You can download the latest version of the AMD Catalyst driver from Softpedia

Feb 27, 2014 08:07 GMT  ·  By

AMD has just released the new Catalyst 14.2 Beta Linux video driver for the Linux platforms, which is quite a surprise because it doesn't bring support for new devices and has no new features. It only fixes a couple of problems.

This is the second AMD Catalyst driver update for Linux in 2014 and, so far, this hasn't been a good start for the company. In their defense, the AMD engineers are pushing for more transparency and publishing documentation that can help in the development of open source drivers.

According to the latest changelog, a problem has been fixed for Minecraft, which was experiencing some missing textures, and a number of corruptions that were detected in X-plane have been corrected.

This is pretty much the extent of the fixes for the new AMD Catalyst 14.2 Beta video driver for Linux, although they do mention a number of outstanding problems than have yet to be resolved.

For example, there is still a fair amount of stuttering and poor performance after playing an OpenGL game for several minutes on Ubuntu, the terminal panel still stops refreshing until there is movement from mouse cursor, and a system hang that has been observed while hotpluging the stereo display is still in effect.

Also, the corruption and system hang observed while running Sanctuary BM with TFD enabled is still present, and when users enable Overlay: StartX, a number of problems with corruptions still manifest themselves.

AMD Catalyst 14.2 Beta video driver has been tested and will work on the following operating systems: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Suite 6.4 and 6.5, SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP3, OpenSuSE 13.1, Ubuntu 12.04.3 and 13.10.

As you can see, there are a lot of other Linux distributions missing, but that doesn't mean that it's not going to work. For example, Arch Linux maintainers will most likely push this new version of the driver in the repositories without any help from AMD.

The driver also has a few very specific system requirements and dependencies: Xorg/Xserver 7.4 and above (up to 1.15), Linux kernel 2.6 or above (up to 3.13), and glibc version 2.2 or 2.3. POSIX Shared Memory (/dev/shm) support is recommended for 3D applications, but it's not mandatory.

As you can easily see, there is no support for the new Linux kernel 3.14.x branch, which is now in development.

Check the release notes for more details about this driver. Download the AMD Catalyst 14.2 Beta Linux video driver right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.