14 DAY TRIAL // The AMD developers have announced that a new Catalyst 14.12 Linux driver has been released and it's probably the most important one made available in 2014.
The AMD team doesn't have the best track record when it comes to drivers for the Linux platform and the latest releases have been rather mediocre. Nothing out of the ordinary was provided and the users of this hardware have been rather disappointed by the lack of new features. That has changed now with AMD Catalyst 14.12 Linux driver, which finally promises a number of interesting features.
The AMD drivers don't get updated all that often and the company is in constant competition with NVIDIA, which has registered great progress. NVIDIA has already pushed a couple of major upgrades for Linux, one as stable and another one as Beta. Now, AMD finally brings something to the table that can sit on an equal footing.
The AMD Catalyst OMEGA Linux is the first proper release in a long time
You can tell this is a proper release because we can find all the new operating systems and kernels supported by the drivers, which is something not usually found. It's true that it's not difficult to make this driver compatible with a newer kernel type, but it's nice to see that users don't actually have to.
The driver has a few very specific system requirements and dependencies: Xorg/Xserver 7.4 and above (up to 1.16), Linux kernel 2.6 or above (up to 3.17), glibc version 2.2 or 2.3, and POSIX Shared Memory (/dev/shm) support is required for 3D applications. Also, a number of packages are needed in the system, such as GIMP-help-en, gimp-help-common, XFree86-Mesa-libGL, libstdc++, libgcc, XFree86-libs, fontconfig, freetype, zlib, and gcc.
First of all, the AMD devs now provide OpenCL 2.0 support (which requires 64-bit OS and compatible AMD Radeon R Series GPU), the VAAPI decoding support (H264, VC1, MPEG2, MPEG4) has been improved, and specific package support for Ubuntu and Red Hat has been provided.
The devs have also explained that the driver will no longer fail to install on Ubuntu 14.10 and the driver upgrade function no longer fails in Ubuntu OSes. The packages for specific distros are available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Suite 7.0 (6.5) and Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS (14.04 LTS). On the other hand, the RUN packages have a wider target and they should cover Red Hat Enterprise Linux Suite 6.4, SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP3, 12, OpenSuSE 13.1, and Ubuntu 14.10.
You can download the AMD Catalyst OMEGA Linux 14.12 Linux driver right now from Softpedia.