AMD 8.41.7 Display Driver

After talking for the past week about AMD's new Linux efforts with announcing a new fglrx Linux driver overhaul and releasing ATI GPU specifications without a Non-Disclosure Agreement, the 8.41 fglrx driver is now released. You can now download this new Linux driver right now. This is the closed-source proprietary driver, however, much of the "engine" for this driver is rewritten and as we have been sharing in articles from the Radeon X800XL performance to the flagship Radeon HD 2900XT there are certainly some new accomplishments coming out of the AMD Linux camp. The new baseline open-source driver written by Novell should also be released shortly. In this article we have a few additional remarks on the AMD 8.41 Linux display driver for ATI Radeon graphics cards.

As we had shared in our 8.41 preview, this release is designed specifically for the AMD Radeon R600 (HD 2000) series. There are still bugs present for previous ATI GPU generations. However, all supported R300, R400, and R500 ASICs should be enabled. Just be forewarned that there will be some bugs present until the 8.42 and 8.43 releases that will batten down the hatches on the new driver. This release also does not support the FireGL series.

This driver does not support AIGLX for Beryl or Compiz, but that support will finally arrive next month with fglrx 8.42. Linux 2.6.23 kernel support for the fglrx driver will hopefully arrive next month as well.

The fglrx 8.41.7 driver adds Radeon HD 2000 series support in addition to the immense performance improvements all across their supported product families. For more information check out our R300/400, R500, and R600 benchmarks (including the HD 2400 and HD 2600 series). You may also be interested in Mark Shuttleworth's thoughts on this new driver.

The new 8.41.7 fglrx driver is available as of today. Check it out and let us know your thoughts on it in this Phoronix Forums thread. This driver should now work on Fedora 7 x86_64 and has a number of other fixes, but if you run into a new problem or an old problem that hasn't been fixed, we ask you share it with other ATI Linux users in our forums.