Catalyst 6.8 drivers make it out the door
 

New Catalyst 6.8 drivers for ATI's Radeon graphics cards are now available for download. These new drivers include optimizations that increase OpenGL performance with all Radeon X1000-series graphics cards.

Direct3D performance has also gone up in 3DMark 2006 and Call of Duty 2. According to ATI, both apps see gains at 1280x1024 and above with antialiasing enabled on systems that include Radeon X1000-series cards with 256MB of memory. 3DMark 2006 performance can go up as much as 22%, ATI says, while Call of Duty sees improvements of up to 30% that also apply to Radeon X550 cards and up.