RadeonHD CS Driver Gets EXA Love

For the past two weeks we've been talking about the RadeonHD Command Submission branch that changes all of the driver's command sequencing calls into inline functions in order to offer dramatically improved performance. This branch of the xf86-video-radeonhd driver also presents a command submission infrastructure using the GPU's command processor (CP) for the R500 (Radeon X1000) series using MMIO (Memory Mapped I/O).

Last week EXA improvements were added to the CS branch of this open-source ATI R500+ driver by means of hardware-accelerated downloading and uploading from the screen. Now committed to the development branch for this driver is acceleration for EXA Composite and Render extensions. Additionally, a few other improvements and other work (setup code for the 3D engine) was committed today.

If you're interested in checking out this latest open-source work checkout git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/xorg/driver/xf86-video-radeonhd and then proceed to checkout (using git) the origin/CS branch. TexturedVideo code for the RadeonHD driver is expected this week and there may be a new official RadeonHD driver release later this month.