They weren't supposed to officially go live until July 24th, but with Windows 7 hitting RTM status an hour ago, ATI apparently decided to post Catalyst 9.7 for Windows Vista/Windows 7 early (AMD had planned to issue a PR stating that 9.7 was the first driver certified for Windows 7 RTM release).

The most notable feature found in Catalyst 9.7 is its new user interface. ATI says the UI has been tweaked to "enhance usability and end user efficiency" although I'm not a big fan of the new streamlined interface myself -- way too much digging through submenus now. The tree menu from previous Catalyst releases has been replaced with the new "Graphics" menu option: basically everything you need to tweak graphics settings can be found inside this menu. As ATI notes, "a single page with multiple tabs now exist for features that used to have multiple tree options". The hotkey, profile, preferences, and help menus have now been moved under one general "Options" menu. Skins and custom view are no longer supported.

The UI in Catalyst 9.7 also includes a new desktop and displays manager interface that more easily facilitates users configuring and arranging their displays under Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Another addition found in Catalyst 9.7 is ATI's video encoder program, which is now fully supported under Windows 7. ATI says that Catalyst 9.10 will provide acceleration for the Windows 7 Drag and Drop transcoder application using ATI Stream technology.

In terms of performance improvements, ATI says Catalyst 9.7 delivers up to 8% better performance for Radeon 4800 GPUs in Crysis when run under the "very high" graphics quality preset. In addition, Lost Planet Colonies also runs 8-11% faster under 8xAA for 4800 series GPUs.

Links:
Windows Vista 32-bit
Windows Vista 64-bit
Windows 7 32-bit
Windows 7 64-bit

I would guess that Windows XP drivers will be hitting AMD's servers at midnight on July 24th (the original embargo date). Feel free to voice your thoughts on the new user interface in the news comments.

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