AMD Launches Catalyst 14.2 Beta Drivers; Talks Linux

[exfileme]

AMD's Catalyst 14.2 beta drivers are now available. AMD is also making changes to the X.ORG 'radeon' repository.

AMD Launches Catalyst 14.2 Beta Drivers; Talks Linux : Read more

 

[JD88]

AMD's Linux support has generally been awful. Hopefully this is a step in the right direction.

 

[gallidorn]

Hopefully AMD is working on Mantle support for Linux. But, it would be just like in Windows where new technologies can't gain traction until Games start including Mantle support. Hopefully someone will figure out a way to integrate basic mantle support in graphic engines (i.e. Unreal, Frostbite, etc.). If that is possible, game companies could easily roll out game engine patches to older games.

 

[the1kingbob]

Our workstations in my office have professional graphics cards from both nvidia and amd. I don't remember which ones specifically, just that the AMD cards cost half as much. Either way, the nvidia cards are awful compared to the AMD cards in Ubuntu. The AMD cards use the default drivers while we have to use the nvidia proprietary drivers just to have multiple screen support (not sure if still true to this day, but was when installed). Animations are choppy, randomly freezes and chokes requiring a ctrl+alt+f1 then ctrl+alt+f7 just to get going again. Was disappointed, makes work in VMD quite challenging sometimes. (Note platforms are exactly the same, 16GB of ram with two 6 core xeons)

 

[firefoxx04]

AMD has been crap for me in ubuntu and ubuntu gnome (both 13.10)My laptop with intel and nvidia is excellent under linux. Just wish my desktop would be. Would love to have screen support for both my cards rather than just the primary card.

 

[rpmrush]

Anandtech's article has the exert from AMD apologizing that Minecraft is fixed with this release. I couldn't understand why it was broken. My kid and her friends complained. Irks me to know they broke it and my only option for a fix is a beta driver. Ever tried navigating the Malware ridden sites that carry older GPU drivers..even one version back?

 

[rakadedo]

Ever tried navigating the Malware ridden sites that carry older GPU drivers..even one version back?

AMD still offers every driver for download all the way back to January of 2012...

 

[rokit]

There is a mistake in the article.

Substantial OpenGL feature level upgrade to v4.3

should be 3.3. Even though OSS devs brought alot of 4.x functions to the driver, there is 3.3 full feature support at the moment.

AMD has been crap for me in ubuntu and ubuntu gnome (both 13.10)My laptop with intel and nvidia is excellent under linux. Just wish my desktop would be. Would love to have screen support for both my cards rather than just the primary card.

Crossfire support is not priority for OSS drivers at the moment so you'll stick with fglrx for quite awhile. However new fglrx drivers showed some improvements as well(it seems Valve was that magical kick for AMD to strike for better proprietary driver support for Linux), so you might try to do like this:
a) update kernel atleast to 3.12(some improvements for all vendors graphics cards) + latest drivers from amd site(i saw improvements since 14.1)
b) upgrade to ubuntu 14.04 whenever it'll come out

Ever tried navigating the Malware ridden sites that carry older GPU drivers..even one version back?

You mean like this http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop/previous?os=Linux%20x86_64 ?

 

[cat1092]

I've always had good luck with AMD's drivers on Linux, usually all needed drivers installs with the OS, which is why an active Internet connection is suggested during install. It used to be that we had to check for additional drivers, that link always shows none for the last couple of years, And hopefully when 14.2 is released for Windows, the full NET 4 install won't be required, as I updated to 4.5.1 & ran the NET Framework utility to purge 4 & it's massive collection of updates, Version 13.12 installed fine w/out Net 4, though I manually downloaded it & didn't bother with Auto Detect & Install. Cat