AMD Is Launching A New Beta Program For Their Drivers

For years AMD had a very active, community-driven semi-private beta program for their (Catalyst, at the time) drivers but in recent years while going through tough financial times they cut back the program. However, they will now be working to restore this program and they will be looking for Linux participants too.

During the earlier beta program there was Linux coverage too with select community members being part of the NDA'ed process. It's been quiet in recent years but now they are working to ramp things up and also hired one of the former community organizers for their beta program.

Terry Makedon was talking about this renewed beta effort on a conference call recently when also talking about WattMan and how "Radeon Settings" might be open-sourced.

It's good to hear they are back to engaging on this beta program, but it will be interesting to see how useful it is on the Linux side. After all, AMD continues open-sourcing more of their code and the AMDGPU kernel DRM driver is now leveraged by their hybrid driver too. It may though be useful for those wanting to use AMD's closed-source OpenGL library for Linux gaming to help test what new Linux games do/don't work with it. Additionally, until the AMD Vulkan Linux driver is open-sourced, it may be useful there too. So for those few closed areas it may be worthwhile but it's great that more code is being opened, AMD is being more public on mailing lists with their patches and early feature work, etc.

It will be interesting to see what happens with this program in the months ahead on the Linux side.

Update: The beta sign-up is now available for applicants.