Advanced Micro Devices released yesterday, June 16th, a new version of their ATI proprietary video driver for Linux. With version 9.6, the ATI Catalyst driver updates the software to version 8.62. This release comes with several new features and also a lot of bugfixes. ATI Catalyst 9.6 brings production support for SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) and SLED 11, as well as early support RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 4.8.
End-users now have access to MultiView, allowing them to use multiple GPU configurations for application rendering, all in a unified environment. Thus, Xinerama is now enabled in both single and up-to-four multiple GPUs setups. For the latter, any combination of the following graphics cards can be made: ATI Radeon HD 4000, ATI Radeon 3000 Series and ATI Radeon 2000 Series.
Fixes in ATI Catalyst 9.6: · When having enabled 3D desktop effects, using the transparent desktop feature doesn't cause desktop icons and windows to disappear anymore;
· Video playback now works properly with enabled desktop effects;
· In Ubuntu 8.10, starting X on surround view setups now works properly;
· In Ubuntu 9.04, the X Server startup on ATI Radeon HD 4870 GPUs was fixed;
· In Ubuntu 9.04, several X Server failures that occurred when bringing up xrandr --prop were resolved;
· A bug that caused videos to go blank when resizing the DVD playback window was fixed;
· An issue that was causing instability when switching to fullscreen DVD playback in Totem Player was resolved;
· An issue that was causing error messages to be displayed in Terminal when launching the Catalyst Control Center in MultiView was fixed;
· ATI CAL now reports correct clock and memory clock values.
Requirements: · X.Org 6.8, 6.9, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 or 7.4
· Linux kernel 2.6 or higher
· glibc version 2.2 or 2.3
· Support for POSIX Shared Memory (/dev/shm) is necessary for 3D programs
· The following packages should be installed on your system: XFree86-Mesa-libGL, libstdc++, libgcc, XFree86-libs, fontconfig, freetype and zlib.
Supported operating systems: · Red Hat Enterprise Linux
· Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux
· Ubuntu Linux
Detailed installation instructions for the ATI Catalyst installer can be found in
this PDF file.
Download the ATI/AMD Linux Display Driver 9.6 right now from
Softpedia.
