How do you become an AMD Catalyst Beta Tester?

[PuckPoltergeist]

The NDA also allows us to communicate more about driver internals and future plans to the beta test group than we can to the public.

Can't it be split into public beta and closed beta? As Kano wrote, put the beta drivers onto the website (marked as beta) and the closed beta will remain as it is with additional NDA and communication about whatever needed.

[DanL]

How do you become an AMD Catalyst Beta Tester?

Install AMD Catalyst.

[bridgman]

OK, let me try this one more time.

The "beta program" started off with "real" beta drops (functionally complete, all features working but might still have bugs) but over the years we started providing earlier access into development, to the point where todays "beta testers" basically have a pipe into our upstream development builds, often getting access to code 4-6 weeks before "beta".

You see or hear about new features in those early development builds, think they are "betas" because of the program name, and conclude that a "public beta" program would solve your problems, or at least those related to support for new kernels and X servers. When we don't give you public betas, you draw conclusions ranging from us being ignorant and incompetent to us being pawns of a certain large software company and committed to the destruction of Linux.

Your logic is sound, but you are basing the conclusion on bad assumptions. The key point here is that public betas would *not* get you the kind of early support you want, since what would qualify as a beta is usually only a couple of weeks ahead of the final release. What you would need is "public release of early development builds" which is something completely different.

Every additional release we create takes time away from other improvements in the driver. If you were really getting "early development build" features in the final beta releases then I agree that might be a good tradeoff, but that is simply not what would happen.

I really believe that calls for public betas right now are missing the point, for the simple reason that they would *not* give you the new functionality you are expecting. If you focus on the real issue -- earlier support for new kernels and X servers -- I think we have more options for helping.

[cutterjohn]

I would like to know.

install catalyst on linux...

[DanL]

install catalyst on linux...

Is there an echo in here?

[monraaf]

the real point is.... 9.8 is perfekt for the most people beta or not right now.....

wait for a mond to relase a perfekt driver right now?????

i can'T see any bug in this driver....

i play heroes on newerth BETA with it 20 times no crash no bug no problem..

i work i play i watch movies i surfing in the internet no bug...

thats not an beta thats God-like Jesus powered supernova driver...

Dude, I can remember since 9.2 or 9.3 with each beta you telling how great the beta is and that this time AMD finally got it right. But when it was actually released it turned out to be not so great after all... Stop telling lies and raising peoples expectations, 9.8 is buggy and you know it.

[MartjeB]

Is there an echo in here?

Is there an echo here?

I just had to do it

[monraaf]

best example is the UVD2 part of the driver,,

after the rework/rerelease the linux UVD2 part will be better than the windows one..

What you are talking about? Are you saying that with the 9.8 driver you can actually use the UVD2 feature to get accelerated H264 decoding?

If not then what are you saying?

[DanL]

Is there an echo here?
I just had to do it

Well, you screwed it up. Echoes don't drop random words.

[energyman]

please calm down. What would you have gained, if 9.7 would have been 'open beta' 4 weeks before its release?

Probably nothing. The only difference: you would have known earlier that you still need to patch the driver. Nothing else.

And Qaridarium - where do you get all your informations? And why should we believe you, that the 'betas' are better in any aspect? Betas are always buggy - I am saying that as someone running a ~arch gentoo system, with gcc from a testing overlay, qt from svn, kde 4.3.60 svn... why should the AMD betas be magically different? The reason for running betas is to catch bugs. If there aren't any bugs, AMD would probably skip the beta stage and release the sweet error free version right away. But lo and behold, there are still bugs in the released drivers, which makes claims of perfect betas.. suspect.