AMD Catalyst 2013 Linux Graphics Driver Year-In-Review
After Catalyst 13.6 it was a fairly quiet summer for AMD's Linux team. In August was then Catalyst 13.8 Beta for Linux. The Catalyst 13.8 Beta for Linux brought full OpenGL 4.3 support, updated Linux kernel compatibility, initial support for surface resizing, support for updated Linux distributions, and bug-fixes throughout.
A second Catalyst 13.8 Beta also arrived in August for Linux users. There was no public change-log while Phoronix readers had reported this release to be rather problematic. In September these changes from the past few months of betas were released as stable in the form of Catalyst 13.9, but again without an official change-log. It was then discovered that AMD posted the wrong driver, "You should continue using AMD Catalyst 13.8 Beta for Linux. We mistakenly posted a Linux AMD Catalyst 13.9 driver, which was older than the AMD Catalyst 13.8 Beta driver. Linux users can expect a new Linux driver coming in Oct, 2013"
Next up in recapping the AMD Linux activities from 2013 was a Catalyst 13.10 Beta. This driver namely brought various bug fixes to the binary blob.
In October was then the Catalyst 13.11 Beta to prepare support for the new AMD Radeon R9 290 "Hawaii" graphics processors. The one thing AMD had going for it at this time of the year was beating NVIDIA to supporting the Linux 3.11/3.12 kernels.
Released later in October was a new Catalyst 13.11 Beta with proper AMD Radeon R9 290 series Linux support. Some Phoronix users also reported OpenGL performance improvements and other fixes.
One month later was the Catalyst 13.11 Linux Beta v9.4, which fixed some outstanding issues but brought no major features or noted enhancements. By that time I had learned first hand that the Radeon R9 290 performance on Linux was disappointing, but that driver had carried no R9 290 performance optimizations for Linux gamers.
In November after I had went out and purchased a Radeon R9 290 I discovered that the AMD Radeon R9 290 performance was poor and comparatively did much worse than the Windows driver performance. Lower-end NVIDIA graphics cards on the NVIDIA Linux driver were beating out the R9 290 and proving a very different story than the Windows reviews. The latest Catalyst Linux update did not help improve the R9 290 performance and at the time of writing the OpenGL performance is still cringing.
Update: Last week AMD did release Catalyst 13.12 for Linux but it brought only some bug-fixes and was based on an older release branch with no new features... For more comments on that latest driver see the forum comments from that 13.12 article.
That's all the AMD Catalyst Linux driver releases of 2013 at the time of publishing... Mostly just bug fixes for various games, other OpenGL regressions, and other minor additions along with new X.Org Server and Linux kernel support. Aside from new hardware enablement, the biggest AMD Catalyst features of 2013 would likely be full OpenGL 4.3 support and GLX_EXT_buffer_age support. Is there something else I happened to miss? Let me know via our forums, but overall it wasn't too exciting in 2013 compared to NVIDIA's major Linux driver updates. It's also frustrating that now at the end of the year the Catalyst Linux updates have slowed down and with the R9 290 hardware being problematic under Linux, AMD has yet to issue an official statement or provide any new beta releases to try to address the performance problems. Seeing as I spent $400+ USD on a GPU just for testing purposes, yes, it's frustrating.
While AMD sent out many graphics cards in the past for Linux testing at Phoronix, this year they sent out zero. All the AMD Radeon graphics cards benchmarked at Phoronix were GPUs I had personally purchased. While other vendors are gaining interest in Linux due to more games appearing and the interesting opportunities around SteamOS and Steam Machines, some at AMD appear to only be losing interest in Linux.