14 DAY TRIAL // AMD released the new Catalyst 14.4 RC Linux video driver for the Linux platforms, and this time the developers finally made some progress with it. It looks like the current 14.4 branch will be a very interesting one.
The previous 14.3 release from AMD was a poor excuse for a driver. The developers made very little effort to fix the existing problems and even less effort for new features. It seems that the company is only interested in bringing support for various new GPUs.
Now, a new version has been released, and this time the AMD developers have made some real progress. Besides the support for the new AMD Radeon R9 295X, the driver has now brought full OpenGL 4.4 support.
According to the changelog, the following OpenGL extensions now feature improved support: ARB_buffer_storage, ARB_enhanced_layouts, ARB_query_buffer_object, ARB_clear_texture, ARB_texture_mirror_clamp_to_edge, ARB_texture_stencil8, ARB_vertex_type_10f_11f_11f_rev, ARB_multi_bind, ARB_bindless_texture, ARB_spare_texture, ARB_seamless_cubemap_per_texture, ARB_indirect_parameters, ARB_compute_variable_group_size, ARB_shader_draw_parameters, and ARB_shader_group_vote.
A number of issues that have been trailing the AMD releases for some time have been corrected. For example, corruption and system hang observed while running Sanctuary BM with Tear Free Desktop enabled have been fixed, a memory leak about hardware context has been fixed, an EGL create context error for glesx has been fixed, the test "spec/arb_vertex_array_object" no longer fails, and Glxtest failures no longer show up in the log file.
Also, the Test "glx/GLX_EXT_import_context/free context" no longer fails, the test "spec/ARB_seamless_cube_map" is now working properly, a blank screen observed while running Steam games with Big picture has been fixed, a 4ms delay observed in the glxSwapBuffers when VSync is enabled has been corrected, and an ETQW segmentation fault has been repaired.
The AMD developers made a big deal about Ubuntu 12.04.4 support, which is strange considering that Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is already out and there is no mention about it. The driver doesn't seem to have any official support for Linux kernel 3.14, but this is hardly a problem and the issue can be easily resolved.
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.
Check the release notes for more details about this driver. Download the AMD Catalyst 14.4 RC 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.