ATI posted today a new set of drivers for all ATI based cards, ATI Catalyst 6.9, that include several new features and of course performance improvements. This release of Catalyst introduces CrossFire support for the Intel 965 Chipset. This feature is available for D3D applications, and is supported on ATI Radeon X1900 CrossFire edition products. This feature is supported under the Windows XP operating system.

As with most Catalyst releases, performance has increased in various situations.

- 3DMark2006 overall performance improves 6.7-23.7% with anti-aliasing enabled due to improvements in HyperZ efficiency on the Radeon X1300, X1600 and X1800 series of products. The largest gains can be seen on Crossfire configurations and/or 256MB card configurations at resolutions of 1280x1024 or greater

- Doom3 performances improves up to 9.3% due to further OpenGL shader complier and transform engine optimizations on the entire Radeon X1000 Series of products. The largest gains can be seen on Radeon X1900 configurations at resolutions of 1600x1200 or higher

ATI Catalyst 6.9 drivers can be downloaded here (34.6Mb), while the changes log can be found over