AMD 2007 Year In Review

The last driver release of the year, Catalyst 7.12 for Linux, had proper Radeon HD 3850/3870 support, a fix for an OpenGL memory leak, an AGP Rialto fix, and finally there was FireGL support on this new Linux driver code-base.

For benchmarking these twelve drivers, we had used the same system from our NVIDIA 2007 Year in Review. This system was running Fedora Core 6 with the stock packages, and on the hardware side was an Abit AW8 (i955X) motherboard, 2GB of DDR2-800 memory, an Intel Pentium D 820 processor, and Western Digital 160GB SATA drive. The ATI graphics card we had used for benchmarking the twelve drivers was an ATI Radeon X1800XT 256MB, which has been supported by the fglrx driver since 2005 when the Radeon R500 support was added. Benchmarks used for this AMD AYiR 2007 article were Doom 3, Quake 4, and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. With the Enemy Territory: Quake Wars benchmark, from the 8.38.6 to 8.40.4, the fglrx driver had exhibited stability issues with this new OpenGL game, which had prevented us from reporting our frame-rate results for three of the drivers.