AMD News Archives

As a quick follow-up to yesterday's article about a new TearFree option for the Radeon X.Org driver as the latest effort to eliminate tearing, that feature is now in Git.

For those not too busy discussing and digging through the new open-source AMDGPU kernel driver that was published yesterday, out today are some new patches for AMDKFD, the HSA Linux kernel driver.

With yesterday's release of the new open-source "AMDGPU" Linux graphics driver stack we finally have a look at some of the hardware enablement code for the graphics processors of the upcoming "Carrizo" APUs.

As part of AMD finally releasing the AMDGPU kernel driver yesterday along with initial Iceland/Carrizo/Tonga support in Gallium3D, they also open-sourced a component formerly within the Catalyst proprietary driver.

Windows users this week saw the release of an AMD Catalyst 15.4 Beta driver, but if you're looking out for the equivalent Linux build, sadly it has yet to surface.

For those running older Radeon graphics cards with the R600 Gallium3D graphics driver, an important update landed in Mesa 10.6-devel Git this past week.

While AMD has yet to make the Catalyst 15.3 Beta Linux graphics driver available for download from their web-site, they released the driver to Canonical and as such this new AMD Linux driver has been available in Ubuntu 15.04 for a few weeks. Canonical is now back-porting this proprietary driver back into Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr.

Tom Stellard of AMD has landed initial support into the AMD GPU LLVM back-end for the assembler and supporting inline assembly.

George Kyriazis of AMD has provided patches to the Blender project for vastly improving their OpenCL Cycles renderer support and allow for it to work with AMD GPUs.

Some Radeon DRM changes have already been queued for Linux 4.1 and now the AMDKFD HSA driver has its initial -next pull request for this next version of the Linux kernel.

With this month's release of the Catalyst 15.3 Beta for Windows, FreeSync Technology support was added. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like any Linux support is imminent.

A patch published on Sunday for the new AMDKFD HSA kernel driver adds support for using more than one graphics card/driver.

AMD issued two job postings this past week for hiring more open-source Linux graphics driver developers.

While we're still waiting for AMD to release their new GPU kernel driver for supporting the existing R9 285 "Tonga" graphics card and their next-gen graphics cards coming out later this year, on the CPU side the AMD Linux developers have already started shipping patches to support their next-gen CPU architecture not expected for release until 2016~2017. Tux, meet the AMD Zen architecture.

Early adopters of Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet can now use AMD's new Catalyst 15.3 Beta driver that's been packaged for Ubuntu and uploaded to the Vivid repository prior to its release on AMD.com.

It looks like in the next two weeks AMD will finally be releasing an updated Catalyst/fglrx graphics driver for Linux users.

Taiwanese SoC manufacturer MediaTek is said to be licensing AMD graphics technology for use in future high-end ARM SoC designs.

Another interesting announcement at GDC2015 yesterday besides the new Vulkan API, the Source 2 Engine, Unity 5, and more was AMD's LiquidVR announcement.

This month AMD is planning to finally make their Mantle graphics API more "open" by releasing a 450-page programming guide and API reference for Mantle.

AMD has released more details on their forthcoming "Carrizo" APUs from the IEEE International Solid-State CIrcuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco.

Support for the GL_AMD_pinned_memory OpenGL extension has landed within Mesa and is implemented for the R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers. This patch series also lands the Userptr support for the open-source AMD graphics drivers on the user-space side.

Beyond the big set of AMD Radeon changes for Linux 3.20, Alex Deucher of AMD mailed in some important Radeon DRM driver fixes today that are a big deal for some R9 290 "Hawaii" users of the open-source driver.

Interstellar Marines is a science fiction FPS game in development that's powered by the Unity 4 Game Engine. While it's been available in early access mode for Linux gamers going back several months, the latest AMD Catalyst driver still seems to be having issues with this game.

Earlier this month I wrote about AMD preparing open-source HSA support for Carrizo APUs that aren't launching until later this year. Today more patches were published for the AMDKFD kernel driver in preparing for the forthcoming Volcanic Islands APUs.

It seems the corporate restructuring at AMD isn't yet over with the post-CES announcement yesterday of three more top-level executives leaving the company.

