AMD also decided to include official support for Linux kernel 3.7 and 3.8

Mar 25, 2013 19:25 GMT  ·  By

AMD is usually rather shy about the changes they implement in their Linux drivers, but this time they’ve decided that it’s time to actually tell us what the changes were, especially because the current release is a very important one.

Nvidia has managed to capture the spotlight in the open source world. Even with all the criticism coming from Linus Torvalds himself, Nvidia has released regular driver updates, fixing and improving tons of problems. This is even more important now because Steam for Linux has started to get a firm grip on Linux gamers.

The advent of Steam for Linux can also be seen from the generous changelog put forth by AMD, for Catalyst 13.3 LINUX Beta Driver. The company released a couple of drivers updates in the past months, but they didn’t bother to tell us what they actually did.

This new beta is different and it can be easily seem from the large number of changes and improvements. Here are some highlights of the AMD Catalyst 13.3 LINUX Beta Driver:

• Color of Objects is no longer turning into red when enabling separate shader object (Serious Sam 3); • A black screen issue which occurred while entering the game screen, under the Cinnamon desktop environment, has been corrected (Team Fortress 2); • Changing settings without restarting would reduce FPS down to the 20s/30s (Team Fortress 2); • Random screen flickering and corruptions in the Lakeside Map have been fixed (Team Fortress 2); • The X server starting is no longer failing after switching to Power-Saving mode, on the PowerXpress A+I platform with Ubuntu 12.10; • Linux kernel 3.7 and 3.8 support has been added; • A black window issue, for OpenGL applications when using XRender backend of kwin, has been corrected; • A X server crash has been fixed for the High-Performance mode, on PowerXpress A+I platform with Intel Haswell.

More details about this release can be found in the official announcement.

Download AMD Catalyst 13.3 LINUX Beta Driver right now from Softpedia.