ATI R600g Gains Mip-Map, Face Culling Support

It was just one week ago that the R600g driver that is to provide open-source Gallium3D support to ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 (R600/700) graphics cards didn't do much as it's shader compiler was far from complete. However, after the author of this driver, Jerome Glisse, embarked on a new strategy, the the glxgears milestone was quickly hit.

Just days after this very simple OpenGL test was running on the ATI graphics hardware, Jerome added OpenGL texture support allowing more OpenGL test demos to properly function. This week he's continued to quickly add more features to this open-source hardware driver.

Just last night the R600/700 Gallium3D driver gained mip-map support, EX2/ABS shader instruction support, and face culling support. The commit adding these new features plus miscellaneous fixes can be found on FreeDesktop.org CGit.

We're quickly reaching a point where Quake and other older game engines should be able to run with this Gallium3D driver for the R600/700 GPUs. This means there will be Gallium3D coverage for R300/400/500/600/700 generation GPUs. The R300/400/500 Gallium3D driver support is already quite good with the R300g driver while pre-R300 hardware isn't really capable of working well with Gallium3D and then the newer R800/Evergreen generation of GPUs is still lacking any form of 2D/3D acceleration support using an open-source driver. For those with R600/700 hardware right now not wanting to use the proprietary Catalyst Linux driver, the best bet is to use the classic Mesa DRI driver that does provide a modest level of OpenGL support.