ATI Technologies recently said at press-conference that in several month time the company's drivers for graphics cards would take advantage of dual-core microprocessors. The move will allow users of systems running chips with two engines to get higher performance in games.

According to ATI's software product manager Terry Makedon, the company will release CATALYST drivers that take full advantage of microprocessors with two processing engines in about two or three months from now. Given that processors with two cores typically run at lower clock-speeds compared to chips with one core, whereas gaming applications typically do not benefit from the number of cores per processors, a performance boost is likely to allow owners of modern computers to enjoy higher speeds in games.

The representative for ATI did not reveal what exactly would be optimized to increase performance on systems with the latest processors with two cores, but earlier this year ATI's arch-rival NVIDIA said that there were several opportunities for driver performance gains with multi-threading, including vertex processing. The NVIDIA's representative said that NVIDIA's drivers did load balancing for vertex processing, offloading some work to the CPU, when the GPU was busy. This sort of vertex processing load could be spun off into a separate thread and processed in parallel. There are other ways to boost performance of games on dual-core chips as well.

According to estimations of both ATI and NVIDIA, performance boost for dual-core chips may be in the range of up to 30%.

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