There is nothing better then getting free performance boosts for our Radeon cards from the monthly Catalyst software updates. Every month we expect to see some new goods from AMD’s finest software department. Sometimes our expectations are too high and we are left somewhat disappointed, and sometimes they manage to rock us all. Last month AMD has released Catalyst 7.4 and claimed that they had boosted its OpenGL performance on Windows Vista.

With AMD’s Catalyst 7.5 around the corner, and the hype around R600, we relaxed, sat back and tested the Catalyst 7.4 suite under Microsoft’s new Vista operating system to investigate AMD’s claims. Are they telling the truth? And if it’s true – is it a pure performance improvement? or something we have to pay for by sacrificing image quality?

Vista’s OpenGL performance wasn’t that impressive when compared to Windows XP, same as DirectX, but it’s getting better with every software update. Since Windows Vista is the future, and NVIDIA owned the DirectX 10 market; AMD had to pull something out their bag of goods to make this remain interesting.

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