Everyone like something for free, but for some time the ATI Catalyst drivers have been mere bug fixes. According to an article over at The Inq we could see a nice fps boost from the next driver comming in June. We'll have to wait and see how accurate this is.

ATI will soon introduce its Catalyst 5.6 driver and we have the feeling that this might happen on the seventh of June, we might be wrong about the date, it's not yet specific but you never know.

Once you install this new driver you should see around ten per cent plus performance increase in 3Dmark05, Aquamark 3 and Halo and Tomb Raider: AOD games and benchmarks. ATI did this by using some Z optimisations, removing unseen pixels before running through the pixel shaders. I guess that this is an allowed method and Halo might be running even fifteen per cent faster.

Doom 3 will work almost twenty per cent faster than with Catalyst 5.5 as ATI made more efficient use of memory.

Even games such as Call of Duty will benefit from this new driver as the driver team managed to increase the game efficiency resulting in close to ten per cent faster performance.