ATI has released new Catalyst drivers for its Radeon graphics cards. The drivers are numbered 7.1, and they bring a couple of new improvements. For one, ATI tells us performance has gone up by as much as 12% when Radeon X1000-series graphics cards run Dark Messiah of Might & Magic.

ATI's release notes also say the Catalyst 7.1 drivers include enhancements to CrossFire multi-GPU support that enable the alternate-frame rendering (AFR) mode by default, resulting in "significant performance benefits across all AFR compatible applications." AFR provides the best performance scaling of all CrossFire load-balancing modes. Of course, no graphics card driver update would be complete without some bug fixes. ATI has delivered a round of those for Desperados 2, Rome: Total War, Sniper Elite, Splinter Cell Double Agent, and X-29. Other bugs in the Catalyst Control Center and other applications have also been fixed.

See the aforementioned release notes for details.