After releasing it few days early at Ian "Cabrtosr" McNaughton's AMD blog, AMD has now officially released its new Catalyst 9.8 version.

The new driver brings some CrossfireX performance gains in various games, as well as OpenGL 3.1 support. The games that will see a performance boost in CrossfireX modes include Battleforge, Company of Heroes, Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Farcry, World in Conflict and Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X., all in DirectX 10 mode and with gains from 5 to 77 percent depending on the game.

The new Catalyst 8.9 also brings support for OpenGL 3.1 which includes OpenGL Shading Language 1.30 and 1.40, instanced rendering with a per-instance counter accessible to vertex shaders (GL ARB draw instanced), data copying between buffer objects (GL EXT copy buffer), texture buffer objects (GL ARB texture buffer object), rectangular textures (GL ARB texture rectangle), uniform buffer objects (GL ARB uniform buffer object), and some other various OpenGL 3.1 related topics.

You can find the new driver and full release notes here.