AMD was quite busy during past days by announcing few changes to their Catalyst program. Since Catalyst 12.6 driver, which was released yesterday, AMD is dropping monthly updates. Future releases will focus on specific fixes and improvements rather than just another version, which wasn’t always bringing important changes.

What this basically means is that AMD will release new drivers when they are needed. So we should see new Catalysts every time new graphics card comes out or some popular game. Since Catalyst 12.6, there’s a new naming of YEAR.MONTH system. If there’s a driver coming out on July, then it will be called 12.7, September – 12.8 etc. It’s not clear how will they name a driver that will come in the same month, but it might just get an additional letter (b,c..).

“With the release of the Catalyst 12.6 Beta driver, AMD would also like to announce that we are moving away from our Monthly Catalyst release plan. Our goal is to ensure that every Catalyst release delivers a substantial benefit to our end users; as we have today with the release of the Catalyst 12.6a Beta. 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.”

AMD has also announced that future Radeon HD 7700 Series cards – HD 7770 and 7750 – will get extra speed to their clocks. Each of those cards will be factory-overclocked by 100 MHz. This should provide slightly better performance. AMD also claims that new GPUs will be have more overclocking potential, allowing for clocks up to 1GHz for 7750 and beyond that on HD 7770. This was likely dictated by upcoming NVIDIA’s mid-range graphics cards, which will compete with these cards.

• READ MORE (Source): PC Perspective