Marek Olšák, the well-known independent contributor to Mesa that's made a great deal of enhancements to the Radeon driver stack over the past few years, has a new patch-set. The latest patch-set he published last night cleans up the R600g driver and reworks its cache flushing code. This patch-set affects more than 2,000 lines of code, which is significant for this open-source Gallium3D driver.
Yesterday's patch-set builds upon another set of 19 patches he published this weekend (
Remove all uses of the register mask) which affected about 800 lines of code.
The intent of this work by Marek is to provide "a series of cleanups I am going to make to improve the horribly over-engineered and slow state management of r600g."
The register mask removal was a prerequiste to this current work, which in this latest series tidies up the driver a bit while also adding a new mechanism for emitting states, which is inspired by the older R300g driver. Marek says this new mechanism is simple yet robust. He's also made various other low-level changes to R600g.
This R600g work should end up being part of Mesa 8.1. For those wanting to dig into more details about this work, the patch-set from yesterday can currently be found on
the mailing list.
The open-source ATI/AMD Radeon Linux driver code
still has a ways to catch-up to the Catalyst driver. But if you're interested in boosting your graphics performance, try
the 2D tiling code and
enabling PCI Express 2.0 support.