AMD Catalyst 8.7 Linux Driver Released

Since last month's release of Catalyst 8.6 for Linux we've seen the introduction of the Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 graphics cards and we've been allowed to share with you that CrossFire is coming to Linux along with other yet to be announced features. Today AMD has released the Catalyst 8.7 Linux driver and it doesn't deliver any new ground-breaking features, but it does bring a few improvements.

In fact, the new features in this release are just bringing official Ubuntu 8.04 and SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 SP2 support. In addition, there is early support for OpenSuSE 11.0 and Red Flag DT 7.0.

There are also a few fixes such as preventing freezes when resuming from OpenGL screensavers, images failing to display after installing the driver, corruption when switching displays, TV standard changes, fixing an X segmentation fault with Textured Video, and other fixes but nothing major. Of course, this is also the first ATI Catalyst driver release that officially mentions the Radeon HD 4800 series support.

There isn't too much for an end-user to see with Catalyst 8.7, as you can see from the release notes, but just wait and see what they have in store. Download the x86/x86_64 8.7 Linux driver here. Discuss this Linux driver in the Phoronix Forums.