AMD 2007 Year In Review

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 26 December 2007 at 01:48 PM EST. Page 2 of 6. 8 Comments.

The 8.35.5 display driver, which was released in March of this year, had finally added a new graphical control center for their Linux driver. Previous to the introduction of the AMD Catalyst Control Center Linux Edition, the ATI FireGL Control Panel for Linux was quite useless and displayed very little information with minimal end-user adjustments possible. The Linux driver was in severe need of a new control panel. This Qt-based control center isn't as elaborate as the one that ships with the Windows Catalyst driver, but it does display the card information as well as color adjustments and display management support for multiple monitors and adjusting the monitor's resolution. Subsequent updates to their Linux driver had added new features as well.

A month later in fglrx 8.36.5, official support was added for the Linux 2.6.20 kernel and build support for Ubuntu 7.04 "Feisty Fawn". Adding to the AMD Catalyst Control Center in this Linux driver release was locale support for 23 different languages and addressing a few bugs.

As another "maintenance release", the fglrx 8.37.6 driver had added several fixes including fixing TV-Out when using X-Video and adding support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. This driver had contained v1.0 of the AMD Catalyst Control Center for Linux and this version had added a 3D page for manually overriding the anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering controls. In addition, enabling 8-bit double-buffered overlay planes and waiting for vertical retraces could be toggled.

The 8.38.6 Linux driver, which shipped in June, was a bare minimal update and had contained very little end-user changes, while lacking X Server 1.3 support. Coming three days after the 8.38.6 driver release was an 8.38.7 hot-fix release. This was the first-ever hot-fix release for ATI/AMD's Linux driver and came because 8.38.6 had shipped with a regression that would cause aticonfig to crash and remove the xorg.conf file in some circumstances.

A month later, the 8.39.4 driver shipped with X Server 1.3 support and proper Fedora 7 build support. This driver had an unexplained XML file included and even some functions pertaining to the (still unreleased) RV770 GPU. Just a month after their first-ever Linux hot-fix, the 8.39.4 driver was temporarily recalled. The 8.39.4 driver installer had a bug that caused Linux users to have a watermark in the lower corner of their screen that had said "AMD: Testing Use Only". This watermark is used internally at AMD as well as with their closed beta testing program. Four days after the 8.39.4 driver was recalled, it was re-released with the watermark disabled.

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