New ATI Linux Video Driver Has OpenGL 4.0 and RHEL 5.5 Support

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced last evening, June 16th, another improved version of its ATI Catalyst Linux display driver, available for both x86 and x86_64 architectures. ATI Catalyst 10.6 introduces final and stable support for the Red Hat Enterprise 5.5 Linux operating system, official OpenGL 4.0 and OpenGL 3.3 support, and many 2D performance improvements. The software version was updated to 8.741. Without further introduction, let's have a look at the highlights of ATI Catalyst 10.6:

· Production support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 operating system;
· Support for OpenGL 4.0 on ATI Radeon HD 5xxx series;
· Support for OpenGL 3.3 on ATI Radeon HD series;
· Added new 2D acceleration architecture for fast window resizing with the Compiz desktop effects;
· 2D performance enhancements on all supported Linux operating systems;
· Fixed "Xorg -probeonly" screen corruptions or system freezes.

Supported operating systems:

· Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) suite;
· Novell/SuSE Linux product suite;
· Ubuntu Linux (including 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx)).

Requirements:

· XOrg 6.8, 6.9, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4 or 7.5;
· Linux kernel 2.6 or above;
· glibc version 2.2 or 2.3;
· POSIX Shared Memory (/dev/shm) support is needed for 3D applications;
· You need all of these packages before installing: XFree86-Mesa-libGL, libstdc++, libgcc, XFree86-libs, fontconfig, freetype, zlib and gcc;
· For the best experience, you should also have: the kernel module build environment, either the sources or the headers, and, if you plan to use the RPM packages, you need to make sure the RMP utility is working properly.

As usual, a lot of known issues remain unresolved in this release. Check them out here.

Detailed installation instructions can be found here, in PDF format.

Download the ATI/AMD Linux Display Driver 10.6 right now from Softpedia.