AMD 2007 Year In Review
In what would be the last monthly driver release on their old code-base, the fglrx 8.40.4 driver was another non-exciting maintenance release. The 8.40.4 release had contained a native x86_64 edition of the AMD Catalyst Control Center.
Where the year really started to get interesting for ATI/AMD was in September when they had introduced their new Linux OpenGL driver. This driver was in development for over a year and many resources were devoted to this driver, which is why there were a number of maintenance releases with very few changes. AMD had granted Phoronix unprecedented access to deliver the details on this new Linux driver a week before it was released to the public. We had been testing this driver internally since the end of July. In our 8.41 Driver Preview we broke all of the details on this new driver, which included the Radeon HD 2000 (R600) support and major performance improvements for all supported Radeon product families. These performance improvements were phenomenal and was common to see the performance almost doubled (R300/400, R500, HD 2400/2600, HD 2900XT benchmarks). A week later, the driver was released and publicly became known as the 8.41.7 release. While we had ran into very few problems during our testing, this wasn't a joyous release for everyone as some users had experienced problems and the release was intended for just the Radeon R600 customers.
While our Year in Review articles are targeted just on the binary drivers, it was the same week in September when we broke the news at Phoronix that AMD would be officially supporting an open-source display driver. This driver was written with specifications that AMD had provided to the community (without any Non-Disclosure Agreement or other distribution restrictions) and was written through a partnership with Novell. This driver has become known as RadeonHD (xf86-video-radeonhd) and currently supports the R500 and R600 series. If you are interested, we have published many articles on this new RadeonHD driver.
Running off the excitement of the 8.41 driver with its R600 support and performance boosts, the AMD 8.42 driver had brought the much-anticipated AIGLX support. AIGLX is needed for using Compiz / Compiz Fusion without XGL for accelerating desktop effects / eye-candy. The 8.42.3 driver also shipped with X Server 1.4 support, TexturedVideo (X-Video) playback fix, and this driver was geared for R600 and earlier Radeon families.
In November, AMD began branding their proprietary Linux driver with the Catalyst moniker and thus the 8.43 release is publicized as Catalyst 7.11. This driver had brought Linux 2.6.23 kernel support accompanied by support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 and initial support for the Radeon HD 3850 and Radeon HD 3870 GPUs.