AMD's Hawaii Open-Source Support Still Remains Broken
FreeDesktop.org Bug 78453 remains open about getting R9 290 "Hawaii" acceleration working... Aside from those tests, in my own tests I've also still been unsuccessful in getting any usable 3D hardware acceleration out of the Radeon R9 290 that was released last year. Honestly, I figured the situation would be improved better than that quick enough.
In judging from some of the comments on the aforementioned bug report, it raises the question whether any of the open-source AMD Linux developers still have any R9 290 series hardware or even remote access to the graphics cards... It seems they had the hardware initially when enabling the support for AMD "Hawaii" GPU series under Linux, but based upon the lack of activity, it would seem their hardware has been returned. That's not too much of a surprise though considering AMD says high-end graphics cards are expensive as a reason why I tend to have to buy my own Radeon graphics cards in order to review them on Phoronix and provide this continued AMD Linux coverage for interested Linux gamers and enthusiasts.
As soon as the AMD Radeon R9 290 graphics card is working on the Linux open-source stack with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, you can surely bet there will be benchmarks found on Phoronix. If you wish to support this work please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium seeing as we only receive very limited support from AMD for review samples.
UPDATE: Open-source AMD developer Marek Olsak says, "We do have access to the hardware. The problem is nobody knows why it doesn't work."
Long-time open-source AMD Linux driver developer Alex Deucher meanwhile says, "We have access to the hardware, the problem is hawaii support is not a priority at the moment. We don't have any business cases right now where accelerated open source hawaii is a priority."
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