A Comparison Of AMD & NVIDIA's Linux Control Panels

The AMD Catalyst Control Center Linux Edition takes a much simpler approach compared to the NVIDIA Settings panel. The welcome page contains virtually no information and just a link to the AMD website. If you choose to launch the website from the amdcccle, the web browser also needs to be selected. AMD should turn to just automatically detected the installed or default browser for this mechanism...

The information page in the Catalyst Control Center for Linux is split into hardware, software, and OpenGL information. The hardware information is the graphics card, BIOS version, memory type, memory size, memory clock speed, core clock speed, bus type, and bus setting. Software and OpenGL information includes the driver version, Catalyst Control Center version, OpenGL provider, OpenGL renderer, and OpenGL version.

Color options within the AMD Catalyst Control Center include adjusting the amount of red, green, and blue. The display head can be adjusted using a drop-down menu.

When AMD initially introduced its Dynamic Display Management Options (DDMO) into the driver for real-time monitor hot-plugging support, enabling (or disabling) the display heads had to be done from the command line using aticonfig. With the Catalyst Control Center, however, it can be done from the Display Manager area. The display manager for the amdcccle has a display layout area similar to that of the nvidia-settings and a drop-down menu for switching between displays for the properties and display modes tab. The properties tab indicates the display type (i.e. digital monitor) and a slider bar for changing the resolution and a drop-down menu for the refresh rate. The display modes tab is irrelevant to those with only a single display head, but for others can be used to setup a Big Desktop configuration (Big Desktop is AMD's equivalent to NVIDIA TwinView) or cloning a display.