AMD Catalyst 2011 Driver Year In Review

Like Sanctuary, Tropics at 1920 x 1080 was flat for 2011, but at 2560 x 1600 there is a nice performance boost with a 2560 x 1600 resolution.

The Unigine Heaven performance also improved with Catalyst 11.2 at a 2560 x 1600 resolution. With Catalyst 11.10, there was another more modest boost in performance with this most demanding OpenGL Linux benchmark.

So there were a few small performance improvements this year in the Catalyst Linux driver at least for the high-end Radeon HD 6950 "Cayman", but besides that there is not too much to shout about for the Catalyst driver releases of 2011.

The only real feature highlights is the PowerXpress support under Linux and the OpenCL run-time integration into the mainline driver. Overall, the Catalyst Linux driver is in good shape and certainly is better than it was several years ago. Besides bug fixing, one of the other critical areas for the Catalyst Linux driver to improve upon is reducing the time for new Linux kernel and X.Org Server support to appear in the public driver builds.

What will 2012 bring for this Linux driver? Well, wait and see!