AMD Catalyst 2013 Linux Graphics Driver Year-In-Review

I've been writing yearly recaps of AMD's Catalyst driver going back to 2005 and this year on the Catalyst Linux side it's probably been the worst ever -- at least in the past five years. While long-term the AMD Catalyst driver is much better now than where it was at long ago, 2013 for AMD's Linux Catalyst driver seemed to mostly just be on a steady course.

The Catalyst 13.x Linux driver updates were mostly about bug fixing with no real innovations being presented. The driver updates brought OpenGL 4.3 and GLX_EXT_buffer_age support and some other minor enhancements, but nothing to get AMD's Linux customers really excited. When it came to the bug fixing, there was lots going on and mostly bringing the binary driver into better shape for the latest native Linux games being offered through Valve's Steam client.

The benchmarks in this article showed that regressions are still a common occurrence when using AMD's Catalyst Linux driver -- something that I'm sure many Phoronix Forums users will also quickly attest to -- and that Catalyst 13.4 seemed to be particularly bad. Some of the regressions were addressed and for some OpenGL/OpenCL workloads the latest driver results are measurably ahead where the performance was at in January with Catalyst 13.1.

Still upsetting though was AMD's botched support for the Radeon R9 290 and its performance still being poor compared to the AMD competition and older Radeon graphics processors. The R9 290 hardware has been out for a while now but there haven't been many beta updates for Linux customers this last quarter of the year. Since I was one of the AMD Linux customers that spent $400+ USD for the latest high-end hardware, I am certainly anxious to see fixed drivers. I've also made other AMD hardware purchases this year since AMD doesn't appear as interested in Linux these days so the review samples have dried up.

While the 2013 Catalyst Linux driver updates weren't too great, on the open-source side the AMD Linux driver work was fantastic! AMD's open-source driver improvements in 2013 were splendid. Users of AMD's open-source Linux GPU driver saw Dynamic Power Management support and open-source UVD video acceleration as two of the biggest open-source AMD accomplishments of 2013.

On the open-source AMD driver side there were many performance improvements to the point that for older Radeon GPUs the performance can be sort of comparable to Catalyst. For the Radeon HD 7000 series and newer, the RadeonSI Gallium3D performance is improving and advanced a lot in 2013, but is still not yet at parity to the older R600 Gallium3D driver.

We've also seen AMD open-source advancements in the area of OpenCL/GPGPU, new OpenGL extension support from Mesa, and new GPU hardware enablement (most recently, open-source AMD Hawaii code). So at the end of the day, the few AMD Linux developers (and the community/independent open-source contributors) devoted to their open-source driver stack deserve much praise for the accomplishments in 2013! The AMD open-source Linux driver is immensely better at the end of 2013 than at the beginning thanks to DPM, UVD, performance improvements, and RadeonSI getting into shape.

If you want to buy an AMD Radeon graphics card, I would happily recommend the Radeon HD 5000/6000 series graphics cards where there is currently the best open-source driver support. In 2014 we will hopefully see the Radeon HD 7000 and Rx 200 series at the same level as their older counterparts. I hope that in 2014 we will see exciting and more dependable Catalyst Linux driver updates.

Ending this year I have much praise for the accomplishments of the open-source AMD Linux driver in 2013 but not many positive comments to say about the Catalyst Linux driver in 2013. AMD is the open-source Linux winner (along with Intel for integrated HD Graphics and their first-rate Linux support), but the binary loser.