Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has recently released DirectX 12 drivers for its GPU line. However, it doesn't end there. The company has finally made efforts towards improving its drivers for Linux-based systems.

Taking TDP out of the equation, driver support and stability have always been two of the issues thrown at AMD graphics cards. The "fabless" chip designer has suffered in the desktop GPU market due to these issues. In fact, many argue that the Fury X's release would have been more successful had AMD shipped it with the Catalyst 15.7 WHQL drivers instead of waiting almost two weeks after the release before updating it.

The company, however, seems to have mended its ways and is now extending its efforts towards driver updates not only for Windows but other platforms as well.

A recent report from Chris Hoffman of PC World details AMD driver's status for Linux-based systems and the company's endeavor in updating the said drivers. Hoffman noted that AMD currently has two main drivers for Linux: the open-source "Radeon" driver and the closed-source "Catalyst" driver.

"As with Nvidia's drivers, the open-source driver is fine for just using a graphical desktop with AMD graphics cards, but you'll want the closed-source driver to get maximum gaming performance," he added.

To remedy the situation, AMD is attempting to create a "unified" driver set for Linux by discarding the two aforementioned ones and writing completely new drivers. Hoffman reports that the driver, which is known as "AMDGPU", will only have a single open-source kernel module.

Phoronix defines AMDGPU as "the name given to the AMD GPU LLVM back-end (formerly known as the R600 LLVM back-end) as well as a new DRM kernel driver for supporting newer hardware". It further states that "the AMDGPU kernel driver is used by both the open-source Gallium3D user-space driver and the new Catalyst driver in user-space on Linux systems". Hence, the Catalyst drivers will still be in use as an option for those that do not need the best gaming performance out of their graphics processors.

Note that Phoronix discovered a "tweak" for AMD graphics card that will boost its performance for Counter-Strike Global Offensive while running on a Linux system. When the "csgo_linux" binary is renamed to "hl2_linux," a forty percent increase in graphics performance was observed.

"What looks bad for AMD here is how slow it's been to maintain these application profiles when compared to Nvidia on Linux and even AMD's own profiles on Windows," Hoffman concludes.