AMD has released the last iteration of its Catalyst drivers for this year, the Catalyst 9.12. The new pack features support for Radeon HD 2000, 3000, 4000 and of course HD 5000 series of graphics cards and brings a handful of performance improvements and new features.

The new Catalyst 9.12 driver pack comes with v8.681 graphics driver, and features support for DirectCompute 10.1 for the HD 4800 series and HD 4700 series in both single and CrossfireX configurations. Another new feature is support for OpenGL 3.2 extensions for the entire lineup.

As we noted, there is a handful of performance improvements which include 3DMark Vantage of up to 9 percent for ATI Radeon HD 5800 and HD 5700 series as well as small performance improvement in STALKER Call of Pripyat.

You can find the new Catalyst and the release notes here.

Update

We decided to briefly check out the new Catalyst driver and it looks like that Vantage indeed likes them, but then again, Far Cry 2 didn't get any improvement whatsoever.







Futuremark's Vantage is 6.5 percent faster at performance settings, 6.59 percent in high settings, while extreme settings had a decent boost of twelve percent on the Radeon HD 5770.







We honestly doubt that any other game received any improvements as we are sure that AMD would list it in its release notes. The one that is listed, STALKER Call of Pripyat is unfortunately still just a benchmark (not in Germany, Austria and Switzerland), and should appear as a real game in February 2010.