The new AMD Catalyst drivers feature limited support

Sep 30, 2014 07:20 GMT  ·  By

The AMD developers have announced that a new Catalyst 14.9 Linux driver is now out and that it brings support for a couple of new operating systems and a few bug fixes.

New AMD Linux drivers don't arrive as often as the community wants or needs them and the company doesn't have the best track record in the open source world. As it stands right now, there are two kinds of drivers available to Linux users, one that's open source and another one that's proprietary. Catalyst 14.9 is made by AMD and provides better functionality than the open source one, but it doesn't get updated too often.

To make things worse, AMD sometimes releases new drivers and doesn't provide release notes, so users don't know what has been changed or fixed, and they are left guessing. The support offered for their products is rather sketchy and the company implements features long after they are really needed, and the same is true for the 14.9 version.

What GPUs are supported by AMD Catalyst 14.9 Linux

Most of the time, new drivers are made available to offer support for new GPUs that have just been released. This particular version should work just fine with the latest AMD Radeon R9 285, but it's also compatible with the R9 290, R9 270, R7 260 series and down to the HD 5000 series.

The new drivers also provide support for a number of major Linux distros, although the packages should work on other OSes as well: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Suite 7.0 and 6.5, SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP3, OpenSuSE 13.1, and Ubuntu 12.04.4 and 14.04 LTS.

You might have noticed that the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS support is mentioned, but that's not actually all that strange. This is the way AMD does things on Linux and its drivers feature support for six months after the initial launch of that operating system. There is no word on supporting the upcoming Ubuntu 14.10 version that will land in less than a month.

Dependencies, dependencies

The drivers, like most other Linux packages, have various dependencies that have to be met. The ones for Catalyst 14.9 didn't change very much: Xorg/Xserver 7.4 and above (up to 1.15), Linux kernel 2.6 or above (up to 3.15), glibc version 2.2 or 2.3, and the POSIX Shared Memory (/dev/shm) support is required for 3D applications.

As usual, the Linux kernel supported by this release is 3.15, but that particular release reached end of life a couple of months ago. There is no mention of Linux kernel 3.16, which is omitted by numerous Linux distros.

The drive also comes with some fixes for Witcher 2, Motion Builder, ETQW, a few OpenGL programs, and a number of applications and other packages.

You can download the Catalyst 14.9 Linux driver right now from Softpedia.