AMD's New Catalyst Driver Is Available To All Linux Users

Yesterday saw a SteamOS Linux update that shipped a new AMD Catalyst Linux driver that reportedly worked much better for popular Steam Linux games. That driver update led Valve to officially support AMD (and Intel) graphics on SteamOS. For non-SteamOS Linux users, that new AMD driver update is available for other distributions.

The "AMD Catalyst 13.11 LINUX Beta V9.95 Driver" is now available from AMD.com as the latest Linux Catalyst Beta.

This driver lists official resolved issues as a crash when resizing Konsole, brightness adjustment issues, kernel module compile failures, avoids a new GPL kernel symbol, and resolves a system hang on resume from S4 with an OpenGL screensaver. AMD acknowledges there's still open SteamOS issues about screen tearing with v-sync enabled and the SteamOS overlay while playing games can result in a slower UI response time.

Now that I'm working my way back to the states, I'll run some new AMD Catalyst driver tests to see how the driver update does -- especially if the AMD Radeon R9 290 Linux support is less of a Linux disaster. Share your AMD Radeon Catalyst driver experiences with this new update in our forums.