AMD, and before them ATI, had the practice of releasing new Catalyst drivers for its Radeon graphics cards at least once a month, with special driver updates as needed. That era is apparently done with at AMD. In a post on its game blog today, the company announced it would no longer update the Catalyst drivers every single month.
AMD didn't go into too much detail in explaining the change, saying, "We will still continue with the Catalyst naming convention; Catalyst: Year.Month., You just won’t see a new driver every single month. We are confident that this will only benefit the end user; you’ll only need to upgrade to a new Catalyst driver, when it makes sense."
Of course, AMD's main rival in the PC graphics space, NVIDIA, also releases new graphics drivers when the time is right and doesn't have a set schedule for doing so.
The blog post also announces that the beta version of AMD's Catalyst 12.6 drivers is now available to download. The company has also launched a new issue reporting form for people who experience problems with new Catalyst driver updates. AMD states, "This is not just a check-box for us – we take these reports very seriously. We will review every report posted here and investigate every issue encountered."
Source: AMD Game Blog
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