AMD Forms A Tiger Team For Catalyst Improvements, Including Linux

I've found out from various people in the know that AMD has assembled a "tiger team" to tackle outstanding Catalyst driver issues. This tiger team isn't Linux specific, but Linux driver issues will be fully evaluated and tackled by this new group of driver specialists.

Instituted this year is a "tiger team" to provide elevated support for priority AMD customers. By definition, it's "a group of experts assigned to investigate and/or solve technical or systemic problems." This tiger team will try to resolve pressing issues to the Catalyst driver on both Windows and Linux in a more timely manner and with better answers for customers.

Before getting too excited, this tiger team appears to be primarily focused on AMD enterprise customers leveraging the Catalyst driver, but not the casual Linux gamer or enthusiast. For any change there, as has been the case for years, you're best off just expressing to the various AIB board partner that in fact you buy their products and you're using them on Linux.

Hopefully this tiger team will lead to measurable improvements to the AMD Catalyst Linux driver, especially as there's serious problems with their binary driver in modern OGL4 workloads -- while game related, examples like the Metro Redux games, Civilization: Beyond Earth, and BioShock Infinite.

Unfortunately I don't have any further details to share right now on who's making up this AMD Catalyst tiger team, but if I happen to hear any more details, I'll pass it along on Phoronix. Here's to hoping for some more exciting Catalyst Linux driver updates in 2015 as so far it's been quite lackluster on the closed-source driver side.