Outside of the performance, though, there are some seriously awesome improvements to this driver set when it comes to the feature set, especially when it comes to CrossFire improvements. In saying that, if you don't make use of the technology this driver is still a fantastic one that offers a nice performance boost in cards starting as low as the HD 5770 from our testing.

Months after the ATI Radeon HD 5000 series (known by the "Evergreen" family codename) was introduced, AMD has finally pushed out the first bits of open-source code. This morning if you are to checkout the xf86-video-ati DDX driver branch there is initial user-space mode-setting support for the Radeon HD 5000 series GPUs. The ATI kernel mode-setting support that we really care about these days is also about done, but it isn't yet published. The open-source ATI driver currently offers no 2D (EXA) acceleration and the 3D support either through a classic Mesa driver or Gallium3D also is not yet available.

Highlights of the ATI Catalyst™ 10.1 Windows release include:

Performance improvements  

• Left 4 Dead 2 – Overall performance improves as much as 3% on ATI Radeon™ HD 5700 series products and ATI Radeon™ HD 5800 series products
• Crysis – Performance improves as much as 3% on ATI Radeon™ HD 5700 series products and as much as 4% on ATI Radeon™ HD 5800 series products

High-lights of Resolved Issues  

• [Catalyst Control Center] The display order will now reflect changes properly when Eyefinity is re-arranged while desktop is rotated to portrait mode
• Hot unplugging one of the displays in an Eyefinity configuration no longer causes rotation modes to disappear from Catalyst Control Center
• [Catalyst Control Center] Enabling LCD Overdrive will no longer cause mouse cursor to magnify when moved overtop of the "Calibration Preview"
• Firefox now works properly and video no longer drop frames when playing Youtube clips with Adobe Flash Player 10
•  [Catalyst Control Center] Newly added custom modes will now appear properly in desktop area tree view
• Confirmation dialogue window will now appear when setting up Eyefinity mode
• 120 Hz is no longer missing from display modes for specific digital displays
• Overscan/underscan issue no longer occurs when setting displays to HDTV modes
• Performance drop no longer observed during some scenes of Resident Evil 5cinematics
• Blocky grass and trees no longer visible in Unigine "Heaven" in OpenGL mode

Highlights of the Linux ATI Catalyst™ 10.1 release include:

New Features

Support for new Linux operating systems

• This release of ATI Catalyst™ Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems: 

• Ubuntu 9.10 production support

For more information on ATI Catalyst™ 10.1 (for Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Linux versions), including all of the resolved issues in this release, please see the ATI Catalyst™ 10.1 release notes. 

Stay tuned for next month’s ATI Catalyst™ release J  It’s going to be a good one!

Part of the reason why 2009 was not as exciting as past years with regards to Catalyst Linux driver improvements is because AMD has nearly reached feature parity with the Catalyst Windows driver , so there is not a whole lot of missing features. Missing still though from the Catalyst Linux driver is support for 4-card CrossFireX, Eyefinity (though it is coming soon), and other miscellaneous drivers. What was delivered in 2009 though for the Catalyst Linux driver include support for the latest OpenGL 3.2 extensions (along with OpenGL 3.0 and 3.1), Hybrid CrossFire, MultiView, support for the AMD Display Library (ADL) SDK, compositing improvements, and enhancements to the AMD Catalyst Control Center Linux Edition (including integrated support for RandR 1.2). That is about it for the new features.