Conclusion

There is a lot to be happy about with Catalyst 5.6, laptop users can rejoice at finally being properly supported on the graphics driver front. Linux users should be happier about the ATI driver situation, MCE 2005 and AIW fans can finally have their products working well together and gamers have their usual plethora of enhancements to performance.

Improvements which we found to be beneficial were the Real Time Video Preview which works surprisingly well and does improve the end user experience hugely. WMV acceleration didn’t provide the huge benefits we’d hoped for in all situations though it did provide some improvements overall, …it should be noted though that this is one item that really needs to be tested with your setup to see what you gain (we’ve no doubt that users with lower spec CPU’s are going to see some excellent benefits with WMV acceleration enabled.)

On the gaming front as our tests showed there are also some nice improvements to be had, especially in OpenGL games which is nice to see as many end users have been looking for enhanced OpenGL performance from ATI for a while.

I personally have been extremely happy with the performance and stability of the 5.6 drivers and continue to use them without issue at this point…I’ll be looking forward to the final posting later this week. ATI really are making huge strides forward in every aspect of their display driver, so much so that the performance and functionality of the driver really is light years ahead of any competitor’s driver and really makes ATI hardware worth buying just for the driver support.

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