ATI 8.31.5 Display Drivers

We had seen ATI's fglrx 8.30.3 display driver strike the Internet on the last day of October, and now this month we are seeing the next release appear only two weeks later. The ATI 8.31.5 display drivers are primarily a maintenance release with no new features being added.

The changes this time around is a fix for --tv-geometry and --tvf (not backing up the X configuration if the argument fails or no change is made), small modes no longer have double Y lines, X hanging shortly after X is started on RHEL3 non-SMP kernel, aticonfig TV format fix for PAL-COMB-N, and enhanced TexturedVideo performance for X1000 series. The video "shakes" should also be to a minimum. The primary change in this release is indeed the corrections for brief pausing or video tearing with TexturedVideo (primarily on the Radeon X1000 series). Unfortunately, the X-Video issue with x86_64 Xorg 6.9+ systems still has not been addressed.

For those of you paying attention to the AMD / ATI rumors, the documentation/release notes now refers to these drivers as being the "AMD Display Drivers", but not all ATI references have been removed. Is this a sign of the gradual elimination of the ATI brand? The installer and control panel still refer to the drivers as being from ATI Technologies. These drivers still do not support AIGLX.