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Open-Source ATI R600/700 3D Driver Almost Working

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  • Open-Source ATI R600/700 3D Driver Almost Working

    Phoronix: Open-Source ATI R600/700 3D Driver Almost Working

    AMD's John Bridgman has shared that the open-source R600/700 3D driver for Linux is becoming usable, slowly but surely. Months after releasing documentation, a programmer's guide, and sample code, their Mesa driver is beginning to do useful things -- more so than just rendering simple triangles. The ATI R600/700 3D driver is derived from the Radeon driver rewrite and is currently living in a branch off of Mesa...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    What about usable 3D in games for older radeons? Will it be in good standing and usable by the end of summer or do all developers focus now on ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series?

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    • #3
      Originally posted by NSLW View Post
      What about usable 3D in games for older radeons? Will it be in good standing and usable by the end of summer or do all developers focus now on ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series?
      A lot of work is going into the Radeon Gallium driver fro r300 and latter cards

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      • #4
        Nice to see this stuff work opensourced

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        • #5
          This is really good news to me.
          It's still hard for me to project when the driver will actually be usable for end users (like myself), because AFAIK there's no info on the speed of the driver, and op top of that I don't know anything about how long it took the developers to get these test cases to work since they were written. What I do know is that what I inferred from the article: that the driver is fairly crashy atm.

          In any case this seems like a good opportunity to say this to the developers: Thank you for your efforts so far, and keep 'em coming!

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          • #6
            Awesome, makes me even happier that I built and AMD/ATI system. Can't wait.

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            • #7
              I can't wait using the open source driver for playing UT2004 (UT3 ?).

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              • #8
                Yey! Now we have an unusable closed source driver and an unusable open source driver...It's so hard to choose.

                Anyway, thanks for the update. Slightly good news is better than no news at all.

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by m4rgin4l View Post
                  Yey! Now we have an unusable closed source driver and an unusable open source driver...It's so hard to choose.

                  Anyway, thanks for the update. Slightly good news is better than no news at all.
                  fglrx is not so unusable : i can play UT2K4 fine with fglrx 9.3.
                  I can also play videos / DVD nice (I don't have compiz/fusion). 2D is working well : I have a normal speed everywhere in KDE 3.x while my HD4870 is operating silently.

                  I've read over the forums the people using open source driver are also rather happy, unless they want to play some 3D games. But that's part of the contract for now : if you go for open source, you can't play.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by Fixxer_Linux View Post
                    fglrx is not so unusable : i can play UT2K4 fine with fglrx 9.3.
                    I can also play videos / DVD nice (I don't have compiz/fusion). 2D is working well : I have a normal speed everywhere in KDE 3.x while my HD4870 is operating silently.

                    I've read over the forums the people using open source driver are also rather happy, unless they want to play some 3D games. But that's part of the contract for now : if you go for open source, you can't play.
                    I'm using Fedora 11, so there's no fglrx for me (unless I go for the unstable rpmfusion repo). Funny enough this is also part of a contract that states that if you buy AMD/ATI you better use a stable distro (I was going to write "an obsolete distro" but that seems to offend some phoronix users).

                    Right now I'm using the ati driver which is only a little bit better than using the vesa driver. The radeonhd also "works" but the system freezes when I switch to a text console.

                    What I was trying to say with my post is that I don't like news that say "we're now a little bit less bad than before". I appreciate the effort of the developers, but I have to live with a daily reminder that if you want to support the open source initiatives, you have to be willing to pay the price, which in this is case is having to put up with lousy drivers. Don't expect me to be happy about THAT.

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