AMD Catalyst 10.7 For Linux Has Eyefinity Support

As was widely anticipated, today AMD is rolling out their Catalyst 10.7 graphics driver for Windows and Linux platforms. On the Windows side, their Catalyst 10.7 rolls out support for OpenGL ES 2.0. ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000/5000 series graphics cards (along with the FirePro hardware) running Windows can now take advantage of OpenGL ES 2.0 support with HTML5 for in-browser graphics rendering. However, that support hasn't yet made its way to the Catalyst Linux driver, but there are other changes packed away in this month's update.

First and foremost, the Catalyst 10.7 Linux driver finally rolls out official support for Eyefinity on consumer-grade Radeon HD 5000 series hardware. Eyefinity is AMD's technology introduced with the ATI Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" graphics cards for driving three or more displays simultaneously from a single graphics card. Back when it was publicly displayed last September, 24 monitors were being driven via Eyefinity and that was running under Linux and demoed by Matthew Tippett. Finally, with the Catalyst 10.7 driver, this technology is officially supported on Linux.

The Catalyst 10.7 also carries "production support" for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (even though going back to Catalyst 10.4 has worked with the Lucid Lynx release) and "early look support" for openSUSE 11.3. There are also a handful of resolved issues with the Catalyst 10.7 Linux driver, which are listed below.

- Applying display rotation using Catalyst Control Center or XRandR no longer causes display to turn blank with mouse cursor
- Disabling the primary display in clone/dual-head mode no longer causes Catalyst Control Center not to launch after X restart
- CrossFire can now be enabled properly on the first Gemimi card under a 2 Gemini multi-adapter configuration
- Xserver no longer fails when applying "Maintain Aspect Ratio" option from GPU scaling at maximum resolution
- [SUSE] Desktop corruption no longer visible after applying rotation using Catalyst Control Center and restarting X
- Enabling a second ASIC without a monitor connected no longer causes black screen and X window not launching when startx is executed
- [Ubuntu 10.04] X segmentation fault no longer occur at startup on multi-ASIC systems
- Catalyst Control Center: Gamma control changes no longer affect the wrong display in clone mode
- Switching to clone mode by pressing Fn+F4 now functions properly after connecting

That's about it for the Catalyst 10.7 Linux release. While not officially announced, Catalyst 10.7 may also work better with newer kernel and X.Org Server releases too. It's unknown right now whether AMD will be adding OpenGL ES 2.0 support to their Linux driver -- chances are they will, but like the time it took Eyefinity to be certified on Linux, it could be a number of months till it emerges. At least those with the open-source ATI Gallium3D drivers will be able to have OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0 support using the OpenGL ES state tracker.

The Catalyst 10.7 Linux x86/x86_64 driver can be downloaded at AMD.com.