ATI AYiR 2006

Finally, in the 8.24.8 display driver there was what we would consider a turning point in ATI's Linux history. The 8.24.8 display driver had finally appended support for the Radeon X1000 (R500) series. This Linux support for ATI’s new products was coming in April, while the series was introduced in October of the preceding year. On top of support for the Mobility X1300/X1400/X1600/X1800 and Radeon X1300/X1600/X1800/X1900 series was several other changes and improvements. The 8.24.8 display driver also supported Avivo through X-Video with these display drivers. Though lacking from this driver was support for TV-out with the X1000 series. Several other bug fixes were also presented in this release. At Phoronix we had presented a launch day preview with the 8.24.8 driver where we had tested the Radeon X1800XL and X1300PRO. The Radeon X1000 support for Linux was extremely belated and caused many in the community to become upset with ATI's management, but in January of this year in an ASUS X1300PRO Preview we had stated the drivers should be out in the spring -- well, the 8.24.8 display driver was the first 2006 spring release.

Running off the excitement of the 8.24.8 display driver, in the 8.25.18 display driver there were several exciting changes. On top of the usual assortment of bug fixes and minor changes was new product support as well as Dynamic Display Management Options, or DDMO for short. The new product support in the fglrx 8.25.18 driver was the FireGL V3300/V3400/V5200/V7200/V7300/V7350 and the FireMV 2200. On the Radeon side, the X1900GT support was added as well as the Radeon Xpress 1100 (RS465) Chipset. The ATI Dynamic Display Management Options were not officially noted in the fglrx 8.25.18 driver release as the feature was still being stabilized, but using aticonfig with the --query-monitor and --enable-monitor arguments allowed the dynamic enabling/disabling of display heads including TV devices! With the advent of the ATI DDMO it is no longer necessary to restart X when changing display heads as aticonfig is able to address it in real time. A similar feature was added to the NVIDIA display drivers in the 1.0-9XXX series several months later. The dynamic display options were a terrific feature to see and is extremely handy for notebook users. Another feature in the 8.25.18 driver release was support for X.Org 7.0. However, the 8.25.18 display driver was not all happiness as the driver had broken support for the Radeon R200 series.

For three months in a row were feature-rich display drivers. Making up the changes in the 8.26.18 display driver was a great deal of bug fixing as well as adding the ATI external events daemon (atieventsd). This daemon provides hotkey display switching, DFP hotplug, and thermal event power management. With this display driver we had also noted an OverDrive statement when using ATI PowerPlay; however, to this date ATI still has not added any official overclocking support to the fglrx drivers. This release had also dropped support for XFree86 4.1 and 4.2.