AMD 2012 Catalyst Driver Year-In-Review

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD 2012 Catalyst Driver Year-In-Review

For the past seven years I have been writing annual year-in-review articles for the AMD and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers. Much progress has been made in recent years for bettering the OpenGL Linux support from these leading closed-source graphics drivers and this year is no exception. Up today is a recap of this year's AMD Catalyst graphics driver releases plus benchmarks of this year's driver releases going back to Catalyst 11.12.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=18302

[newwen]

Although the radeon open source driver works pretty well out of the box, it lacks the performance, and the propietary fglrx is always a nightmare to deal with. The 12.6 legacy driver still broken in ubuntu 12.10.

[grigi]

Wouldn't benchmarking one of the GCN (7700+) also be useful? I mean, totally new architecture?

[Nasenbaer]

Thx for the effort - such a driver review comparing one year of driver development is really interesting. But I want to clarify that it isn't very accurate to compare such high framerates! It doesn't matter if your have 300fps or only 250fps. Every current reasonable graphics card comparison uses quality enhancement features of modern graphics cards. Please activate anti-aliasing (at least 4x for modern GPUs) and anisotropic filtering - preferably via the in-game graphics settings. If not avaiable there, force it via the driver menu and check if the engine supports forcing of such features.

[xeekei]

It appears that Catalyst 12.10 is the best overall driver released today. Is Catalyst 12.11 Beta much better in Steam games? There gotta' be some excuse for this.