End of year "bonus" releaseAs a special year end bonus, ATI has released their Catalyst 5.13 drivers today.
As you might know, Catalyst drivers versions are based on the year and month of their release, so 5.13 are the 13th drivers to be released this year and is basically ATI's Christmas surprise to all of you waiting for video related fixes.
The new suite includes updates to the control center, Southbridge/IXP, Remote Wonder, HydraVision, Multimedia Center and of course the new 8.203 display drivers. It also focuses heavily on video related fixes as well as:
H.264 Hardware Acceleration ATI CrossFire?Support for the ATI Radeon?X1800 HQV Video Benchmark Support (driver tweaks provide a better DVD image quality, and higher benchmark scores)Catalyst?5.13 software suite introduces H.264 hardware acceleration for the ATI Radeon?X1800, X1600, and X1300 product line. H.264 is advanced video coding that provides significant reduction in bit-rate compared to standards such as MPEG-2 and MPEG-4. The ATI Radeon?X1800, X1600, and X1300 products provide hardware acceleration for the playback of high-definition content that is encoded using H.264. Using the Catalyst?software suite 5.13, along with the Cyberlink H.264 decoder available from http://www.ati.com/technology/h264.html provides H.264 hardware acceleration.
You can download the drivers right here.
Full release notes can be found here.
ATI Catalyst 5 7 (2005-07-18)