ATI Linux Display Driver 8.3 Released

A new version of the ATI/AMD Linux display driver was released last night, for both x86 and x86_64 platforms. This release introduces Xvideo extension for video scaling and color space conversion for Xpress 1200 series GPUs. The following issues were resolved in this release:

• On workstation hardware 3D applications will no longer be corrupted if the screen width is not an integer multiple of 64 pixels, for example with a 1680x1050 wide screen display;
• Display flicker is no longer noticed when the gnome screen-saver starts;
• Several image brightness and gamma-correction issues were resolved. Setting the gamma correction using xgamma, fglrx_xgamma, xorg.conf and in OpenGL games all work as expected now;
• Diagonal tearing will no longer be noticed when playing a video file using a video player that utilizes the XVideo extension;
• Video playback will no longer look blocky when playing a video file using a video player that utilizes the XVideo extension.

Known issues of this release:

• There is no support for video playback on the second head in dual head mode;
• Desktop corruption may be noticed when dragging the overlay/video when using dual-display mode;
• A black screen may be observed on some hardware when switching to the console or leaving the X window system when a Vesa framebuffer console driver is used;
• Video Playback may display wrong colors and additional shadow images when cropping or expanding a video file using a video player that utilizes the XVideo extension.

In order to gain the best performance and ease of use, ATI/AMD recommends the following:

• Kernel module build environment should include the following: Kernel source code – either the Kernel Source or Kernel Headers packages.
• ISSE Support enabled in your Linux Kernel (applies to Intel Pentium III and later CPUs only; enabled by default on version 2.4 and later kernels).
• The rpm utility should be installed and configured correctly on your system, if you intend to install it via RPM packages.

Requirements:

• XOrg 6.7, 6.8, 6.9, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2 or 7.3
• Linux kernel 2.6 or higher
• glibc version 2.2 or 2.3
• POSIX Shared Memory (/dev/shm) support is required for 3D applications.

If you have a machine running Linux kernel 2.4, you should install version 8.42.3 of the ATI Catalyst software suite.

Supported operating systems:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.6
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1
• Ubuntu 7.10
• Red Flag DT 6.0
• openSUSE 10.3

For installation instructions and more information about this release, please go here.

You can download the ATI/AMD Linux Display Driver now from Softpedia.

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