Graphics device drivers

AMD's proprietary graphics device driver "Radeon Software Crimson Edition" (Formerly Catalyst)

Main article: AMD Radeon Software Crimson

On November 24, 2015 AMD renamed their graphics drivers following the formation of the RTG (Radeon Technologies Group) to signify their commitment to providing better software support for their Graphics Cards. They completely overhauled the UI, built from the ground up in Qt (Qt is a software development framework with modular cross-platform libraries and tools) resulting in 10x faster start up, and 3X Faster initialization of the display than with the AMD Catalyst™ driver. It also has new and more intuitive navigation, a new game manager, new overdrive, and new video, display and AMD Eyefinity technology sections.^[16]
Unofficial modifications such as Omega drivers and DNA drivers were available. These drivers typically consist of mixtures of various driver file versions with some registry variables altered and are advertised as offering superior performance or image quality. They are, of course, unsupported, and as such, are not guaranteed to function correctly. Some of them also provide modified system files for hardware enthusiasts to run specific graphics cards outside of their specifications.

On operating systems

AMD Catalyst was based on a proprietary binary blob.

The unified kernel-mode driver (DRM/KMS) is utilzed by Catalyst and by Mesa 3D.^[17] amdkfd was mainlined into Linux kernel 3.19.^[18]

Radeon Software Crimson Edition is being developed for Microsoft Windows and Linux. As of July 2014, other operating system are not officially supported. This may be different for the AMD FirePro brand, which is based on identical hardware but features OpenGL-certified graphics device drivers.
ATI previously offered driver updates for their retail and integrated Macintosh video cards and chipsets. ATI stopped support for Mac OS 9 after the Radeon R200 cards, making the last officially supported card the Radeon 9250. The Radeon R100 cards up to the Radeon 7200 can still be used with even older classic Mac OS versions such as System 7, although not all features are taken advantage of by the older operating system.^[19]
Ever since ATI's acquisition by AMD, ATI no longer supplies or supports drivers for classic Mac OS nor macOS. macOS drivers can be downloaded from Apple's support website, while classic Mac OS drivers can be obtained from 3rd party websites that host the older drivers for users to download. ATI used to provide a preference panel for use in macOS called ATI Displays which can be used both with retail and OEM versions of its cards. Though it gives more control over advanced features of the graphics chipset, ATI Displays has limited functionality compared to Catalyst for Windows or Linux.

Free and open-source graphics device driver "Radeon"

Main article: free and open-source "radeon" graphics device driver

^[20]
The free and open-source for Direct Rendering Infrastructure has been under constant development by the Linux kernel developers, by 3rd party programming enthusiasts and by AMD employees. It is composed out of five parts:

1. Linux kernel component DRM
   • this part received dynamic re-clocking support in Linux kernel version 3.12 and its performance has become comparable to that of AMD Catalyst
2. Linux kernel component KMS driver: basically the device driver for the display controller
3. user-space component libDRM
4. user-space component in Mesa 3D; currently most of these components are written conforming to the Gallium3D-specifications.
   • all drivers in Mesa 3D with Version 10.x (last 10.6.7) are as of September 2014 limited to OpenGL version 3.3.
   • all drivers in Mesa 3D with Version 11.x (last 11.2.2) are as of Mai 2016 limited to OpenGL version 4.1.
   • all drivers in Mesa 3D with version 12.x (in June 2016) can support OpenGL version 4.3.^[21]
   • Actual Hardware Support see: glxinfo ^[22]
5. a special and distinct 2D graphics device driver for X.Org Server, which is finally about to be replaced by Glamor

Supported features

The free and open-source driver supports many of the features available in Radeon-branded cards and APUs, such as multi-monitor or hybrid graphics.

Linux

The free and open-source drivers are primarily developed on Linux and for Linux.

Other operating systems

Being entirely free and open-source software, the free and open-source drivers can be ported to any existing operating system. Whether they have been, and to what extent depends entirely on the man-power available. Available support shall be referenced here.
FreeBSD adopted DRI, and since Mesa 3D is not programmed for Linux, it should have identical support.^{[citation needed]}
MorphOS supports 2D and 3D acceleration for Radeon R100, R200 and R300 chipsets.^[23]
AmigaOS 4 supports Radeon R100, R200, R300,^[24] R520 (X1000 Series), R700 (HD 4000 Series), HD 5000 (Evergreen) series, HD 6000 (Northern Islands) series and HD 7000 (Southern Islands) series.^[25] The RadeonHD AmigaOS 4 driver has been developed by Hans de Ruiter^[26] funded and owned by A-EON Technology Ltd. The older R100 and R200 "ATIRadeon" driver for AmigaOS, originally developed Forefront Technologies has been acquired by A-EON Technology Ltd in 2015.
In the past ATI provided hardware and technical documentation to the Haiku Project to produce drivers with full 2D and video in/out support on older Radeon chipsets (up to R500) for Haiku. A new Radeon HD driver was developed with the unofficial and indirect guidance of AMD open source engineers and currently exists in recent Haiku versions. The new Radeon HD driver supports native mode setting on R600 through Southern Islands GPU's.^[27]