ATI 8.29.6 Display Drivers

As we had received these drivers late for testing, we were unable to perform our standard set of benchmarks that we perform each month. However, we had extensively tried out the 8.29 Beta candidate. From our testing thus far with an Radeon X1800XT, there was no definitive performance changes. If we do, however, find any performance oddities we will be sure to pass them along on Phoronix. Feel free to share your experiences on the Phoronix Forums.

The changes in this latest build have had very little effect on the frame-rate performance, which continues to be significantly lower than that of ATI's Windows CATALYST suite. The feature change in this release has solely been the Linux 2.6.18 kernel support. There are also a few issues resolved in this release. Radeon R200 support has also been removed from the 8.29+ drivers. Outside of any performance improvements, what remains to be seen by the fglrx display drivers is GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap support for AIGLX. As brought up in the beginning of this article, this release is not nearly as exciting as some of the recent driver releases, which raises the point that we have likely reached a slowdown in the development cycle as they prepare for the next onslaught of new features and improvements.