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ATI Catalyst 8.6 driver for Radeon graphics cards: XP and Vista performance

The new ATI Catalyst 8.6 driver for Radeon graphics cards has just been released by AMD and you may want to know how well this driver performs under Microsoft Windows Vista and XP, Tweak Town take a closer look and show the results over 11 pages. They found that the new Catalyst driver has some good performance promises but wanted to give it a run on their mighty test bed.

In the final thoughts, they had this to say “While in the applications we tested there hasn’t been any notable gains with the HD 3870 X2 actually taking a hit in a few cases, the new drivers generally seem to be increasing performance in the promised sections for people.

What’s really interesting about this driver is if you take the time to read the performance improvements, they all revolve around DX10 improvements. It will be interesting to see if this is something we begin to see more of over the coming months; Vista has really picked up momentum in the gamers market with most people jumping onboard.

Considering how hard at work AMD has been on the new HD 4800 series, it’s surprising to see any real gains from this month’s driver, but they’ve managed to do it. No doubt over the coming months AMDs focus will begin to move to the HD 4800 series of cards in a continuing effort to compete against NVIDIA”.

If you want to get a detailed look at the results and how well these drivers perform on different games in XP and Vista then click the read link below.

Read the 11 page review.

VIA Linux Portal to offer drivers, documentation and open source code

VIA Technologies, Inc, a leading innovator of power efficient x86 processor platforms, today announced the launch of a beta version of the VIA Linux Portal as part of an initiative designed to extend collaboration with the Open Source community.

The VIA Linux Portal will initially offer graphics drivers for the VIA CN896 digital media IGP chipset for the new Ubuntu 8.04 LTS distribution. Documentation and source code for these drivers will be released over the coming weeks, with official forums and bug tracking scheduled for implementation later this year. The VIA Linux Portal will also adhere to a regular release schedule that is aligned with kernel changes and the release of major Linux distributions.

Sponsored by Canonical Ltd., Ubuntu is released every six months, with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS the latest release in what has been consistently rated among the most popular of the many GNU/Linux distributions in the PC space.

“We welcome the steps being taken by VIA to improve its support to the Open Source community,” said Chris Kenyon, Director of Business Development at Canonical. “We look forward to working with VIA to ensure these drivers get built into Ubuntu by default and that Ubuntu developers and users enjoy a great experience when using VIA platforms.”

“VIA is excited to be taking a more active role within the open source ecosystem,” said Richard Brown, Vice President of Corporate Marketing, VIA Technologies, Inc. “Opening the VIA Linux Portal is an important step in our long term open source initiative and offering support for Ubuntu, one of the most widely known of the Linux distributions, is an ideal place to start.”

The beta version of the VIA Linux Portal is located at linux.via.com.tw and currently offers driver files for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 Service Pack 1 for the VIA CN896 chipset with two south bridge options.