RadeonHD 1.1.0 Driver Released

Yesterday the NVIDIA proprietary driver was updated as well as the ATI proprietary driver and the open-source Radeon driver. Continuing in this holiday excitement, the Novell developers have released the RadeonHD 1.1.0 driver just moments ago. This open-source R500/600 driver contains a few new features and fixes since the RadeonHD 1.0.0 release last month.

Less than a month ago, the RadeonHD 1.0.0 driver was released with RandR 1.2 support and compatibility with the available Radeon X1000 (R500) and Radeon HD 2000 (R600) GPUs, with only hardware cursor acceleration. Both 2D and 3D acceleration are still lacking with xf86-video-radeonhd, but version 1.1.0 brings a few major changes to the table. Among these recent changes are better monitor detection, mode stability and text-mode restore, and added support for the RS600 and preliminary support for the RV670. The open-source RV670 support covers the Radeon HD 3850 and Radeon HD 3870, which are AMD's latest GPUs. This support in the driver is initial as the Novell developers responsible for a majority of the work on the xf86-video-radeonhd still have yet to receive the RV670 specifications or even the hardware.

Two other changes in RadeonHD 1.1.0 include gamma and palette fixes and RandR mode selection fixes. As we reported earlier, this driver also has initial support for HDMI by treating these high-definition connectors just like a DVI interface.

AMD has yet to release the RS690 and M76 specifications to the public, which will also contain DRM sample code for starting the 3D work, but we do expect this next documentation drop to come very soon. If you missed it, AMD's open-source work and this driver were named one of the greatest Linux innovations of 2007.

If you try out the RadeonHD v1.1.0 driver, be sure to share your results on the RadeonHD mailing list and IRC channel and you can chime in on the Phoronix Forums.