ATI has released Catalyst 7.4 for Vista, XP and Linux. This monthly update became a tradition. The new driver increases the Open GL performance in Vista on all Radeon X1000 series on a single cards and Crossfire setups. You should typically expect about 15 percent in games such as Doom 3, Quake 4 and Play. With high end cards you can reach a 30 or more percent increase.

The new driver has a new feature, Avivo video converter for Windows Vista 32 bit. This is a cool transcoder that can easily and quickly convert your videos from one format to another. It is part of the Catalyst control center and it supports formats such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4/DivX, WMA, H.264/AVC and more.

The Linux driver called 8.36.5 supports Kernel 2.6.20 and it has beta version 0.9 of AMD catalyst control centre for Linux. The new driver has language localization in Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Swedish, Spanish, Thai, and Turkish. Only  Bosnian / Croatian and Serbian are missing.

The Linux driver resolves an issue with certain AGP cards and now works well after switching from X-Server to a text console.

In windows Vista 64 / XP there is no support for X1600 Pro with HDMI and ATI advises you to continue using Catalyst 7.3. You can download the XP version here and the Vista 32 bit here. Vista 64 bit driver is here and finally the Linux X86 driver is here.