The ATI Evergreen Mesa Code Has Now Landed

Nearly two hours ago we shared the news that there's finally open-source 2D/3D/video acceleration for ATI's Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" family of graphics processors, which is currently the newest and best consumer-grade GPUs from AMD's GPG unit. At the time though only the xf86-video-ati DDX driver code was publicly pushed into a branch of the driver, but now the 3D portion of the code has publicly landed.

Today's article has already been updated with a link to this Mesa Git commit that pushes the Evergreen code into the R600 DRI driver, but for those that already read the article prior to the push, here's the Git commit. The Evergreen support went directly into Mesa master and not a branch, which means the code will be present in the upcoming Mesa 7.9 release.

This Evergreen OpenGL support should immediately work with games and applications where the current Mesa R600 classic driver works with ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series hardware, but there's likely to be some initial bugs as this code begins to be tested by the general public rather than the few AMD developers and partners that had access to the code prior to its final review by AMD's legal department.

Now it's just a matter of seeing how the Evergreen open-source dilemma pans out and whether this new code is played with and built upon or it sits by until the R600g driver is in a working state by the community developers while AMD's Alex Deucher, Richard Li, and John Bridgman begin figuring out their open-source plans for the ATI Radeon HD 6000 graphics cards (codenamed "Southern Islands") that will be released in the coming months.

It's likely with the ATI Radeon HD 6000 upbringing we may see the 3D support go first -- and only into -- a Gallium3D driver rather than wasting resources on the classic Mesa architecture, but it's a matter to be discussed next month at the pre-Oktoberfest 2010 X Developers' Summit in Toulouse.