ATI Stream™ support:

• With the release of ATI Catalyst™ 8.12 users can unlock the potential of accelerated applications enabling ATI Stream™ technology for millions of ATI Radeon™ graphics processors worldwide

  • ATI Stream™ harnesses the tremendous processing power of the graphics processing unit (GPU) for high-performance, data-intensive computations over a wide range of scientific, business and consumer applications.

  • ATI Stream™ enables the hundreds of parallel cores inside AMD graphics processors to accelerate general purpose applications.  These capabilities will allow ATI Stream™-enabled programs, for a variety of different tasks and from a growing number of software vendors, to operate with optimized performance or with new functionality.

  • The CAL (Compute Abstraction Layer) is now included in the ATI Catalyst™ driver package. CAL is the enabling component for ATI Stream™

ATI Stream™ application:  ATI Avivo Video Converter

• Using ATI Stream technology, owners of ATI Radeon™ HD 4800 Series and ATI Radeon™ HD 4600 Series of graphics cards can take advantage of this video conversion tool (found in ATI Catalyst™ Control Center Basic View) to achieve incredible performance levels in video transcoding.

ATI Catalyst™ 8.12 Folding@Home performance enhancements

• Using ATI Stream™ technology, owners of the ATI Radeon™ HD 4000 Series, ATI Radeon™ HD 3000 Series, and ATI Radeon™ HD 2000 Series of graphics accelerators will see a performance boost in their Folding@Home scores when running the latest Folding@Home client and upcoming cores in conjunction with ATI Catalyst™ 8.12 (just click on the Folding@Home desktop shortcut installed with ATI Catalyst 8.12 to download the client)

ATI Catalyst™ Control Center – Noise reduction for progressive video content:

• This release of ATI Catalyst™ introduces a new advanced video quality control:  Noise Reduction for progressive video content, which removes ghosting artifacts while preserving details of the original video.  The slider control can be found in the All Settings page of the Avivo Video tab found in the ATI Catalyst™ Control Center.     

Performance improvements

• 3DMark Vantage DX10 – performance gains of up to 5% for single GPU and CrossFire configurations.  Performance gains were seen on the ATI Radeon™ HD4600 Series, ATI Radeon™ HD 4550 Series and the ATI Radeon™ HD4350 Series.

• Call of Duty: World at War DX9 – performance gains of up to 21% for single GPU and CrossFire configurations.  Performance gains were seen on the ATI Radeon™ HD 4800 Series.

• Crysis DX10 – performance gains of up to 25% for single GPU and CrossFire configurations.  Performance gains were seen on the entire ATI Radeon™ HD4000 Series of products.

• Crysis Warhead DX10 – performance gains of up to 13% for single GPU and up to 16% for CrossFire configurations.  Performance gains were seen on the entire ATI Radeon™ HD 4000 Series of products.

• Devil May Cry 4 DX10– performance gains of up to 6% for single GPU and CrossFire configurations.  Performance gains were noticed on the entire ATI Radeon™ HD 4000 Series and ATI Radeon™ HD 3800 Series of products

• Fallout 3 DX9 – performance gains of up to 15% for single GPU cards.

• Far Cry 2 DX10 – performance gains of up to 10% for single GPU and up to 57% in CrossFire configurations.  Performance gains were noticed on the entire ATI Radeon™ HD 4000 Series and ATI Radeon™ HD 3800 Series of products

• FEAR DX9 – performance gains of up to 6% for single GPU and CrossFire configurations.  Performance gains were noticed on the ATI Radeon™ HD 4870X2 and the ATI Radeon™ HD 4870.

• Hellgate: London DX10 – performance gains of up to 6% for single GPU and up to 10% for CrossFire configurations.  Performance gains were seen on the entire ATI Radeon™ HD 4000 Series of products.

• Left 4 Dead DX9– performance gains of up to 10% for single GPU and up to 5% for CrossFire configurations.  Performance gains were noticed on the ATI Radeon™ HD 4870X2 and the ATI Radeon™ HD 4870.

• Lost Planet Colonies DX10 – performance gains of up to 10% for single GPU and CrossFire configurations.  Performance gains were noticed on the entire ATI Radeon™ HD 4000 Series and ATI Radeon™ HD 3800 Series of products

• Prey OGL – performance gains of up to 15% for CrossFire configurations.  Performance gains were noticed on the ATI Radeon™ HD4870 1GB card, ATI Radeon™ HD 4600 Series, and the ATI Radeon™ HD 4500 Series of products.

• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky – performance gains of up to 10% for CrossFire configurations.  Performance gains were noticed on the entire ATI Radeon™ HD 4000 Series and ATI Radeon™ HD 3800 Series of products

• Unreal Tournament 3 DX9 – performance gains of up to 18% for single GPU and up to 15% in CrossFire configurations, especially in cases where AA is enabled.  Performance gains were noticed on the entire ATI Radeon™ HD 4000 Series and ATI Radeon™ HD 3800 Series of products

Highlights of the Linux ATI Catalyst™ 8.12 release include:

New Features

ATI Stream™ support:

• With the release of Linux ATI Catalyst™ 8.12 users can unlock the potential of accelerated applications enabling ATI Stream™ technology for millions of ATI Radeon™ graphics processors worldwide

  • ATI Stream™ harnesses the tremendous processing power of the graphics processing unit (GPU) for high-performance, data-intensive computations over a wide range of scientific, business and consumer applications.

  • ATI Stream™ enables the hundreds of parallel cores inside AMD graphics processors to accelerate general purpose applications.  These capabilities will allow ATI Stream™-enabled programs, for a variety of different tasks and from a growing number of software vendors, to operate with optimized performance or with new functionality.

  • The CAL (Compute Abstraction Layer) is now included in the ATI Catalyst™ driver package. CAL is the enabling component for ATI Stream™

Support for new Linux operating systems

• This release of ATI Catalyst™ Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems: 

o        Ubuntu 8.10 support – early look

SurroundView™ support:

• This release of ATI Catalyst™ Linux enables users to render multiple OpenGL applications across single/multiple displays

  • SurroundView™ can be enabled across a single discrete ATI Radeon™ graphics accelerator (ATI Radeon™ X1300 and higher product) and an AMD Integrated graphics product ( ATI Radeon 1200 Series, ATI Radeon 3100 Series, ATI Radeon 3200 Series and, Radeon 3300 Series Integrated graphics)

For more information on ATI Catalyst™ 8.12 (for Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Linux versions), including all of the resolved issues in this release, please see below:

Download: http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx
Release Note: https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/gamesite/Catalyst_812_release_notes.pdf
Installation Instruction: http://ati.supportcenteronline.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&questionID=20870