Phoronix posted AMD Catalyst 2013 Linux Graphics Driver Year-In-Review

After a few days ago delivering the 2013 NVIDIA Linux Year-In-Review, an annual article I've been writing for both AMD and NVIDIA since 2005 to cover the Linux driver and support improvements made each passing year, it's now time to take a look at the Catalyst Linux driver releases from 2013. While NVIDIA added many new features to their Linux driver, enhanced many existing features, and continued delivering first-rate Linux GPU support at launch-time, it's not been the same for AMD's Linux team.

With AMD no longer abiding by a monthly release process for Catalyst Linux/Windows driver updates, as they had been doing for many years, the Linux updates have tended to be seldom at times. In fact, if going to AMD's web-site to look at their AMD Catalyst Display Driver releases for Linux, their only official releases of 2013 listed on AMD.com were Catalyst 13.1 and Catalyst 13.4. After that, they only list the most recent beta: Catalyst 13.11 Linux Beta v9.4 (at the time of writing this article in mid-December due to my ongoing travels). They've released other beta Linux driver releases throughout the year and a few more official releases (but for whatever reason disappearing from the AMD.com web-site), but not as many as the Windows Catalyst beta releases that are much more frequent.

  AMD Catalyst 2013 Linux Graphics Driver Year-In-Review