Open-Source R600 OpenGL Support May Come Soon

In late December AMD had released open-source R600/700 3D code and a month later they released the 3D documentation that covers these Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series graphics cards. The initial code drop didn't do much good for end-users as they couldn't do much more than render a couple triangles, but over the past few months the open-source developers have been working on the proper Mesa support for the R600/700 graphics cards in a private code repository. Now this code may finally be pushed out to the general public in the near future.

As AMD is still working on code review and obtaining permission to push out different pieces of code, much of the OpenGL work has been going on behind the scenes in a private code repository rather than in the open and needing to get permission before each commit. AMD's John Bridgman shared this morning on the RadeonHD IRC channel that the OpenGL work is not finished yet but "a bunch of things work" and he hopes to be able to get the R600/700 Mesa code pushed into the public tree over the next week or so.

When it comes to this initial open-source R600/700 3D support, we have heard that textures and mipmaps are working to some extent right now along with the shader compiler. Hopefully this code will indeed be pushed out to the public over the next week or two, and at that time we will be back with more information.

For reference, it was one year and one week ago that the first R500 3D milestone was reached of having hardware-accelerated glxgears.