ATI Radeon HD 2900XT Powered By Open-Source Driver

The open-source Avivo driver is currently bound to supporting the ATI R500 GPU family and with efforts now being focused on the RadeonHD driver, this reverse-engineered driver will likely never support the newer GPUs (The Death Of The R500 Avivo Driver). However, the RadeonHD driver that was pushed out into the public a few hours ago does support the R600 series. This open-source support does include the flagship ATI Radeon HD 2900XT graphics card. Inside our labs we tried out the Radeon HD 2900XT with the RadeonHD driver on Fedora 7 and it's certainly great to see this progress. The driver still has a climbing road a head, but this driver is already a leap in the right direction.

When testing out this early driver with the Radeon HD 2900XT we had initially run into problems with TMDS on LVTMA, but switching DVI connectors had resolved the problem. One of the Novell developers on this driver, Luc Verhaegen, had mentioned that TMDS on LVTMA is still among the basic features to enable.

As this new open-source X.Org driver continues to mature, we will be back with additional investigations on the Radeon HD 2900XT, among other R500 and R600 GPUs. In this article we just wanted to share with you that we have been able to get the open-source RadeonHD driver working with AMD's flagship ATI GPU -- it's very wonderful to see!

If you have tried out this new driver, be sure to share your findings with us in the forums.