The green team (NVIDIA, that is), has been bellowing the importance of GPGPU throughout the year, and we recently concluded that its CUDA and PhsyX technologies could finally be coming to fruition. Despite the underlying promise of its GPGPU ambitions, however, NVIDIA has somewhat struggled to get large quantities of programmers to adopt its CUDA development tools... But what about the read team? AMD has been sitting it out for the best part of the year, but it's arriving on the GPGPU scene today with v8.12 of its Catalyst software suite. Inside, users will find ATI Stream, a technology that'll add GPGPU functionality to all Radeon HD 4000-series graphics cards. Let's see what it has to offer.

Performance improvements:

Catalyst 8.12 Preliminary Performance Notes

Crysis + 2-7%
Crysis Warhead + 2-3%
Devil May Cry 4 + 1-6%
Far Cry 2
+ noAA scores are fixed for Crossfire configs; this is worth +20% on slower cards, and as much as 70% on faster ones
+ 5-10% gains when AA is enabled

FEAR + 2-6%
Left 4 Dead + 2-4%
Lost Planet Colonies + 3-10%, mostly in Area 2
Prey + 2-5%
STALKER Clear Sky + 5-10%, primarily on Crossfire configurations