Open-Source Radeon R700 Graphics?

While the Novell developers are hoping to have stable 2D working with the RadeonHD driver by the end of the year, much more work will be needed once AMD delivers the rest of the specifications they have promised. Brought up on the RadeonHD mailing list this morning was whether it would be worth it if a user bought an R600 now or not. AMD's next-generation graphics processors will be out before the R500/600 series has an open-source working 3D driver, so is it a better bet waiting for the R700 series (Radeon HD 3000, perhaps)? Granted, the fglrx driver now has R600 support. The R700 is based upon the R600 (Radeon HD 2000) architecture, so it hopefully won't be too much work to implement its functionality -- especially if AMD delivers the R700 specifications to the community in a timely fashion. The ATI R700 is expected in the first half of 2008. While it's been a while waiting for open-source R500 and R600 support, we finally have basic 2D support and 3D should be expected for next year, the waiting for the R700 open-source support will hopefully be dramatically shorter. Once everything arrives, it should be benchmarking heaven here at Phoronix :).

On the opposite side of the table, NVIDIA's GeForce 9 series is expected shortly but will require reverse-engineering by the Nouveau folks and its unknown if NVIDIA will be delivering same-day binary Linux drivers or not especially after the GeForce 8 meltdown.