. Hopefully this new ccc will do something this time
27 May 2010 ~ 11:18am mirage CCC is just a control panel, an interface for controlling driver settings. I highly doubt CCC is causing the crashes and lags; those can be due to the driver.

I don't use CCC for anything and it is disabled in my startup programs. For overclocking, ATI Tray Tools works much better for my HD 4850.
27 May 2010 ~ 2:10pm shwaip I found that making the fan speed curve more aggressive on my 5870 has basically stopped all grey screen crashes. I used the msi afterburner program to do it.
12 Jun 2010 ~ 8:40pm DrLiam Did anyone find this updating conflicting with iTunes? I find that album view and all my podcasts no longer play.. just weird artifacts appear.

I've gone from 10.1 to 10.5 and updated to the newest iTunes. Frustrating.
17 Jun 2010 ~ 2:50pm DrLiam ps- The issue resolved itself with a few restarts.