Oded Gabbay of AMD has sent in his latest AMDKFD kernel driver changes that he's hoping to have integrated for the Linux 3.20 kernel merge window.

Patches published by AMD today prepare the AMDKFD Linux kernel HSA driver for initial support of forthcoming AMD "VI" APUs.

A number of new monitors that support AMD FreeSync are being shown off this week at CES. FreeSync is AMD's method of matching the monitor's variable refresh rate to that of the graphics card that is similar to the now VESA-approved DisplayPort Adaptive-Sync.

This really shouldn't come as a huge surprise, but AMD won't support HSA on 32-bit Linux.

As said last week that a huge new Catalyst Linux driver release would be coming on Tuesday and sure enough it has arrived. Catalyst 14.12 is the biggest AMD proprietary Linux graphics driver update in quite some time.

Due out next week is a very significant update to AMD's Catalyst Linux graphics driver as they continue to work towards the unified AMD Linux driver strategy.

The AMDKFD driver, which has been under development in the public spotlight for the past few months as a necessary piece to having AMD HSA open-source support on Linux, will premiere with the Linux 3.19 kernel.

While the new "AMDGPU" kernel driver won't be merged until at least Linux 3.20, it looks like the AMDKFD driver could be merged for the upcoming Linux 3.19 kernel.

Last week we reported on AMD's plans for a complete user-space open-source HSA stack. Today they have finally delivered!

As a follow up to yesterday's 16-way AMD GPU comparison with the latest open-source Linux graphics drivers, here's some numbers with the same graphics cards when adding in the Catalyst Linux graphics driver... The numbers may very well surprise you.

It looks like the first point release to LLVM 3.5 will be out in December.

The R600g Gallium3D driver has new patches available -- along with a needed kernel patch -- for supporting OpenGL 4.0's GL_ARB_draw_indirect extension.

In the coming days AMD will be releasing AMD's HSA run-time library as open-source!

For those stuck running on the R300g driver, which supports the ATI Radeon X1000 (R500) series and older GPUs, you really should consider upgrading your graphics card and likely your system. But if you're set on using the R300g driver going into the foreseeable future, you might as well upgrade Mesa.

AMD reported their Q3'2014 results yesterday and they weren't good for the company. AMD will be restructuring again and will be slashing their global headcount by about 7%.

AMD's patches to add support to compiling to native object code for the "Clover" OpenCL state tracker in Mesa's Gallium3D and for the Radeon Gallium3D driver to take advantage of this functionality, has landed.

Along with today's R9 285 GPU scaling tests from Ubuntu, other Linux graphics tests I ran from the AMD Radeon R9 285 GCN 1.2 graphics card is a check whether to see Catalyst AI is doing much on Linux.

Given yesterday's big update about AMD's unified Linux driver approach and creating a new "AMDGPU" kernel driver, open-source driver developers independent of AMD who have worked on the current Radeon code are already proposing API improvements.

The Linux 3.18 kernel will bring support for reading the core temperature of AMD's forthcoming "Carrizo" APUs.

The AMD news keeps rolling today... The latest is word hitting the wire that Rory Read has stepped down from AMD.

If you go back more than seven years ago, lots of people took easy aim at the state of ATI/AMD's Linux graphics drivers. Back then, they didn't even have an open-source strategy... How times have changed.

On Monday I wrote about AMD adding native object code support to their Radeon Gallium3D drivers and Clover. Besides being a huge performance win for OpenCL kernel compile times, this work is also instrumental as part of AMD's open-source HSA Linux plans.

There's a lot of work going on right now to the AMD Catalyst Linux graphics driver. We've written about new features coming to an upcoming Catalyst Linux driver but silently being pushed into the latest round of release is a GLSL shader disk cache.

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.

Earlier this year I delivered the exclusive news how AMD was looking at a new Linux driver strategy for Catalyst that involved leveraging the open-source Radeon DRM kernel driver. The strategy at the time effectively meant just making Catalyst a user-space blob and riding off the open-source Radeon kernel driver to share more common code and hopefully lead to a better experience. It looks like this driver strategy is moving forward.