Last night, AMD made public it's Catalyst 9.7 drivers. These drivers coincide with Windows 7 RTM availability and are WHQL certified for not only windows Vista, but for Windows 7 as well. But this isn't the only new and interesting tidbit about the Catalyst 9.7 release. AMD has reworked the advanced driver interface as well.
We are working on performance testing the new driver with an eye towards Windows 7. AMD claims that performance on Windows 7 boxes with the same hardware as a Vista counterpart will see performance benefits. The marketing slides we received indicate that some games could see about a 10% improvement when moving to the new OS, and that's just for single GPU configurations. With multiGPU setups, AMD has us expecting some titles to show between 15% and 30% improvement with Windows 7.
We are anxious to put the driver to the test as soon as we can get our hands on the final Windows 7 RTM build. A performance improvement in moving from Vista to Windows 7 could definitely help Microsoft move their latest operating system. Those gamers who are still holding out for something better than Windows XP might finally have a reason to let go of the older platform for one that delivers an all around better experience.
