We moved 3Dvelocity and UKGamer to a new sever yesterday so please bare with us as some of the links may be broken until we iron out a hitch or three. Normal service will ve resumed as soon as possible ;)
Over the past few days we\'ve been readying a new webserver which should hopefully keep us going for the upcoming years. For the first time in eight years we\'ve moved away from FreeBSD and onto CentOS.
The changes at present are purely behind the scenes however in the coming months there will be visual developments too. Thanks for putting up with the changes in the meantime and watch this space for more!
AMD have just released Catalyst 8.7 for Windows Vista, Windows XP and Linux platforms on http://www.amd.com
Highlights of the Catalyst 8.7 Windows release include:
Performance improvements
3DMark Vantage: Performance increases of up to 20% are seen in the Performance Preset on single card configured systems when using the ATI Radeon™ HD 3600 or ATI Radeon™ HD 3400 Series of products
Company of Heroes DX10: Performance increases between 3% to 12% are seen in specific maps on single card configured systems when using the ATI Radeon™ HD 4800, ATI Radeon ™ HD 3800, and ATI Radeon™ HD 3600 Series of products
Lost Planet DX10: Performance increases between 4% to 15% are seen in specific maps on single card configured systems when using the ATI Radeon™ HD 4800, ATI Radeon™ HD 3800, or ATI Radeon™ HD 3600 Series of products
Call Of Duty 4 DX9: Performance increases of up to 4% in specific maps are seen on single card configured systems when using the ATI Radeon™ HD 4800 Series of products
Lost Planet DX9: CrossFire™ scaling improves up to 1.7x and performance increases up to 80% across all ATI Radeon™ products when Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering are enabled
New features
Catalyst Control Center: Information Center enhancements
This release of Catalyst™ introduces an enhancement to the Catalyst Control Center Information Center. Full Hardware information will be shown for each physical graphics accelerator installed in the system.
Resolved Issue highlights
Assassin\'s Creed: Attempting to launch the game on a system containing an ATI Radeon™ HD 2600 series of product and running the Windows Vista operating system (32 bit version) no longer results in the game exiting to the desktop.
Crysis: Edge detect is now working when playing the DX9 version of the game with UBM enabled.
Frontlines Fuel of War: Setting the in-game option to 1152x864 and AA to N/A no longer results in corruption being noticed when playing the game on a system containing an ATI Radeon™ HD 38x0 series of product.
Hellgate London: Setting the display resolution to 2560x1600 no longer results in the game failing to respond.
Mahjongg Artifacts: Launching the game on a system running Windows Vista no longer results in the operating system failing to respond.
Rainbow Six Vegas 2: Flickering is no longer noticed when switching between the game and the Windows desktop.
Rainbow Six Vegas 2: Setting AA to 8x no longer results in AA failing to be applied.
World In Conflict: Setting the video quality to high no longer results in corruption being noticed.
World of Warcraft: The game\'s log-in background is no longer blank when using OpenGL mode.
Highlights of the Linux Catalyst 8.7 release include:
New features
Support for new Linux operating systems
This release of ATI Catalyst™ Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems:
o Ubuntu 8.04 production support
o SLED 10 sp2 production support
o Open Suse 11 – early look
Resolved Issue highlights
Creating two successive connections no longer results in direct GL context to fail.
The display no longer fails to display an image after the installation of the Linux graphics driver.
Corruption is no longer noticed when switching from the laptop\'s display to the external CRT display device. SECAM, NTSC or PAL signal changes when using aticonfig or Catalyst Control Center and now gets applied to the TV display output.
An X segmentation fault no longer occurs when launching SUZI/textured video.
Ubuntu 7.04: aticonfig -- enable-monitor no longer results in X restarting.
For more information on Catalyst 8.7 (for Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Linux versions), including all of the resolved issues in this release, please see the Catalyst 8.7 release notes found in driver download section.
\"Hundreds of thousands of unsafe chargers for mobile phones, games consoles and music devices could have made their way into the UK.
Trading standards officers studying dangerous chargers being imported from China say vast numbers are available on the internet and in shops.\"
\"As if it wasn\'t already clear that ASUS has descended into self-parody, the company\'s Chinese website has now revealed yet another Eee PC model which, by our estimation, brings the total number of variations to about on par with the number of Ben & Jerry\'s ice cream flavors. This latest model, dubbed the Eee PC 900 30G, boasts a 30GB hard drive in place of the usual 12GB or 20GB SSD drive, and is apparently set to be available in both black and white Linux versions, and a black-only Windows XP model.\"
\"AMD continues to stumble through another down year.
The company announced along with the release of its second-quarter earnings results Thursday that it is getting out of the handheld and digital television businesses. As has been the case for the last several quarters, AMD is continuing to lose bucketloads of money: $1.2 billion this time around.\"