ATI has released its monthly set of Catalyst drivers a little early, and not in the usual place. This time, you can grab them through Ian McNaughton's blog, AMD's senior manager of advanced marketing (yep, it's advanced now); as usual, these are for HD2000 series cards and newer.

No release notes as such at the moment, but it's our understanding this set includes OpenGL 3.1 support, and performance improvements for games such as Crysis, Far Cry 2, Battleforge, and World in Conflict.

Grab them at the source -- links are at the bottom of the post. And of course, be safe: uninstall the old set first and run something like Driver Sweeper before giving the new set a go.

Update: the drivers are now available via the AMD Graphics Drivers & Software site. Below are the release notes; check the full list at the source for remaining known issues if desired.

New Features
This release of ATI Catalyst™ provides OpenGL™ 3.1 extension support.  The
following is a list of OpenGL™ 3.1 features and extensions added in Catalyst 9.8:

• Support for OpenGL Shading Language 1.30 and 1.40
• Instanced rendering with a per-instance counter accessible to vertex shaders (GL ARB draw instanced)
• Data copying between buffer objects (GL EXT copy buffer)
• Primitive restart (NV primitive restart). Because client enable/disable no longer exists in OpenGL 3.1, the PRIMITIVE RESTART state has become server state, unlike the NV extension where it is client state. As a result, the numeric values assigned to PRIMITIVE RESTART and PRIMITIVE RESTART INDEX differ from the NV versions of those tokens
• At least 16 texture image units must be accessible to vertex shaders, in addition to the 16 already guaranteed to be accessible to fragment shaders
• Texture buffer objects (GL ARB texture buffer object)
• Rectangular textures (GL ARB texture rectangle)
• Uniform buffer objects (GL ARB uniform buffer object)
• SNORM texture component formats

Performance Improvements
The following performance gains are noticed with this release of Catalyst™ 9.8:

• Battleforge DirectX 10/DirectX 10.1 - performance improves up to 15-50% in CPU limited settings with the largest gains in CrossfireX configurations
• Company of Heroes DirectX 10 - performance improves by up to 10-77% in CPU limited settings
• Crysis DirectX 10 - Dual CrossfireX performance improves as much as 10% and Quad CrossfireX performance improves as much as 34% in CPU limited settings
• Crysis Warhead DirectX 10 - Dual CrossfireX performance improves as much as 7% and Quad CrossfireX performance improves as much as 69% in CPU limited settings
• Far Cry 2 DirectX 10 - Dual CrossfireX performance improves as much as 50% and Quad CrossfireX performance improves as much as 88% in CPU limited settings
• Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. DirectX 10/DirectX 10.1 - Dual CrossfireX performance improves up to 40% in CPU limited settings with Quad CrossfireX performance improving up to 60% in CPU limited settings
• UnigineTropics OpenGL - performance improves 5-20%
• UnigineTropics DirectX 10 - Quad CrossfireX performance improves 5-20% in CPU limited settings
• World in Conflict DirectX 10 - performance improves by 5-10%

Resolved Issues for All Windows Operating Systems
This section provides information on resolved issues in this release of the ATI Catalyst™
Software Suite for Windows. These include:

• Catalyst Control Center: Diagnostic warning message now appears in CrossFire aspect when the only display is removed from the CrossFire chain
• Catalyst Control Centre will now launch properly with CrossFire disabled on multi-adapter enabled/configured systems
• Catalyst Control Center: Some of the missing "Monitor Attributes" options in the Displays tab are now available
• Refresh rates are now applied properly for standard and optimized HDTV modes in Catalyst Control Center
• Catalyst Control Center: Missing update for Windows 7 localized help content is now available
• TV Properties tab now properly displays "Image Quality" instead of "TV Properties" for Catalyst Control Center user interface

Resolved Issues for the Windows 7 Operating System
This section provides information on resolved issues in this release of the ATI Catalyst™
Software Suite for Windows 7. These include:

• Display and mouse rotation now functions properly after reboot with 3 or more displays in clone mode
• “Unreal Tournament 3” no longer fails to respond after performing a taskswitch to desktop
• Hotplugging a secondary display during HD playback with WinDVD no longer causes desktop to go blank
• Intermittent block noise no longer visible during MPEG2-TS content playback with Windows Media Player
• Windows 7 logo no longer displays flickering distortion during Windows 7 loading screen (system reboot up)

Resolved Issues for the Windows Vista Operating System
This section provides information on resolved issues in this release of the ATI Catalyst™
Software Suite for Windows Vista. These include: 

• “Call of Duty: World at War” no longer exhibits flickering water corruption when Software CrossFire is enabled

Resolved Issues for the Windows XP Operating System
This section provides information on resolved issues in this release of the ATI Catalyst™
Software Suite for Windows XP. These include: 

• Catalyst Control Center: Predefined and custom HDTV formats can now be applied via HDTV support
• Intermittent video artifacts no longer visible when playing a DVD in stretched desktop mode