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phoronix
12-26-2007, 12:50 PM
Phoronix: AMD 2007 Year In Review

At the end of our ATI Year in Review for 2006, we had stated, "next year will be a very interesting time for ATI/AMD Linux users." Looking back upon that statement, it has certainly turned out to be true, but perhaps an understatement for all of the AMD Linux work that has actually went on this year. The Catalyst Control Center was finally ported to Linux; there is now AIGLX support for use with Compiz, and the most substantial improvement being a brand new code-base for their proprietary Linux driver. Aside from their binary driver, they have developed a strong interest in better enabling the open-source community through releasing GPU documentation to the public (without NDAs!) and collaborating with Novell on the development of the RadeonHD driver. It has been one hell of a year for AMD, and in this article, we are going to look back at their twelve major driver releases from the year as well as re-benchmark all of these different versions.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=11616

yoshi314
12-26-2007, 01:11 PM
let's hope they do a better this year. personally, i'd rather see 8.35 getting maintenance through the rest of 2007, instead of what we got - that was the best driver release for me.



edit : why is there a "hole" on the last page in benchmarks, on drivers 8.38-8.40 ? i mean the bars are way low. wth?

Michael
12-26-2007, 02:39 PM
edit : why is there a "hole" on the last page in benchmarks, on drivers 8.38-8.40 ? i mean the bars are way low. wth?

From the article:

With the Enemy Territory: Quake Wars benchmark, from the 8.38.6 to 8.40.4, the fglrx driver had exhibited stability issues with this new OpenGL game, which had prevented us from reporting our frame-rate results for three of the drivers.

Kano
12-26-2007, 02:48 PM
More interesting would be how many drivers can show test 3 and 4 of gl2benchmark. All with new codebase fail... I hoped after first release that somebody would fix this issue, but nobody cared.

lucky_
12-26-2007, 04:30 PM
Despite the performance side, is there any benchmark of how pervasive this driver is.
Support of xrandr 1.2 ?
Easy of use of the tv output ?
Support for video output on second screen ?

sid350
12-27-2007, 05:41 AM
Phoronix: AMD 2007 Year In Review
there is now AIGLX support for use with Compiz
http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=11616

there is no.
You can't call this "support" until it is not working properly.

yoshi314
12-27-2007, 07:01 AM
You can't call this "support" until it is not working properly.
and you can't call it a driver until the hardware actually starts working :]

sundown
12-27-2007, 09:30 AM
I'm happy with radeonhd so far.

fglrx can go back to hell :mad:

Nexus7
12-28-2007, 10:21 AM
let's hope they do a better this year.

That'd be a polite way of putting it.

I'd consider buying another AMD (CPU or graphics) product after their Linux driver performance reaches the level of Nvidia (on my HD2600 vs FX5200) for HDTV. That is a 3-4 year old benchmark now.