AMD has announced that its Catalyst video card drivers for its graphic cards will be distributed using Valve's Steam service with immediate effect. In the past, users had to update their ATI drivers using the age-old method of manually checking the manufacturer's website and downloading it from there.

The new distribution option means that customers with an ATI graphics card and using the Steam online game platform can now rely on automated updates. This makes perfect sense since users who are most interested in updating to the latest version of their graphic drivers are in all likelihood gamers.

I'm not sure if there are system administrators or users out there who encounter what I did: Software that runs their own daemon processes to check for updates. Rather than recreating the wheel, how I wish that the thousands of other software makers out there were to work together to come up with a central mechanism from which to update their software or drivers.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at PC Mag
- check out this article at PCWorld

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