CCC possible improvements ?
Credit has to go to the new implementation of the 3d preview window, this is a big improvement over the "car" preview we are all used to, however while applying the settings is easier to see it can still get confusing, especially to an inexperienced user. Perhaps a method of having 3 preview windows, starting with what the defaults are, what the current settings currently are, and finally the changes you are making. It is also worth mentioning that on higher resolutions such as 2560x1600, Catalyst Control Centre is extremely small. If ATI could implement a panel size change via programming, so it would enlarge the window by 30% it would certainly make everything so much easier to see and toggle. Perhaps even a 2x button for those on higher resolutions.

The 3D preview does not work exactly as the XP counterpart. With the previous version, you could simply double click the preview window to get a full desktop resolution view. I personally don't feel this is a major loss, however some people might like the option. Overdrive works flawlessly on our test system, temperature readouts appear to be accurate.

Conclusion:
ATI's 7.1 Catalyst is an impressive first driver for Vista. Granted we experienced issues with Crossfire however at this time we are not sure if this is just a random system specific problem, we will confirm this later in the week when we have time to build a new rig from stratch with a different motherboard and processor. There is also no Crossfire Opengl support until revision 7.3 but in single card mode the performance is only a few percentage slower than the XP counterpart.

When you look back at the state of affairs when XP was released it would be fair to state that ATI's driver development team really have been working their asses off behind the scenes for the last year putting them in a much stronger position this time around.

Many of the performance issues we have experienced with the XP version of Catalyst Control Centre have been addressed with startup only a fraction of the time experienced on earlier XP sets. I think most people could live with a 1-3 second driver panel load time. Thankfully Vista has .net framework incorporated into the operating system so there are no annoying additional installations required either.

All in all we are impressed with the driver and as the months progress I am confident we will see not only increases in performance, better support for Crossfire but most importantly great image quality with the forthcoming DX10 titles. After all this is how ATI have built their reputation.

You can see how the new Nvidia drivers for Vista fared in this article.