ATI Linux Display Driver v8.14.13

Earlier in the day ATI released their new Catalyst 5.6 drivers. These new Windows drivers offer such new features as mobile support, an improved Catalyst Control Center (CCC), re-vamped Catalyst AI for gamers, and several other intuitive features. However, we wouldn’t be bringing you this article if there wasn’t anything to share about the Linux side of things. Today we have a look at the entirely new ATI Linux driver installer and ATI Control Panel.

Version: 8.14.13
Release Date: June 09, 2005
Size: 35.1MB
Highlights

· Quad Buffer Stereo (QBS) support is now working for all ATI FireGL\u2122 products that support QBS
· ATI FireGL X3 products now support dual-link enabled display devices
· The ATI Proprietary Linux Driver now falls back to a single-link mode if the card or connector does not support dual-link mode
· The DGA and RandR X Server extensions are now capable of loading simultaneously when using the ATI Proprietary Linux driver
· Intermittent error messages such as, [fglrx:firegl_alloc_bufs] *ERROR* Failed to create buffer queue (-12) and similar, no longer appear in the kernel output
· OpenGL based applications that have common symbol names to that of the libGL library no longer experience intermittent erratic behavior
· Applications using certain OpenGL calls such as, glTexSubImage no longer results in a driver memory leak
· When running in clone mode, the X server no longer crashes with a segmentation fault if the mouse is moved during a mode switch
· Linux 2.6.11 kernel support
· Radeon X8XX Linux support
· New ATI Installer

The first thing we noticed about the new ATI driver installer download was its immense size, weighing in at 35.1MB, which is four times greater in size than previous ATI Linux drivers. However, the 35.1MB package contains the new graphical installer and support for multiple versions of XFree86 and X.Org. Alternatively, if you don’t want the benefits of the new improved setup, the traditional driver RPMs can still be downloaded. The system we used to report our initial findings regarding these drivers contained a Sapphire X300SE 128MB PCI Express, Tyan Tomcat i915 motherboard, and Intel Pentium 4 530 (3.0GHz) processor. The distribution we used was FedoraCore3 with the 2.6.11-1.27 kernel and Xorg 6.8.2.