14 DAY TRIAL // AMD has announced that the new Catalyst 14.30 Beta video driver for the Linux platform has been released and is now available for download.
AMD has a bad habit of releasing drivers without any kind of notes, and this is one of those times. This is a major problem with the new drivers because the users don't really know what has changed, what has been fixed, what the supported platforms, kernels, and so on are. There are times when AMD provides some notes about new releases, but even then, they're mostly just informing the users about new GPUs that are supported.
In fact, the new AMD Catalyst Software Suite for AMD Radeon R9 285, also known under the less interesting name of Catalyst 14.30 Beta video driver, has been released to support the R9 285 GPU. It might also come with better OpenGL support as well, but that's anyone’s guess.
The one thing that's been shared by the AMD announcement are some of the supported operating systems: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Suite 6.4 and 6.5, SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP3, OpenSuSE 13.1, Ubuntu 12.04.3, 12.04.4 and 13.10.
Any user will quickly see that this list is quite outdated. There is a new Ubuntu point release in the 12.04 branch, and Ubuntu 13.10 has already reached end of life and it's no longer supported by its developers. Both Ubuntu 12.04.5 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS are using Linux kernel 3.13, so this might mean that the new drivers from AMD don't have any kind of support for that particular kernel.
It's very likely that Linux users will be able to make the new drivers work on other Linux distros, not just the ones mentioned in AMD's announcement.
The R9 285 is the new middle-end GPUs from AMD and it's supposed to be fighting in the same category as NVIDIA 770 GTX and NVIDIA 760 GTX. It's been out for just a couple of days, so at least it's a good thing that Linux users that have video cards with this new GPU will be able to use them, at least.
You can download the AMD Catalyst 14.30 Beta Linux video driver right now from Softpedia, for both the 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.
If you do install it, please make sure you leave a comment below to tell us if you found anything interesting.