Testing Out AMD's DRI2 Driver Stack

Right now, no one is claiming any amazing performance gains with the new graphics stack as the primary focus is getting as much hardware functioning as soon as possible. Considering the amount of code churn in the development branches, the result is amazingly stable. I have been running the DRI2 stack on my home PC for several weeks now with hardly any issues. Based on the handful of tests I ran there is fairly consistent performance degradation across the board, but that will certainly improve by the time a release is made.

The current hope is that the KMS / DRI2 code will make it into the 2.6.31 kernel but if any issues are found it could get pushed back to 2.6.32. The upcoming Mesa 7.5 release will have some Radeon Gallium3D code in it, but it is unlikely to be very functional just yet. The current focus is the R300 to R500 family of cards; support for newer hardware will likely appear once work on those is done. It is exciting to watch all this unfold and I would say in another six to eight months you can expect some remarkable things.