AMD Catalyst 14.9 Officially Released For Linux

AMD has released the Catalyst 14.9 Linux graphics driver today with some modest changes but it's not the really big driver update we're waiting for.

The Catalyst 14.9 Linux graphics driver includes official Ubuntu 14.04 LTS support (yes, right ahead of the Ubuntu 14.10 debut), official Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0 support, installation improvements (recommending distribution-specific packages by default), and new hardware support.

The new GPU support just comes down to the recently launched Radeon R9 285. The Radeon R9 285 introduces AMD's GCN 1.2 architecture with the core being a Tong-based GPU. Unfortunately AMD hasn't sent out any review sample of the GPU so we haven't yet been able to do any Linux tests of the graphics card.

More information on the Catalyst 14.9 Linux driver release can be found via the AMD release notes. This driver is based on the fglrx 14.30 release stream so it's newer than the previous 14.6 Beta but the recently released Catalyst with OpenCL 2.0 support is based on the newer fglrx 14.40 stream. Meanwhile, the really interesting changes are coming with fglrx 14.50 that hopefully isn't too far out from its public debut. Next week we're also supposed to learn more about AMD's unified open-source driver strategy.