AMD has been making constant progress for the past 6 months by providing support for their graphics cards in Linux. There has been six driver releases, their driver numbering system has now changed (to reflect the year and month thereby releasing an update each month), the installer has gone through some much needed changes and best of all they have releases register specifications to lot more GPUs. A few days ago they announced the latest driver, AMD Catalyst 8.6 Linux Driver, for general availability. Yesterday it was reported that AMD ships Linux drivers on CD with just announced Radeon HD 4800 "RV770" series graphics cards along with same-day Linux support for these cards. This is indeed a great development since most hardware manufacturers provide no initial Linux driver support for bleeding edge hardware. Our friends in Phoronix also report that AMD is very close to reaching feature parity between the Windows and Linux drivers. Kudos to AMD for providing better Linux driver support.

I had no luck running the previous AMD 8.41 driver on my X300 Mobility Radeon. Supposedly 8.41 was supposed to provide greater performance compared to 8.40.

ATI (now part of AMD) has frustrated the linux community with closed-source blobs for their drivers. Dell and others have been asking AMD/ATI to come up with open-source drives. Until recently there have been no sign of compliance. Of course open-source drivers means opening their hardware which might lead to revealing some of their and their suppliers hardware specifications without a NDA.