A new beta build of ATI’s Catalyst software has been leaked to the web. The datestamp on this build is: 12/1/2008 and build number is: 8.561 RC3. This beta build of Catalyst is available for Windows XP, Windows Vista and their 64-bit flavors as well. Since this driver came from an unknown/unofficial source, use it at your own risk! Don’t blame us if anything bad happens.

Performance Improvements
• Crysis 2-7%
• Crysis Warhead 2-3%
• Devil May Cry 4 1-6%
• Far Cry 2 5-70%
• FEAR 2-6%
• Left 4 Dead 2-4%
• Lost Planet Colonies 3-10%
• Prey 2-5%
• STALKER Clear Sky 5-10%

ATI Stream Support
With the release of ATI Catalyst 8.12 users can unlock the potential of accelerated applications enabling ATI Stream technology for millions of ATI Radeon graphics processors worldwide ATI Stream harnesses the tremendous processing power of the graphics processing unit (GPU) for high-performance, data-intensive computations over a wide range of scientific, business and consumer applications.

ATI Stream enables the hundreds of parallel cores inside AMD graphics processors to accelerate general purpose applications. These capabilities will allow ATI Stream-enabled programs, for a variety of different tasks and from a growing number of software vendors, to operate with optimized performance or with new functionality.
The CAL (Compute Abstraction Layer) is now include in the Catalyst driver package. CAL is the enabling component for ATI Stream.

ATI Avivo Video Converter Stream Edition
Using ATI Stream technology, owners of ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series and ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series of graphics cards can take advantage of this video conversion tool (found in Catalyst Control Center Basic View) to achieve incredible performance levels in video transcoding.

Noise Reduction for Progressive Video Content
This release of Catalyst introduces a new advanced video quality control: Noise Reduction for progressive video content, which removes ghosting artifacts while preserving details of the original video. The slider control can be found in the All Settings page of the Avivo Video tab found in the Catalyst Control Center.

You can download this file at our downloads section.