Phoronix discusses AMD's Radeon HD 8000 open source driver they have put out in the wild for Linux.  Yes, the 8000 series is not yet out.

AMD's been planning for a second quarter release of the Radeon HD 8000 "Sea Islands" GPUs while the first to arrive hardware will be the HD 8800 "Oland" graphics processors. This hardware that succeeds the Radeon HD 7000 series isn't as radically different as going from the HD 6000 to HD 7000 series, which yielded a better turnaround time with the initial HD 8000 series support.

AMD has released their 13.2 beta Catalyst driver which not only imporoves performance in Crysis 3 beta, but also with DMC and Crysis 2.  It also addresses the issues raised in the Tech Report article with frame latency in Skyrim, Borderlands 2, and Guild Wars 2.

· Improves performance up to 15% in high MSAA cases for the Crysis 3 beta release
o Future updates will be made to AMD Catalyst 13.2 Beta to further improve performance in Crysis 3 for both single GPU and CrossFire configurations
· Significantly improves latency performance in Skyrim, Boderlands 2, and Guild Wars 2
· Improves single GPU performance up to 50% for DmC Devil May Cry
· Improves CrossFire performance up to 10% for Crysis 2
· Resolves Texture flickering seen in DirectX9.0c applications.

AMD has released their 13.2 Catalyst drivers today.  They include all of the improvements from the 12.11 beta drivers.

AMD Catalyst 13.1 features a newly designed 3D application settings page, allow users to more easily adjust and control their 3D settings on a per application basis.

Tech Report has tested AMD's Catalyst 13.2 beta with a Radeon HD 7950 and it has shown to improve stuttering or frame draw times.

We asked Mr. Dodd whether the changes included in this beta driver would impact performance generally in DirectX 9 applications or only in the three DX9-based games we tested. We also inquired about whether the previously mentioned buffer size tweak for Borderlands 2 was included. Here's his answer:

Basically the fix was different per application (for the DX9 applications) – each fix involved tweaking various driver parameters. In the case of Borderlands 2, yes it did involve tweaking the buffer size.

So what we have in Cat 13.2 is a series of targeted tweaks that appear to work quite well for the games in question. However, Dodd says additional improvements are coming down the pike, including a rewrite of the software memory manager for GPUs based on the Graphics Core Next architecture that should bring a more general improvement:

The driver does not yet contain the new video memory manager. Our intention is release a new driver in a few weeks, which does include the new Video memory manager, which will help resolve latency issues for DX11/DX10 applications.

AMD has released Catalyst 12.11 beta11 for Far Cry 3 coming tomorrow.

Improves performance in Far Cry 3 (up to 25% with 8xMSAA, SSAO enabled @ 1600p, and up to 15% with 8xMSAA, HDAO enabled @1600p) (AMD Catalyst 12.11 CAP2 must also be installed)
Resolves a sporadic system hang encountered with a single AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series GPU seen on X58 and X79 chipsets.
Resolves an intermittent hang encountered with AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series GPUs in a CrossFire Eyefinity setup.
Resolves image corruption found in certain DirectX 9.0c titles
Resolve missing fonts issue in XBMC
Resolves no video issue found in Media Player Classic Home Cinema when using full or half floating point processing
Resolves stability issues found in the previous AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta8 driver for Linux
For users experiencing issues with HDMI Audio under Ubuntu 12.04, users should try installing the “dkms-hda - 0.201211291615~precise1” package from https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-audio-dev/+archive/alsa-daily/+packages and reboot; this will resolve the HDMI Audio issue found in Ubuntu 12.04
AMD Catalyst 12.11 CAP2 has just been released, and should be used in conjunction with AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta11
Improves Far Cry 3 performance for single GPU configurations with AA enabled