News ATI breaks new ground with Catalyst drivers

From the Inq:

WITH THE release of the Catalyst 3.8 drivers yesterday, ATI broke new ground in what a graphics card driver is supposed to do. Reading the release notes for the card, there is the usual litany of bug fixes, speed increases, and everything you would expect from a new driver. If you were not expecting much from a driver that brings things from the 3.7 level to 3.8, prepare to be disappointed.
The biggest thing these drivers bring is a feature called VPU Recover, something glossed over at best by the mainstream reviews in their quest to show massive 2% increases in frame rates. Those increases rate a genuine ho hum from me, give me something substantial. VPU Recover is just that.

The short story is that if your graphics card crashes, your system is pretty much toast If you are lucky, you will get a BSOD, but more likely, you will get a frozen screen or nothing at all. A little longer story is here. No graphics means just that. You can thank MS for this behavior, in a brilliant reshuffling of where the graphics drivers reside in the NT 3.51 to NT 4 transition. We have been paying for it with stability since.

Full story here

 

I'll have to check these when I get in. sounds like good stuff.