The official WHQL Catalyst 8.7 driver from ATI has just been released. The new driver had to stay a bit longer into beta phase, but that is not because of the upcoming HD 4870X2.

ATI’s release notes inform that the newest version comes with some improvements for the Radeon HD 3600 and 3400 products in 3DMark Vantage, while the latest GPU generation along with the HD 3800 and HD 3600 series are supposed to be getting major improvements in Company of Heroes DX10 and Lost Planet DX10. Catalyst 8.7 also brings some improvements for Lost Planet and Call of Duty under DirectX 9 on HD 4800 series and better Crossfire scaling on all products.

There’s an additional feature located in the Catalyst Control Center, which is now enhanced to show full hardware information for each physical graphics accelerator installed, in case you have more than one cards. The ATI team managed to resolve many issues with games such as Assassin's Creed, Crysis, Rainbow Six Vegas 2, World in Conflict, Hellgate: London and some other minor games. As always, there is an updated list of known issues that haven’t been corrected just yet.

Windows Vista and XP owners, as well as Linux owners can download the latest Catalyst version from the AMD Game site.