January 29, 2008 -- The public release of AMD's "tcore" sample code is imminent, thereby steering the open-source development efforts toward R600 2D acceleration and the basis of the 3D support for the RadeonHD driver. However, in somewhat of a surprise, this afternoon XAA and EXA support was added to the RadeonHD driver for the R500 series. For those that aren't X enthusiasts or Linux veterans, XAA and EXA are architectures for providing 2D graphics acceleration. With this accelerated 2D support, we have benchmarked both XAA and EXA on the xf86-video-radeonhd driver as well as with the xf86-video-ati driver and the binary fglrx driver.

January 29, 2008 -- The 34th edition of the Nouveau Companion is now available for your reading pleasure. The Nouveau crew this time around debates the issue of whether they should push a 2D-only release of the Nouveau driver out the door while continuing the 3D work, integrating MMioTrace into the mainstream kernel, the status of RandR 1.2, TV-Out support getting underway, and last but not least is the status of the Nouveau Gallium3D driver.

January 27, 2008 -- X-Plane is marketed as the "most thorough, flexible, and realistic flight simulator available for personal computers" and ships not only for Windows and Macintosh platforms but also for Linux. Laminar Research produces X-Plane and while it's currently not part of our testing suite, we recently took X-Plane v9 Beta 18 for a test flight. Previously their community leader had classified using ATI Linux drivers with X-Plane as an "unusable disaster" with "insurmountable problems", but is that really the case? We explored the situation in this article.

January 25, 2008 -- Back in June of 2005 with the ATI Linux 8.14.13 driver release was a new installer to more easily facilitate the installation of this binary graphics driver using a graphical interface for a generic setup or generating distribution-specific packages (at that time Red Hat was the only officially supported distribution). With time, this installer has evolved by gaining new features and more distributions are being supported through their --buildpkg command for generating custom driver packages. These packaging scripts are now even hosted in the open for more community interaction. With two new driver options that will be formally introduced next month in Ubuntu's packaging scripts for the Catalyst 8.02 Linux driver, the installation process of the ATI fglrx driver on Ubuntu will become several steps easier.

January 22, 2008 -- One month and one day after the NVIDIA 169.07 display driver was released, the Santa Clara folks have released a minor driver update for Linux and Solaris. No new features have been introduced, but just a couple of bug fixes.

January 18, 2008 -- AMD has today released the 8.01 Linux Catalyst package, which contains the fglrx 8.45 driver. New in this release are updated packaging scripts and a few fixes, which many have been hopeful for in this release. Compared to our usual Linux driver articles, this one is a bit shorter due to the KDE 4.0 release event going on at the Googleplex, which we are in the process of covering.

January 11, 2008 -- The Nouveau crew is out with their first Nouveau Companion of the year, which details the recent progress made with this reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA display driver. Among the items talked about in this issue include PowerPC fixes, RandR 1.2 for older NVIDIA graphics cards, MMioTrace being broken with the Linux 2.6.24 kernel, and a variety of other topics.

January 04, 2008 -- In the second NDA-free documentation dump, AMD has just released programming data on the M76 and RS690 graphics processors. While the RadeonHD developers have already had these documents, this information will help the free software community in understanding the internal workings of AMD's graphics processors. In this article, we have information on this just-released data as well as what else the community can expect in the way of documentation in the near future.

December 29, 2007 -- AMD is on the heels of releasing the next set of GPU programming documentation to aide in the development of the open-source R500/600 drivers (xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-radeonhd). It's already been discussed what this NDA-free documentation release will have, but one of the questions that have repeatedly come up is if/when AMD will release information on accelerated video playback. AMD's John Bridgman has now stated what they plan to release in the video realm as well as a new requirement for their future graphics processors: being open-source friendly while avoiding DRM.

December 27, 2007 -- Last week the RadeonHD v1.1 driver was released, which (among other changes) had introduced extended monitor detection, RS600 support, and preliminary support for the RV670-based ATI Radeon HD 3850 and Radeon HD 3870 graphics cards. This v1.1 driver release combined with a recent git commit for adding additional TMDSA/B electrical values has led to quite a pleasant experience already with these new midrange graphics cards that have been on the market for less than two months.