ATI Radeon HD 3800 Series On Linux?

This morning ATI/AMD launched the ATI Radeon HD 3800 series graphics cards. The ATI Radeon HD 3800 GPUs contain 320 stream processors, PCI Express 2.0 compliance, CrossFire X technology, and an assortment of other Radeon technologies. The GPU die is also built on a 55nm process. The two cards in this series currently available, the HD 3850 and HD 3870, are mid-range graphics cards priced at $179 and $219 USD, respectively. For Microsoft Windows users, these cards are also DirectX 10.1 compliant. The advantages that these ATI Radeon HD 3800 series cards have over the Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB is PowerPlay support and a Unified Video Decoder (UVD) for high-definition content.

While these new PCI Express graphics cards launched today, there are no Linux drivers available. At this time we are unsure of when the support will arrive, but we would hope that it arrives next month with the Linux fglrx 8.44 release to end out the year. There is also no word on when any open-source support could arrive in the RadeonHD driver for this RV670 GPU.

More information on the ATI Radeon HD 3800 series is available from the product page and the HD 3850/3870 press release.