ATI Catalyst is a software suite and driver pack designed by ATI to make the most of your ATI graphics hardware. Drivers can be downloaded individually, but ATI Catalyst can offer improved stability and performance.

Simple

The software suite's main advantage is that, by using it, you can be sure that your graphics drivers are not only up to date, but that they are the most compatible drivers with your system. The suite also boasts optimisations for a number of top games, giving you performance increases that you would not get with the drivers alone. The suite also has some none-gaming features, such as Steady Video, an image stability function, and decode acceleration for improved playback of popular video formats.

Good in Most Cases

ATI Catalyst is definitely an improvement over just downloading the driver, however there are some kinks to be aware of. The game optimisations are essentially squeezing every drop of performance possible, and as such can often cause glitches and crashes. These problems are usually fixed in updates, but they are there. Also, those optimisations are only available for a select number of games.