The old Catalyst is gone, welcome the Crimson driver

Nov 24, 2015 15:36 GMT  ·  By

The new Radeon Software Crimson Driver from AMD has been released for the Linux platform as well, but it looks like the Linux users will have to wait a little bit more for the new UI or other features.

Numerous users, including myself, were excited to see that AMD was paying proper attention to the Linux drivers, and there was a special slide in their official communique about Linux gaming. In fact, they were saying that, with the help of the new drivers, Linux players should expect some pretty amazing performance boosts.

Now, the official Radeon Software Crimson Driver is also out for Linux users. It’s marked as 15.11, but that was done so that people understand the progression since we had a 15.11 Beta version a while back. Unfortunately, the new interface that’s been touted on Windows hasn’t made its way onto Linux, but we can hope that the performance upgrades are real right now.

Radeon Software Crimson Driver 15.11 is now ready for download

From an installer or UI point of view, nothing has really changed for the AMD video driver. We hope that things will evolve, but at least for now we’ll have to settle with the old interface.

Now, there is good news, and there is bad news, so let's start with the latter. The latest supported Linux kernel mentioned in the release notes is 3.19 and the latest Xorg driver is 1.17. There are much newer versions than those already out, but we can only hope that they just copy-pasted from one release to another.

Also, the release notes don’t explain if they fixed anything important or if they improved anything, with the exception of a couple of bugs.

The good news is that most of the newer distributions are mentioned as supported, including Ubuntu 15.10. I’m mentioning this one since it comes with Linux kernel 4.2, so there may be some hope.

You can download Radeon Software Crimson Driver 15.11 right now and give it a try. Make sure you tell us how it’s working out for you.