AMD Catalyst 11.1a Hot-fix Drivers Set to Arrive on Republic Day

AMD have just announced that the Catalyst 11.1a Hot-fix drivers will be released on January 26. The new drivers are primarily aimed at the 6800 and 6900 series and promise some pretty crazy performance improvements.__STARTQUOTE__AMD Radeon HD 6900 and AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series:

• 3DMark Vantage improves ~7%
• 3DMark06 improves ~3%
• Call of Duty Black Ops improves ~20% at 4xMSAA and up to 35% at 8xMSAA
• Riddick Assault on Dark Athena SSAO performance improves ~20%
• Unigine Heaven OpenGL performance improves ~10% at moderate, 30% at normal and 100% at extreme tessellation levels
• Aliens vs. Predators improves ~9% at 2xMSAA and up to 20% at 4xMSAA
• Batman Arkham Asylum improves ~4%
• Crysis Warhead improves ~2-4%Metro 2033 improves ~28% at 4xMSAA

__ENDQUOTE__AMD are also rumoured to be bundling an early prototype of their tessellation controls in this release. Still a Work in Progress, AMD aims to make the Catalyst Center or the Application control the tessellation levels in order to optimize performance.

AMD trying to fight back

With the GTX560 rumoured to be releasing very very soon, these drivers were likely required to keep up with the NVIDIA card’s performance. Let’s just hope these drivers deliver on their promises, because AMD certainly need them to.