It has been a while since we have seen a new WHQL driver from AMD, so the newly released Catalyst 14.9 WHQL is a refreshing change of pace. The new Catalyst 14.9 WHQL drivers bring official WHQL support for the new R9 285 Tonga Pro based graphics card as well as a plenty of performance improvements and bug fixes for various games and applications.

According to AMD's release notes, the new Catalyst 14.9 drivers supports all the desktop and mobile graphics cards since the Radeon HD 5000 series as well as support for APUs with R7/R6/R5/R3 graphics and HD 6000D/G graphics.

As far as the performance improvements are concerned, the new driver includes improvements for Futuremark's 3DMark Sky Diver, Fire Strike and 3DMark11 benchmarks, as well as Bioshock Infinite, Company of Heroes 2, Crysis 3, GRID Autosport, Murdered: Soul Suspect, Plants vs. Zombies, Batman: Arkham Origins, Wildstar, Tomb Raider, Watch Dogs, Assassin's Creed IV, Lichdom, and StarCraft II games. The performance improvements scale anywhere from up to 50 percent and down to 5 percent.

It also brings Mantle support for AMD mobile GPUs with Enduro tehcnology, a couple of AMD Eyefinity enhancements and resolves a number of issues including 60Hz SST flickering on the AOC U2868PQU monitor reported on certain AMD Radeon graphics cards, 4K flickering issues seen on AMD R9 290 series and HD 7800 series, screen tearing issues on AMD Crossfire, instability issues in GRID Autosport running in Eyefinity and geometry corruption in State of Decay.

The new Catalyst 14.9 is available for Windows 8 and Windows 7 in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions and, as always, can be found over at AMD's support site.