CnP from artical at http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/40433/135/ ""There is big news for owners of ATI Radeon graphics cards today. AMD’s graphics unit released the final driver package for this year, which includes stream support to accelerate applications that tap into the hidden potential of the GPU. Update 2:56 PM EDT: Some readers already noticed that the driver is not yet available. There was a miscommunication between ATI and TG Daily and the company clarified that the driver has only been released to reviewers at this time. The final version will be posted for download on Dec. 10. We apologize for this error. Catalyst 8.12 essentially represents what Nvidia has been offering with its CUDA-enabled graphics drivers for some time now. Announced on November 13, the driver was released for download earlier today and takes advantage of the CAL (Compute Abstraction Layer), the key component of AMD’s Stream technology. To get an idea how well the new feature actually works, AMD added a free stream application, the ATI Avivo Video Converter. According to the company, the video conversion tool will run on 4800- and 4600-series cards. AMD claims that the CAL will accelerate the software by a factor of 17x. Also included is noise reduction for progressive video content, which removes ghosting artifacts while preserving details of the original video, ATI said. Needless to say, there is the usual array of game performance increases for titles such as Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Devil May Cry, Far Cry 2, FEAR, Left 4 Dead, STALKER Clear Sky and Prey."" I hope it helps me with CoD...
I saw improvement in world war 2 online..I went from 40-50 frames to 40-70. I might actually be able to fly the planes now without lawn darting when I fire my guns on strafing runs. In Cod I didn't notice any change yet. I have to run that at the lowest settings. In second life when I watch movies,youtube or live cams It helped a lot.
I think they usually aim at game performance improvements in certain aspects. You won't see as much improvement with low settings. For example DMC4 is very well optimized and looks great at max settings. However, turn just the shadow slider from the second highest to the highest and you go from an average 120FPS down to 15FPS. This is on nvidia cards, but just shows how you can claim that it improves performance by x% if you aren't specific. They usually don't tell you where the improvements are gained from. They are usually only in the most recent line of cards though so you need 4XXX or sometimes even 3XXX. And let's not even get into all their hotfixes...
I just installed them on my machine and I've noticed improvements in performance as well as the textures in the games I play (CoD4, and CoD WaW). Unlike Doc, I run the CoD games at about the highest settings (barring resolution because my monitor won't handle above 1024x768).