Languishing yourself in the bang-for-the-buck Radeon HD 4800s? Or still packing those twin 3600s for a CrossFire party? Well, put it on hold. AMD has just updated the ATI Catalyst unified driver set to version 8.7, which is available all across the versions of XP and Vista.

Now though this driver set hauls a minimalist changelog, hardware enthusiasts managed to determine the following performance increases (as quoted from Guru3D):

• 3DMark Vantage: Performance increases of up to 20% is noticed in the Performance Preset on single card configured systems when using ATI Radeon™ HD 36xx or ATI Radeon™ HD 34xx products
• Company of Heroes DX10: Performance increases of 3% to 12% is noticed in specific maps on single card configured systems when using either an ATI Radeon™ HD 48xx, ATI Radeon ™ HD 38xx, or an ATI Radeon™ HD 36xx product
• Lost Planet DX10: Performance increases of 4% to 15% is noticed in specific maps on single card configured systems when using either an ATI Radeon™ HD 48xx, ATI Radeon™ HD 38xx, or an ATI Radeon™ HD 36xx product
• Call Of Duty 4 DX9: Performance increases of up to 4% in specific maps is noticed on single card configured systems when using an ATI Radeon™ HD 48xx product
•  Lost Planet DX9: CrossFire™ scaling improves up to 1.7x and performance increases up to 80% across all Radeon™ products when AA and AF is enabled

Now that's sexy right there - nothing like an anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering tandem AND a framerate hike in one pixel-perfect waltz.

Hopefully, the driver also manages to correct a few hiccups with older Radeon hardware and performance issues in some least-known 3D games, but you'll only find out if you check back with the game's community. More from AMD as soon as we come across them.

---

Related articles:

• Diamond unleashes ATI Radeon HD 4870 card
• ATI looks to kick Nvidia while it's down