AMD 2012 Catalyst Driver Year-In-Review

For the past seven years I have been writing annual year-in-review articles for the AMD and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers. Much progress has been made in recent years for bettering the OpenGL Linux support from these leading closed-source graphics drivers and this year is no exception. Up today is a recap of this year's AMD Catalyst graphics driver releases plus benchmarks of this year's driver releases going back to Catalyst 11.12.

Tomorrow will be the NVIDIA 2012 Year In Review while today are just the AMD results. This year saw some fundamental changes for the Catalyst driver with AMD abandoning their strict monthly release cadence and moved towards to pushing betas and new releases whenever warranted. Earlier this year they also ended their AMD Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series support by pushing the older GPU generations into a "Catalyst Legacy" driver that really hasn't seen any significant updates on Linux. In terms of any revolutionary improvements to the Catalyst Linux driver, there really were not any major leaps forward, but towards the end of the year AMD began to work on OpenGL fixes and improvements because of Valve Software bringing their games to Linux.