[ Thanks to Michael Larabel for
this link. ]
“Compared to past years when recapping the AMD/ATI Linux
advancements over the past calendar year, 2009 was not quite as
exciting, which can be viewed as both good and bad for their
Catalyst Linux driver. There were many advancements this year on
AMD’s open-source side, but in 2009 there wasn’t as many milestones
for their Catalyst driver like in the past with the introduction of
CrossFire, OverDrive, same-day Linux support, the AMD Catalyst
Control Center, and other new features. Here is our 2009 year in
review look at AMD’s advancements to their proprietary Catalyst
Linux driver along with our annual benchmarks.“Part of the reason why 2009 was not as exciting as past years
with regards to Catalyst Linux driver improvements is because AMD
has nearly reached feature parity with the Catalyst Windows driver,
so there is not a whole lot of missing features. Missing still
though from the Catalyst Linux driver is support for 4-card
CrossFireX, Eyefinity (though it is coming soon), and other
miscellaneous drivers. What was delivered in 2009 though for the
Catalyst Linux driver include support for the latest OpenGL 3.2
extensions (along with OpenGL 3.0 and 3.1), Hybrid CrossFire,
MultiView, support for the AMD Display Library (ADL) SDK,
compositing improvements, and enhancements to the AMD Catalyst
Control Center Linux Edition (including integrated support for
RandR 1.2). That is about it for the new features.“Besides the features introduced this year, the 12 Linux driver
releases did bring many bug-fixes along with support for new X
Server and Linux kernel releases (albeit many times months late).
What was also partially resolved in 2009 was their XvBA mess
concerning the X-Video Bitstream Acceleration
(http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=13034) API that we have been
talking about since last year.”