AMD 8.37.6 Display Driver

It was a year ago that AMD/ATI had delivered the fglrx 8.25.18 display driver, which corrected a bug causing issues with the Radeon X1000 512MB video cards, added new product support, and squashed a variety of other bugs. Well, today AMD delivered the 8.37.6 Linux display driver. Affecting this driver the most is support for X server version 1.3 and appended several other fixes along with a slight upgrade to the AMD Catalyst Control Center Linux Edition. While no AIGLX support was added or no new features introduced, the upgrade should be worth the time.

The fixes for the 8.37.6 driver includes proper swapping on Vsync, translation updates in the AMD Catalyst Control Center, and the TV-Out video is no longer cropped when using X-Video. Also introduced in 8.37.6 is Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 packaging support provided by AMD. Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Flag, and Novell's SuSE are the distributions officially supported by AMD, and thus we now have support for RHEL 5 with the fglrx drivers. There are also a few improvements in the Linux Catalyst Control Center outside of the translation updates.

The AMD Catalyst Control Center Linux Edition is now officially at version 1.0. In addition to the translation improvements, the 3D page has finally been added. Anti-aliasing (AA) and Anisotropic Filtering (AF) can finally be adjusted through AMD's GUI control panel. The anti-aliasing levels supported are 2x, 4x, and 6x with the ability to override any application settings. The Anisotropic Filtering levels automatically override application settings and the levels supported here are 2x, 4x, 8x, and 16x. The 3D page also supports 8-bit double-buffered overlay planes and waiting for vertical retraces.

This driver does not append support for the Radeon HD 2000 series "R600", but the product support will hopefully arrive soon. Our AMD Radeon HD 2900XT Preview can be read here.