ATI Catalyst Linux Display Driver 12.4 Review for Linux

ATI Catalyst Driver for Linux is the ATI Proprietary Linux driver currently provides hardware acceleration for 3D graphics and video playback. It also includes support for dual displays and TV Output.

The ATI Proprietary Linux driver currently supports RADEON 8500 and later, as well as FireGL 8700 and later products. We do not currently plan to include support for any products earlier than this. Drivers for earlier products should already be available from the DRI Project or Utah-GLX project.

2D Graphics Acceleration

XFree86 currently provides hardware 2D acceleration for most ATI graphics adapters. For new products it normally takes at least 12 weeks from retail product shipment for driver support to be become publicly available.

3D Graphics Acceleration

ATI has made the necessary hardware and programming information available to Linux developers for the development of hardware 3D acceleration.

Video Playback

XFree86 uses the XVideo (or Xv) extension to enable hardware video overlay, which is used to accelerate the playback of video clips. The following drivers all support video playback using Xv.

Video Capture

Video capture under XFree86 is currently handled using the Video4Linux2 (or V4L2) API, which should be available for 2.2.x and later kernels. It is included with most current Linux distributions.

TV Output

TV Output can be enabled in the ATI Proprietary Linux Driver for RADEON 8500 and later cards that have this feature.