14 DAY TRIAL // AMD has released the new AMD Catalyst 13.12 video driver for Linux platforms, featuring a long number of new features, but a few inexplicable absences as well.
This latest version of the AMD Catalyst driver has been in the works for quite some time, and the developers have released 11 beta version before they could get a stable one out the door.
The AMD Catalyst 13.9 video driver offers production support for the following Linux-based operating systems: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 and 6.4, Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux 11 SP3, OpenSuSE Linux 11.4 and 12.1, and Ubuntu 12.04.2 and 13.04. As you can clearly see, there is no mention of Ubuntu 13.10 or Ubuntu 14.04.
The system requirements are also pretty interesting: Xorg/Xserver 7.4 and above (up to 1.14), Linux kernel 2.6 or above (up to 3.11), glibc version 2.2 or 2.3, and POSIX Shared Memory (/dev/shm) support for 3D applications.
As you will notice, Linux kernel 3.12 is not mentioned. This means that either they made a mistake in the text, or they dropped the support for the latest stable Linux kernel 3.12, which is weird because the previous Beta releases supported 3.12.
Highlights of AMD Catalyst 13.12:
• A problem that caused ultra slow Dota2 performance has been fixed; • A system hang that occurred when startx runs after enabling Eyefinity has been fixed; • A screen corruption when running C4Engine with the GL_ARB_texture_array enabled has been fixed; • The procfs permission issue on kernel 3.10 and later has been fixed; • Glxtest no longer fails with force AA; • cairo-dock now works with AMD hardware; • An X crash that occurred when the user killed X with Xserver 1.13 and 1.14 has been fixed; • Screens are distorted are no longer when connecting an external monitor on some PowerXpress platform with Intel Haswell; • Display corruption that occurred when using rotation has been fixed.
Check the release notes for more details about this driver. Download the AMD Linux Display Drivers 13.12 right now from Softpedia.