14 DAY TRIAL // AMD has announced that the new Catalyst 14.6 Beta video driver for the Linux platform has been released and is now available for download and testing.
The AMD developers have been working very hard these last few days to fix some of the problems with their latest drivers and to bring support for the newly-released The Witcher 2 game. Some of the problems have been fixed, but there are also a few issues that still need to be repaired.
Unlike most of the previous AMD Catalyst releases, this new build doesn't provide support for some new GPUs and it only takes care of several bugs, just like it's supposed to.
It's also worth noting that the release rhythm for new drivers seems to have increased a little for AMD, which can only be a good thing, although they could take some lessons from NVIDIA, if they just take a look at their release notes.
For the first time in ages, the new AMD Catalyst drivers come with some pretty interesting features, like Ubuntu 14.04 support, numerous improvements to the installer, package and distribution generation options, option sets recommenced by default, pop-up messages to help guide the users through the install process, and identifying and installing pre-requisites.
It looks like AMD is focusing on the installer and this is good news because the Linux users are the last ones to get any sort of improvements in this area.
According to the changelog, a random lock-up that occurred when launching the Witcher 2 application has been fixed, screen corruption that happened when the users connected an external monitor to some PowerXpress A+I platforms has been corrected, the X server no longer crashes when the user has Tear Free Desktop enabled, OpenGL programs now exit properly, and an error message that was displayed when running the clinfo command in console mode has been fixed.
Also, hotpluging the HDMI monitor from the MST hub no longer gives a blank screen, booting into login UI during restart is now cleaner, and a segmentation fault that occurred when users were running Enemy Territory: Quake Wars has been fixed.
A couple of problems are still present, but they will probably get squashed in the next Beta. The developers say that DOTA 2 may hang while playing on the AMD Radeon 7900 or AMD Radeon R9 280X and that Witcher 2 still encounters intermittent corruption during gameplay.
The driver also has a few very specific system requirements and dependencies: Xorg/Xserver 7.4 and above (up to 1.15) and glibc version 2.2 or 2.3. POSIX Shared Memory (/dev/shm) support is recommended for 3D applications, but it's not mandatory.
You can download the AMD Catalyst 14.6 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.