"On the same day that we learn VIA's Linux support is basically dead and after a troubling week for Intel with regards to open-source graphics support for their new Sandy Bridge CPUs, Advanced Micro Devices has come forward and released open-source graphics driver support for their AMD Radeon HD 6000 series of graphics cards."
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Member since:2010-07-07
Nah, Michael as usual is blowing smoke for page hits and thinks that we should already be at zero day support with 90% of binary blob performance. But then he also thinks that there will be Steam and Unreal Tournament 3 for Linux any day now!
The community is doing a great job so far, they've gotten very far in the actual OpenGL implementation for the backlog of cards and is still working around the legal issues with the OpenGL 3 spec.
Currently they are only focusing on getting everything working on all R300+ cards and finalising Gallium3D before they can begin performance optimisation. Why get everything tweaked for performance with half the spec implemented only to have to redo half of the optimisation to get more features in place?
Member since:2007-02-17
Having said that, I noticed
http://wiki.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature
that the Page Flipping support for all models has recently been marked as "Done" (requires kernel 2.6.38).
Page Flipping was said to be one thing that was relatively low-hanging fruit, that is to say it wasn't seen as too hard to do, it was being worked on, and it would yeild significant performance gains.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODcyMA
Accelerated video is still some way away, however XvMC and VDPAU may be coming to the ATI R600 Gallium3D driver as well as the R300 Gallium3D driver. This willwould allow those with Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000/5000 series graphics cards to enjoy accelerated video playback using GPU shaders beyond just the limited X-Video extension.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODcxOA
It seems that after the Linux 2.6.38 kernel is released, the Gallium3D open source drivers may become the default preference for Linux distributions instead of the classic mesa drivers.
At that point, maybe sometime this year, the open source drivers for Radeon GPUs would begin to challenge the closed source drivers certainly for functionality and perhaps for performance as well.
Member since:
2009-03-13
http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=15604 According to Phoronix there is still a far far way to go for the open source drivers ... so does this mean that "AMD release the specs and we will make the drivers ourselves" group was wrong? I am for sure very happy with NVIDIA which has shown almost exemplary support throughout the years (minus some KDE4-related issues which took some time for them to fix) .. but I would be perfectly happy to jump on some open-source drivers wagon .. however even Intel who supposedly commited itself to Linux even before AMD made its decision, its open source drivers are even more pitiful. Try running some serious graphics on it and compare the results to Windows drivers. So is anybody actually happy with non-NVIDIA graphics cards on Linux and actualy doing serious and modern stuff with OpenGL?
Edited 2011-01-08 04:07 UTC