Application Performance Increases By Up To 20 Percent with Latest ATI FirePro™ Graphics Driver

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — March 12, 2010 —

"With more than 20 percent performance improvement for many industry leading applications, this new performance driver increases the value for both existing and new ATI FirePro users," said Janet Matsuda, senior director, AMD Professional Graphics. "Certified on more than

· Compared to previous drivers, version 8.702 provides Dassault Systèmes CATIA users more than 25 percent performance improvement, and Autodesk 3ds Max and PTC Pro/Engineer users more than 20 percent performance improvement¹.

· Adobe® Photoshop® CS4 users can now render images with 10-bit² per component color, helping provide exact representation of colors between Photoshop and their 10-bit display, as well as the ability to maintain an enhanced end-to-end 10-bit color workflow.

· In addition to current support of numerous active, passive and autostereoscopic displays, blue-line stereo³ for synchronizing 3D glasses is now supported.

· DisplayPort audio is now enabled on select ATI FirePro professional graphics cards, with support for 5.1 Dolby Digital and 5.1 DTS surround sound as well as 8-channel and 2-channel uncompressed audio4.

Later this year, AMD plans to issue reliability, application performance and feature enhancements in bi-monthly driver updates for notebooks that feature ATI FirePro™ professional graphics. AMD is working closely with workstation notebook manufacturers to ensure support for this initiative.

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¹ Based on SPECViewperf® 10 benchmark scores as tested by AMD performance labs for Dassault Systèmes CATIA, Autodesk® 3ds Max® and PTC® Pro ENGINEER®, using ATI FirePro™ V3750, V5700, V7750, and V8700. Testing compared ATI FirePro™ graphics driver version 8.603 vs. version 8.702. Testing performed with the following configurations: HP Z400, Intel® Xeon® quad-core 1xW3570 @ 3.2 GHz, Intel® X58, 3GB DDR3, Microsoft® Windows® XP 32-bit SP3.

²Requires 10-bit monitor for true 10-bit color display; only on Microsoft® Windows® XP.

³Blue-line stereo: Blue-line stereo support is available on following Operating Systems: Microsoft® Windows® XP, Windows Vista® and Windows 7.

4Available on the following ATI FirePro™ professional graphics: ATI FirePro V3750, V5700 and V7750. Audio formats achieved will depend on what audio formats the DisplayPort display supports, as well as which audio driver is used.