Sapphire Announces Latest 8.12 Catalyst Drivers to Unlock Potential of Stream Processors

Category: Video Cards
Posted: December 9, 2008 10:47AM
Author: Nemo

ATI's latest set of Catalyst drivers, version 8.12, are set to be released tomorrow. Sapphire Technology has announced that the new driver set will unleash the power of stream processing on all the latest generation Sapphire cards. ATI Stream is a set of open AMD technologies that enable the hundreds of stream processors on cards such as the HD 4850/4870 series to be used to accelerate general purpose applications. Several companies are already working on developing applications to harness the massive parallel processing capabilities of the 800 stream processors found on the HD 4850/4870 cards to accelerate various multimedia applications along with gaming and productivity tools. Sapphire has also announced it will be releasing a new version of its ATI Avivo Video Converter utility in December as a free download which will allow users of Sapphire video cards to transcode HD video between formats at speeds much faster than before. The HD 4850 X2 videocard is only available from Sapphire and the new 8.12 drivers will offer support for that model along with the recently released HD 4830.