AMD Close to Releasing Catalyst 8.3 Drivers

We posted late last week about AMD’s latest Catalyst 8.3 drivers, and without time to even catch our breath, AMD are now prepared to release them to the public. Kind of. The press release states that the drivers would be available March 4, but at the time of this post, they are still missing. The reason for the delay is unclear, but we should see them soon.

In addition to opening up DX10.1 support, Super Anti-Aliasing modes, HydraVision support and better GPU monitor-scaling, the driver also delivers support for CrossFireX, making support for three and four GPUs entirely possible. The performance is still unknown for Quad-GPU, such as dual HD 3870 X2’s, but I am sure it won’t be long before we find out. I have a great feeling these first drivers will not deliver superb performance, but I’d like to be proven wrong. Dual 3870 X2’s would be very nice in Crysis…

Update: The driver is now live!

Through three- and four-GPU configurations in CrossFireX, gamers can see multi-GPU performance scaling across a range of today’s most popular DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 games on Windows Vista — up to 3.2 times the performance over a single GPU2 in some scenarios. The flexible architecture of CrossFireX allows for the mixing and matching of high-performing ATI Radeon GPUs. Any ATI Radeon HD 3850, ATI Radeon HD 3870 or ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 cards can be combined to harness the power of up to four GPUs. CrossFireX also supports a wide range of platforms, enabling many gamers to take advantage of three- and four-GPU gaming on their existing hardware.

Source: AMD Press Release, Via: Engadget