New 12.1 Catalyst preview drivers from AMD

AMD has made the 12.1 preview drivers available to download as of today. The drivers bring quite a lot of new functionality such as:

• AMD HD3D has been enabled for CrossFireX configurations.
• Support for HDMI 1.4a displays at 1080p 30Hz.
• Per application profiles for 3D and CrossFireX settings of Direct3D applications.
• Simplified UI for video colour and quality control.
• 10 per cent performance improvement for Elder Scrolls: Skyrim when Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing is enabled on HD 6900 series.
• Improves performance (10%) in Elder Scrolls: Skyrim when Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing is enabled on the AMD Radeon HD 6900 Series for single GPU and AMD CrossFireX configurations

In addition to the above improvements these new drivers will cater for the upcoming HD 7000 series of graphics cards which will the first major architectural redesign AMD have undertaken since first implementing VLIW unified-shader architecture fin the 2900XT graphics card almost five years ago.

You can download the 12.1 Preview Drivers here. Although initial testing would imply that the drivers bring performance decrease over the 11.12 Beta drivers to most games with a few exceptions where it increased performance such as Modern Warfare 3, Batman Arkham City and Saints Row 3 (in direct X 9 mode only). However the drivers are still better than the 11.11 WHQL drivers.

Source: Guru3D