As far as Windows 8, AMD has been on top of things in terms of releasing new graphics drivers for its Radeon cards that support Microsoft's new OS. The company quickly released official drivers that supported the Release Preview version of Windows 8 just a few hours after the OS was made available to users.

With the official launch of the RTM version of Windows 8 on Wedneday to certain developers, AMD has now gone ahead and also released its newest Catalyst drivers for some Radeon-based cards. The 12.8 version of the drivers include support for Windows 8, along with Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP. At the moment, the drivers support just the Radeon 5000 series and above cards.

The release notes for Catalyst 12.8 include word that the drivers support DirectX 11.1 and the WDDM 1.2 driver model for Windows 8 users. There are also some special Windows 8-only features, including Target-Independent Rasterization, which AMD says is a "new rendering path that enables superior anti-aliasing in Direct3D driver applications."

So far, AMD's main rival in the graphics card business, NVIDIA, has yet to release its own Windows 8 RTM drivers for its GeForce line of PC graphics cards.

Source: AMD