ATI FirePro Windows 7 drivers now available

The new ATI FirePr/FireGL Unified Driver v8.632 adds support for Windows 7 32- and 64-bit versions. This is timely news following on yesterdays news that Microsoft has released Windows 7 to manufacturing (with PC makers getting the official bits from Microsoft by the end of this week).

Windows 7 is a big deal for Microsoft, but I think the bigger deal for the professional CAD and DCC markets will be DirectX 11 (bundled with Windows 7).  This means it will take advantage of the FirePro GPUs for hardware-accelerated tesselation (meaning more complex models that can be manipulated and modified in real-time) and computer shaders (use of the GPU as a parallel processing solution for things like video processing, image processing, effect physics, advanced renderers like ray-tracing or radiosity, and accelerated production pipelines).