AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D Driver Runs A Bit More

Earlier this week the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver hit the glxgears milestone for handling AMD's latest-generation Radeon HD 7000 series graphics cards on an open-source OpenGL driver. There's still much work left, but it's moving bit by bit.

The pace of the open-source AMD HD 7000 series support has been disappointing, but with the very simple glxgears OpenGL test running, more milestones will hopefully be reached soon. Since the gears milestone on Monday, there's been more RadeonSI commits to the mainline Mesa Git repository.

Tom Stellard, Michel Dänzer, and Christian König have all made RadeonSI Gallium3D driver commits in the past two days. This work has involved supporting more TGSI opcodes, adding an initial VDPAU target for this video state tracker, and fixing more bits of code for this AMD "GCN" hardware that's now been on the market for the better part of a year.

With the VDPAU target commit, Christian König mentions, "Windowed speed is of course way to slow, but fullscreen works like a charm now." The open-source AMD video acceleration support though continues to be using GPU shaders rather than the dedicated Radeon Unified Video Decoder (UVD) encode/decode engine -- this though might change in the future.

There's still more work left until the OpenGL support for the AMD Radeon HD 7000 series is in good standing, but at least there's been more commits coming along as the open-source AMD developers figure out the remaining issues to fix. Until then, there's always the proprietary AMD Catalyst Linux graphics driver.