Just about three weeks ago the AMD developers working on the open-source ATI drivers had reached the milestone in their open-source 3D support for the R600/700 GPUs of having glxgears running on these two latest generations of ATI graphics processors. glxgears running itself isn't much, but it's an important step. Last night, AMD's Alex Deucher is now reporting a new milestone and one that is certainly interesting for a large number of users, that is Compiz is running!

If obtaining the latest Mesa code and one of Alex's DRM branches, Compiz can now run ATI Radeon HD 2000, HD 3000, and HD 4000 graphics cards in an open-source stack. Alex mentions in a blog post that the performance is currently slow, but it should be improved soon. It looks like we may see a decent level of 3D support in time for Mesa 7.6 and the round of distribution refreshes this fall. This is also just landing before AMD is expected to launch the R800 GPUs within the next couple of months, where the open-source developers will need to also begin work on supporting these GPUs. At the same time, this work will need to be ported over to the Gallium3D driver architecture.