ATIs Catalyst 4.8 drivers saw the introduction of something of a revolution as far as drivers go, in the form of the Catalyst Control Center. This application has supposedly been somewhat improved upon in the latest Catalyst 4.9 release,

Mussels over at 3DChipset reports spent much time downloading all the versions needed, a pain on dial up, and did some tests. With no ATI drivers installed, commit charge was at 167MB

The following sites have thrown up their reviews of ATi's all new Catalyst Control Center!

AnandTech - Beyond 3D - HardOCP - Tweak Town

Team Radeon has posted their report on the ATI VCall Conference Schwab Soundview Semiconductor Conference which was held today.

As per your prior news posting about the X800 XT PE being cancelled, ATI makes no mention of any product being cancelled.

Humus has found a tweak that can boost your Doom3 performance by 40% on ATI hardware.

I picked up Doom3 today and let be begin by saying it's a kickass game so far. A few minuses like weapon reload (which I find add nothing to a game, except annoyance, so I don't know why many devs keep adding it to their games), but overall much above my expectations.

Yesterday we published details on FarCry 1.2, part of that editorial focused on the ability to enable Instancing on the Radeon X800 within FarCry. Since publishing the details we have been working with www.tommti-systems.de to get their Nvidia Instancing demo working on the X800. With very little trouble (only a change to the program which removed a SM3.0 check) Tommti provided a fixed exe and the demo was up and running.

The Guy's at Team Radeon send news of their new ATI Guides! First up is their Exclusive ATI Price Guide and the second item is their ATI X800 Real-Time Demo Menu!

ATI X800 Real-Time Demo Menu

Another new feature, not found on other ATI-specific sites is our ATI X800 Real-Time Demo Menu that is featured on Team Radeon's homepage. Each selection has a description that details what is found in each demo.

In Japan wurden die ersten finalen Karten der PCI-Express-Generation ausgeliefert. Auf den folgenden Fotos kann man die Karten vom Hersteller PowerColor sehen. Angeboten werden X300, X600 XT und X800 XT. Foto #1
Foto #2
Foto #3 Quelle: MyDrivers

The Firing Squad have thrown up their Performance Comparison of ATI's all new Radeon X800 XT and X600 XT PCI-E garphics cards! Here's a snip.

With today?s launch of Intel?s 915 and 925 family of chipsets, PCI Express finally makes its debut on the PC. In case you didn?t know, PCI Express is Intel?s next generation bus that?s been designed to replace today?s PCI and AGP devices. On the graphics side, PCI Express can deliver up to twice the bandwidth of AGP 8X when fully configured, ushering in the capability to perform a wide variety of applications beyond just gaming.

The Forum over at 3Dchips-fr.com is buzzing with the news of a softmod for ATi's Radeon x800pro? as my french is a bit rusrty! Here's a translation by Google, unless someone can do a better translation for us.

method to regulate the problem of the x800pro, to download just the softmod above, to replace the x800xt.sys file softmod (driver spirit) by that that you come from telecharger and to start again the setup.bat to reinstall the drivers correctly

Heute wurde auf Station-Drivers eine Betaversion des kommenden Catalyst 4.7 veröffentlicht. Der Download wiegt an die 20MB.
Was bisher bekannt ist, ist, dass er das alte Control Panel (6.14.10.5113) beinhaltet und die Versionsnummer 8-03-040528 (6.14.10.6458) lautet.
Außerdem werden folgende ATI-Karten unterstützt (nur unter Windows 2000/XP):

- RADEON 7xxx/8xxx/9xxx & X800 Serie
- FIRE GL T2/V1100/V3200/X1/X2/Z1/8800/M22 GL
- R420/423 RV370/380

Den Download findet ihr hier

ATI has released a new RADEON X800 demo - Crowd. This demonstration shows the vertex shader processing power of the X800 being used to render a large crowd of soldiers (1400 in total) running across a rocky terrain. All of the models feature weighted skinned vertices and are independently animated. Grab it from here or see some pics here!

Spotted this score on 3DMark 03's result browser, a guy claiming to have modded his x800 pro to a 16 pipe x800 xt. Screenshots of the score details and ATi tool clearly showing 16 pipes enabled can be viewed here.
This was discussed before when Chinese site Unkia claimed they had found bridges that need to be joined to reclaim 4 pipes. Xbitlabs tried this however and did not have any luck.
thanks L33

Digitimes report:
"ATI Technologies will begin sourcing flip-chip substrates from Taiwan-based Phoenix Precision Technology (PPT) for its 0.11-micron graphics chip, with first shipments of 500,000 units scheduled for next month, according to sources."

Blissware Ltd are taking pre-orders for Connect 3D and Sapphire ATi X800 XT graphics cards www.blisware.com
Connect 3D version for sale at £375
Price to be confirmed for Sapphire version.

Mit der neuen Grafikkartengeneration von ATI kommt auch ein neuer Treiber. Für die X800 ist der neue Catalyst 4.5 in einer Betaversion aufgetaucht.
Auf der MyDrivers-Seite ist sogar von einem Bug die Rede. Leider ist es mir nicht möglich die Informationen zu übersetzen.
Update: FrancoisC aus dem w2s-Forum hat den Treiber so modifiziert, dass man ihn nun auf allen Radeons installieren kann. Downloaden könnt ihr euch die Datei hier. 3DChipset.com hat einen kurzen Vergleich zwischen dem 4.4 und dem 4.5 Beta veröffentlicht. Hier könnt ihr euch von den leichten Shaderperformanceverbesserung überzeugen. Informationen (u.a. Benchmarks): Link
Download: Link Quelle: Orange.ru

OverclockersClub.com has posted a list of ATI X800 related news (Previews, Reviews, etc.) from around the net. Looks like that is going to be one hell of a video card.

This site updates the links to reviews as they roll in - this saves us for flooding W2S with reviews ;)

If you signed up for the ATi newsletter you would just have been informed about the stuff going on at ATi currently. Read more for site :P