14 DAY TRIAL // AMD has announced that the new Catalyst 14.4 video driver for the Linux platform has been released and is now available for download.
The AMD developers didn't waste any time and the Release Candidate version that was made available just few days ago has been promoted to stable.
Before getting to the good stuff, like fixes and improvements for the Linux systems, we need to specify that the driver supports a number of new GPUs, like the ones from the AMD Radeon R9 290 Series (including AMD Radeon R9 295X). In fact, this latest driver will support GPUs as far back as the ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series. Also, quite a few All-in-One, Embedded, APUs, and Mobility products are supported.
The highlight of this release is the support for the OpenGL 4.4, which finally arrived in the drivers for the Linux systems. NVIDIA has offered full support for OpenGL 4.4 for almost a year now and it took the AMD developers too long to implement it.
According to the changelog, the following OpenGL extensions now feature improved support: ARB_buffer_storage, ARB_enhanced_layouts, ARB_query_buffer_object, ARB_clear_texture, ARB_texture_mirror_clamp_to_edge, ARB_texture_stencil8, ARB_vertex_type_10f_11f_11f_rev, ARB_multi_bind, ARB_bindless_texture, ARB_spare_texture, ARB_seamless_cubemap_per_texture, ARB_indirect_parameters, ARB_compute_variable_group_size, ARB_shader_draw_parameters, and ARB_shader_group_vote.
The developers also explained that some operating systems are officially supported, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux Suite 6.3 and 6.4, SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP3, OpenSuSE 11.4 and 12.1, Ubuntu 12.04.2, 12.04.4, and 13.04.
You might notice that a number of other systems are missing from this list, like Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. It doesn't mean that it won't work, just that the OS is not officially supported yet.
Also, the latest Linux kernel supported by this driver is 3.11, which is odd given the fact that the RC was released only a few days ago had support for Linux kernel 3.13. This is not a major problem, just an inconvenience, but it's definitely not good PR for AMD.
Also, there are still a number of problems with the driver that haven't been fixed yet. For example, the performance on some Steam OS games is lower on 1GB graphics memory cards, compared with 2GB graphics memory cards, and some Piglit tests still cause a system hang in Ubuntu systems.
The driver also has a few very specific system requirements and dependencies: Xorg/Xserver 7.4 and above (up to 1.15) and glibc version 2.2 or 2.3. POSIX Shared Memory (/dev/shm) support is recommended for 3D applications, but it's not mandatory.
Check the release notes for more details about this driver. Download the AMD Catalyst 14.4 Linux video driver right now from Softpedia.