Driver Update: ATI Catalyst Linux Display Driver 10.6

AMD has released new Linux drivers for its ATI Radeon video cards. The download is 96MB in size and can be used for both 32bit and 64bit environments. Version 10.6 is compatible with Radeon HD2400 and higher, the FireStream 9170, 9250 and 9270, and the embedded E2400 and E4690. In addition, versions 6.7 through 7.5 of X.org, Linux kernel 2.6 and above, and glibc versions 2.2 and 2.3 are supported. New in this release is support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 5.5 and OpenGL versions 3.3 and 4.0. In addition, the 2d display part has been rewritten, which has led to performance improvements, among other things. The changelog also shows one bug fix and a list of known issues that have not yet been resolved.

New Features

Support for New Linux Operating Systems

This release of ATI Catalyst Linux introduces support for the following new operating system:

• RHEL 5.5 production support

Official support for OpenGL 4.0 and OpenGL 3.3

• ATI Catalyst 10.6 delivers official support for OpenGL 4.0 on the ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series
• ATI Catalyst 10.6 delivers official support for OpenGL 3.3 on the ATI Radeon HD Series

2D performance enhancements

ATI Catalyst 10.6 delivers a new architecture for 2D acceleration. The new 2D architecture delivers fast windows resizing with Compiz/Visual-Effects and general 2D performance improvements in all AMD supported Linux distributions.

Resolved Issues

The following section provides a brief description of resolved issues with the latest version of the ATI Catalyst Linux software suite. These include:

• “Xorg -probeonly” no longer causes screen corruption or the system to fail to respond

Known Issues

The following section provides a brief description of known issues associated with the latest version of ATI Catalyst Linux software suite. These issues include:

• OpenCL 1.0 conformance tests have not been run with this version of the ATI Catalyst Driver Suite in conjunction with the ATI Stream SDK v2.1. If you require an OpenCL 1.0 conformant driver, we recommend that you install the ATI Catalyst 10.5 Driver Suite
• Desktop arrangement area may appear empty and fail to display the icon number when Catalyst Control Center is relaunched after disabling or hot-unplugging the secondary display
• Disabling the primary display in clone/dual-head mode may cause Catalyst Control Center not to launch properly after X restart
• Applying display rotation using Catalyst Control Center or XRandR may result in display turning blank with mouse cursor while rotating the display
• X-server may fail to start, or unusual behavior may be observed, after applying various HDTV formats of 1080i30/25/p50 standard and optimized modes on DVI/DP displays
• CrossFire might not be enabled properly on the first Gemimi card, with Anti-Alias ​​8x displaying no visual changes, under a 2 Gemini multi-adapter configuration
• Xserver may fail when applying “Maintain Aspect Ratio” option from GPU scaling at maximum resolution
• [SUSE] Desktop corruption may be visible after applying rotation using Catalyst Control Center and restarting X
• Enabling a second ASIC without a monitor connected may result in black screen and X window not launching when startx is executed
• System may fail to display error message when improper position values ​​are used in “aticonfig –tv-geometry” resulting in invalid “TVHPosAdj” and “TVVPosAdj” values ​​in xorg.conf file
• [Ubuntu 10.04] X segmentation faults on startup on multi-ASIC systems
• Switching to clone mode by pressing Fn+F4 might not function properly after connecting an external VGA monitor
• Segmentation fault may occur when running “Quake 4” and “Enemy Territory: Quake Wars” at 1280×1024 or resolutions higher than current desktop resolution