AMD Catalyst 9.5 Driver For Linux Released

If you closely follow the Phoronix Forums you already know that the Catalyst 9.5 Linux driver is available for download. In fact, it has been available since this past Friday on their web server, but it was not officially announced and linked to from their driver web-site until now. The Catalyst 9.5 driver release notes do not mention much, in fact they are basically a facsimile of the Catalyst 9.4 driver release notes.

There are already over 100 posts in the Phoronix Forums about this updated proprietary Linux driver for Radeon and FireGL graphics cards from AMD. Some of the fixes in the Catalyst 9.5 driver include fixing screen corruption after performing a VT switch when using a VESA frame-buffer, a blank screen issue when resizing the video window, supports TV properties when RandR 1.2 is being used, finishes the GLSL 1.4 support, and there are also various OpenGL fixes.

Overall the feedback so far on the Catalyst 9.5 has been fairly positive with some users reporting minor improvements. The latest ATI Catalyst driver for Linux can be downloaded at AMD.com if you are not relying upon your distribution's package management system.

The Catalyst 9.5 driver for Linux continues to lack support for X-Video Bitstream Acceleration (XvBA). Well, technically everything is in place since last year, but AMD still has not released the documentation or patches to make this accelerated video interface usable by any media players. There is also no Linux 2.6.29 kernel support yet, nor any support for the forthcoming Linux 2.6.30 kernel.