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

Improved shader compiler and transform engine optimizations have led to many significant performance gains in OpenGL applications across the entire Radeon® X1000 series of products. These include:

* Doom 3 performance improves as much as 6.5%
* Quake 4 (v1.2 or higher) performance improves as much as 18%
* Chronicles of Riddick performance improves as much as 20%. Average improvements of 5-10% are commonly seen
* Prey performance improves as much as 16%

Optimizations made to ATI's graphics memory manager have led to significant gains in DirectX applications that make heavy use of graphics memory on 256MB ATI graphics cards:

* 3DMark06 performance improves as much as 22% on single ATI Radeon® X1000 series cards with 256MB of graphics memory at 1280x1024 and higher when anti-aliasing is enabled. The largest gains are found on the ATI Radeon® X1800 series and ATI Radeon® X1900 series of products
* Call of Duty 2 performance improves as much as 30% on single ATI Radeon® X550 cards or higher with 256MB of video memory at 1280x1024 and higher when anti-aliasing enabled. The largest gains are found on the ATI Radeon® X1800 series and ATI Radeon® X1900 series of products

Issues Resolved in Catalyst® Software Suite 6.8

The following section provides a summary of the issues that are resolved in the latest release of Catalyst®. These include:

* Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth: Playing the game under Windows XP SP2 using an ATI Radeon® X800 series product no longer results in intermittent display corruption being noticed. Further details can be found in topic number 737-21458
* Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones: Setting the 3D slider to Optimal Quality in Catalyst® Control Center->Advanced View->3D->Standard Settings aspect no longer results in corruption being noticed in the water when playing the game under the Windows MCE operating system with an ATI Radeon® X19x0 series product installed. Further details on this resolved issue can be found in topic number 737-22975
* QQ Fantasy: Playing the online game under Windows XP with an ATI Radeon® X1600 or X1300 no longer results in the an error message being displayed and the mouse pointer control becoming erratic. Further details on this resolved issue can be found in topic number 737-22985
* Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory: Corruption is no longer noticed during the playing the opening cinematic when AA is enabled at 8x. This issue was known to occur under the Windows XP operating system when using an ATI Radeon® X8x0 series product. Further details on this resolved issue can be found in topic number 737-22983