14 DAY TRIAL // AMD has released a major driver update for its current product line, integrating support for the latest Linux kernel and other major fixes.
AMD has started increasing the frequency of its releases, at least the Beta ones. The current version is pretty important, even if we consider only the support for Linux kernel 3.10.
The following distributions are officially supported: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Suite 6.3 and 6.4, SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP3, OpenSuSE 11.4 and 12.1, Ubuntu 12.04.2 and 13.04.
Also, the AMD Catalyst Linux software suite has a few system requirements that must be met: Xorg/Xserver 7.4 and above (up to 1.14), Linux kernel 2.6 or above (up to 3.10), glibc version 2.2 or 2.3, and POSIX Shared Memory (/dev/shm) support.
According to AMD, if a Linux 2.6.11 or newer kernel was built with CONFIG_AGP enabled, the kernel AGP frontend is required to load the fglrx kernel module.
Highlights of AMD Catalyst 13.8 Beta Driver:
• OpenGL 4.3 support has been implemented; • Kernel 3.10 support has been added; • The Source Engine games no longer hang when running on the High Performance ASIC; • A Unigine Heaven 4.0 crash with high performance GPUs has been fixed; • Optimizations have been implemented for the SGPU for an 11% performance gain (unigine heaven); • The Unigine Heaven OGL no longer stops responding at high resolutions with VSync enabled; • The menus are no longer slow with the vsync disabled for XBMC; • The “Testing use only” watermark has been removed; • The AA function is now working properly with the desktop effects enabled; • Various Left4Dead2 fixes have been implemented; • The driver now works a lot better with Autodesk Maya.
A complete list of changes, improvements, and supported graphics cards can be found in the official announcement.
Download AMD Catalyst 13.8 Beta Driver right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines.