Open ATI R600/700 Driver Gains Tiling Support

For those of you not interested in today's ATI Catalyst 10.5 for Linux driver, if you pull the very latest open-source ATI Radeon Linux graphics driver stack there is now tiling support for the R600/700 (Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series) graphics processors.

AMD's Alex Deucher has worked out a set of patches that touch the Radeon DRM, xf86-video-ati DDX driver, and Mesa for providing this 2D and OpenGL/3D tiling support on the ATI R600/700 hardware. While not properly supported yet, these patches also lay the foundation for Evergreen (Radeon HD 5000 series) tiling support too. First though we need usable 2D/3D acceleration for these newest ATI graphics processors by the open-source Linux driver.

These patches expose "1D" and "2D" tiling modes with the latter being designed to deliver optimal performance, but there are some cases where the tiling is not working right at this time. The full details though on this new Radeon R600/700 tiling support in the open-source ATI Linux driver can be found on the DRI mailing list.

Hopefully the DRM bits for this tiling support, which can lead to performance enhancements, will land still in the Linux 2.6.35 kernel thus allowing the tiling support to appear in most Linux distribution updates this fall.