AMD's R300 Gallium3D Driver Is Looking Good For 2011

[highlandsun]

My desktop machine is on a Radeon 9500, I think that was the fastest fanless card I could find at the time. I was surprised to see HD4xxx AGP cards being produced, thought about upgrading, but haven't bothered.

[curaga]

Mine was X1300 until it died.

[pingufunkybeat]

My desktop machine is on a Radeon 9500, I think that was the fastest fanless card I could find at the time. I was surprised to see HD4xxx AGP cards being produced, thought about upgrading, but haven't bothered.

There is a PCI HD4350 out there too (I'm running one), but the bus speed is killing it.

[Decatf]

My desktop has an x1900xtx and my laptop has an x2300 (which I'm told is nothing more than an x1300)

[glxextxexlg]

My desktop has an x1900xtx and my laptop has an x2300 (which I'm told is nothing more than an x1300)

decatf, does blender work with r300g on your machine? it does start but gets locked with the splash window looping forever on my r580.

[Sharky]

I still use two legacy cards daily,X550 fanless and X1650.
The r530 has become my favorite for last 6 months on my main desktop for its stability, and for testing OSS drivers and Distros.
PCI-E Radeon X1xxx and r300g is giving me what I want and will get better from what I understand.
Now waiting for OSS to catch or surpass legacy for my HD cards this next year.

Thank You to all Open Source Stack Developers for making this to happen.

Sharky

[HokTar]

Indeed, a new comparison between fglrx 9.3 and current r300c,g would be interesting, especially with Tom's patches.

[xeros]

Indeed, a new comparison between fglrx 9.3 and current r300c,g would be interesting, especially with Tom's patches.

Even without these patches current r300g in Mesa 7.10 git is something about the same (or even better in some cases and a bit less in others) in performance compared to fglrx 9.3 on my RV350 and RV370. r300g has a lot more GL extensions but few useful fglrx extensions are still missing (but according to irc talk with developer the work is in progress, some of them just need more testing before they will be exposed).

But indeed, it would be very interesting to see Phoronix article with benchmark that compares both drivers.

Edit: r300g is mostly twice as fast as r300c on my hardware.

[HokTar]

Even without these patches current r300g in Mesa 7.10 git is something about the same (or even better in some cases and a bit less in others) in performance compared to fglrx 9.3 on my RV350 and RV370.

Well, if this really is the case then it is indeed excellent news!
Not to mention what a win it would be for bridgman and AMD because it would mean that they fulfilled their promise (up to r500 at least).

For Marek, Corbin Dave and Tom (and everybody I forgot to include) it would be an even greater success if their driver performed _better_ than fglrx. Not as if I would be saying that their achievement so far is not remarkable. Because it is. Corbin and Marek are the real open source heroes in my eyes.

Point is a phoronix article is needed!

@Michael: What do you think?

[pingufunkybeat]

That sounds very promising!

Here's to r600g optimisations which are hopefully coming in the future