Radeon HD 7000 Series Open-Source Still A Mess

[FutureSuture]

Excuse my ignorance, but when something is crap and open source, doesn't the community rush to fix it? I thought that was the very reason many Linux users want software to be open source. Where are all the zealots?

[Hamish Wilson]

Nice, Larabel should mark him as a driver developer.

[bridgman]

Other than the shader compiler Michel pretty much wrote radeonsi. Everyone helped with testing and debugging the driver but MrCooper (that's just his IRC handle BTW) drew the short straw for initial SI userspace support.

[Hamish Wilson]

FWIW, radeonsi can handle much more than 'some basic 3D demos' now. It runs many real games / apps fine. 3D apps run at full acceleration including page flipping. We're very close to enabling full glamor 2D acceleration as well.

Obviously it's not nearly as mature as r600g yet, but it's certainly ready for wider testing by early adopters.

I am interested in the word "we're" in your statement. What exactly is your involvement with the driver?

[dfx.]

That's what you get when you basically rebrand old tech though.

indeed, rebranding is deceiving.
this time they deceived me into believing, that whole ordeal of building AMD-exclusive PC would be a futile idea :\

It would have been better if the article had specified "GCN architecture" (HD 77xx through HD 79xx) rather than "HD 7000", since only the top end of the HD 7xxx range uses GCN and that's where the big driver changes were required. Trinity and the rest of the HD 7xxx lineup use VLIW architecture and have generally been supported at launch (or at least when we hear about the new SKU).

that is reassuring to know. thanks.

[ChrisXY]

Enduro supported since Catalyst 12.10.

So I can use my discrete card to render stuff and display it on the intel card? I googled a bit but I found exactly zero information on how to use it. Do you know more?

[Adarion]

Michael you should just advise people to use Ivy Bridge GPU on Linux. ...

Umm, maybe I missed some tags here. But the nice surprise comes when intel uses some Imagination Technologies HW again and builds in a PowerVR chip labeled as "genuine intel". Nah, I don't trust that stuff from them.
It is of course a sad thing that the fglrx puts HD4/3/2xxx series already to legacy and that the free stack still is far from being feature complete on the newest GPU arch. I'm quite fine with my HD5xxx (R800/Evergreen) and the free driver stack. But currently there are few things to make the Linux user completely happy on the GPU market. :/

edit: It's always a good idea to check the feature matrix on GPUs.

http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature

http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix

http://www.x.org/wiki/IntelGraphicsDriver

http://www.openchrome.org/trac/wiki/SupportedHardware / http://www.openchrome.org/trac/wiki/TOC
probably something for matrox exists as well

[MrCooper]

FWIW, radeonsi can handle much more than 'some basic 3D demos' now. It runs many real games / apps fine. 3D apps run at full acceleration including page flipping. We're very close to enabling full glamor 2D acceleration as well.

Obviously it's not nearly as mature as r600g yet, but it's certainly ready for wider testing by early adopters.

[GreatEmerald]

You mean the U/V swap that causes "blue people"? That was worked around in libvdpau-0.5, shouldn't be an issue anymore.

That's good to know.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

Only partly correct. Not for hybrid graphics with "AMD Enduro".

Enduro supported since Catalyst 12.10.