[FONT=Arial,Helvetica]AMD has released faster new ATI Catalyst drivers for Linux customers of its ATI FireGL professional graphics cards. The 8.49.7 Linux driver provides 33 percent faster OpenGL performance than the previous driver, claims the company.
(Click for larger view of the ATI FireGL V3600)
The drivers support the ATI FireGL V3600 professional card (pictured above), as well as the high-end ATI FireGL V8650, which offers a 2GB frame-buffer memory configuration. The driver is also said to be compatible with the consumer-level ATI Radeon graphics card.
The performance claims are based on OpenGL performance using the SPECviewperf 9 1280x1024x32 ugnx-01 subtest, says AMD. The tests were run on an HP xw4600 with an Intel Core2 Extreme Q6850 processor clocked at 3GHz and a 1333MHz FSB. The system was equipped with 8MB L2 cache and 4GB RAM, and ran Linux Red Hat 4.6. The results are said to be published here.
AMD released Catalyst 7.10 graphics drivers for the Linux desktop in October. The 7.10 release included a preview release of AIGLX (Accelerated Indirect GLX) support for the ATI Radeon, and it also supported ATI FireGL 8700 and later products. The AIGLX support was said to improve OpenGL 3D performance.
Version 8.49.7 of the ATI Catalyst driver is available for download, here, says AMD
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