ATI AYiR 2006

On July 24, 2006 ATI Technologies and Advanced Micro Devices had announced that they would be joining forces to create a processing powerhouse. This deal was approved by shareholders and was completed in October of 2006. However, coming out shortly after the July announcement was the 8.27.10 driver. This release had appended support for X.Org 7.1 (X11R71), Fedora Core packaging script support, and fixed the Radeon X1000 TV-out support. The 8.27.10 fglrx drivers supported X.Org 7.1 though it had not added support for AIGLX or the GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap extension support. The Fedora Core packaging script support allowed for improved compatibility on Fedora Core 3, Fedora Core 4, and Fedora Core 5.

The next ATI fglrx display driver to hit the Internet was version 8.28.8. Highlighted in this release was a combined i386 and x86_64 installer, pairmode aticonfig option, preliminary support for Fedora Core 6, and more bug fixing. The combined installer bundled the i386 and x86_64 drivers into a single package -- the only negative impact was that it had inflated the size of the download. However, this driver allows you to use the same installer on both architectures.

The next driver release was the 8.29.6 release. This release finally slowed down the rapid features we had seen in the driver releases through the summer though this driver still had quite a bit of bug fixes. One important note is that in the fglrx 8.29.6 driver the R200 series support was removed from the main driver development branch meaning that cards up to and including the Radeon 9250 are no longer supported with newer drivers. However, the R200 series does have reliable open-source support through the Radeon driver (with the exception of reliable TV-out support). Some of the changes in the 8.29.6 release include Linux 2.6.18 kernel support, fglrx + Transgaming Cedega improvements, and several other known issues being resolved.