The new ATI Catalyst driver 8.12 should be available on December 10th and it will bring optimization for the titles that Nvidia has a right to gloat about.

We managed to find out that some of these optimizations are also going to wait for the next Catalyst 9.1 which should probably come sometime next year. The optimizations are going to influence both single board and CrossFire configurations and the only issue is the titles for which Nvidia apparently had more time to optimize than ATI.

Nvidia's GTX 260 216 currently beats ATI in Call of Duty 5, Dead Space, Fallout 3, Far Cry 2 and Left 4 Dead, and these are five titles that Nvidia likes. According to our info, the GTX 260 216, at least the overclocked one from EVGA, outperforms HD 4870 by up to 67 percent, in Dead Space at least. In Far Cry 2 and Fallout 3 the gap is much smaller, as GTX 260 216 is 22 and 10 percent faster.

All of this means that ATI will certainly be back with its HD 4870 card, but the performance increase is still unknown, as the 8.12 is still not available for beta testing, but we will get back to you as soon as we manage to get some new info.

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