ATI Radeon Catalyst 5.13 Drivers Released

ATI Customer Care now offers downloads of new version 5.13 Catalyst reference drivers for Radeon graphics accelerators running under Windows XP as a christmas gift. Some game-related fixes and CCC bug fixes are listed among the release notes, and word is: "Catalyst 5.13 software suite introduces H.264 hardware acceleration for the ATI Radeon® X1800, X1600, and X1300 product line. [...] ATI CrossFire Support for the ATI Radeon X1800. [...] " As noted, the "old" control panel edition of the drivers is no longer available, and the CCC edition is now required. CCC requires .NET framework 1.1 to be installed.

NOTE: Using the Catalyst® software suite 5.13, along with the Cyberlink H.264 decoder available from http://www.ati.com/technology/h264.html provides H.264 hardware acceleration. (not yet available)