RadeonHD CS Driver Gets EXA Love

[phoronix]

Phoronix: RadeonHD CS Driver Gets EXA Love

For the past two weeks we've been talking about the RadeonHD Command Submission branch that changes all of the driver's command sequencing calls into inline functions in order to offer dramatically improved performance. This branch of the xf86-video-radeonhd driver also presents a command submission infrastructure using the GPU's command processor (CP) for the R500 (Radeon X1000) series using MMIO (Memory Mapped I/O). Last week EXA improvements were added to the CS branch of this open-source ATI R500+ driver by means of hardware-accelerated downloading and uploading from the screen...

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

[d2kx]

Mmh... how can the CS-branch improve EXA performance when it doesn't even have the initial code from the quick_and_dirty_2d code in it (master has it, but it wasn't merged to CS)? A new stable RadeonHD release will be awesome, hopefully, HDMI-Audio, CS and atombios_support will be merged for that release. And hopefully Matthias Hopf can begin working on the driver again soon.

[puelocesar]

Hi, when mortal users will be able to have a decent opensource driver for ATI? I'm always reading nice stuff about them, but it's not clear to me when all this "nice stuff" will be available for everyone, on default packages in their distros.

Well, I'm going to buy a new card next year, and I had serious problems with ATI in the past (like everyone), will hadeon hd be fasty and stable until there?

[d2kx]

Well, it depends. If you don't need OpenGL 2 yet, the open source driver will (probably) do everything you want for R5xx in the october-distributions. R6xx/R7xx support is in the works and the Gallium3D fun will arrive next year.

[bridgman]

And hopefully Matthias Hopf can begin working on the driver again soon.

Matthias is already back working on the driver, but he's working on 6xx/7xx 3D in the NDA depot so you don't see anything yet.

[puelocesar]

Well, it depends. If you don't need OpenGL 2 yet, the open source driver will (probably) do everything you want for R5xx in the october-distributions. R6xx/R7xx support is in the works and the Gallium3D fun will arrive next year.

that's exactly what I wanted to know, thanks

So probably my next card will be an ATI one

[grantek]

woohoo! I think it'll really start to rumble the gaming community's perception of things when Linux gets a usable open-source 3d graphics driver for serious gaming cards

[sundown]

woohoo! I think it'll really start to rumble the gaming community's perception of things when Linux gets a usable open-source 3d graphics driver for serious gaming cards

Serious gaming with open-source will not happen.

Unless all major GPU companies sign an agreement to open all their codes

Or unless the ATI open-source drivers teams reverse-engineer the hell out of the cards. I wonder if that will be fair-play lol

I wonder if AMD/ATI will enourage such an act lol

[bridgman]

Gotta disagree with you here, at least for our GPUs.

Even the current open source graphics drivers have enough performance for gaming on a midrange to high-end card and that will only improve with time. What is missing right now is the level of GL support, not performance -- and GL support is waiting mostly on memory management and Mesa changes (Gallium).

Getting a good memory manager into the drm driver is a pre-requisite for a lot of other cool things, and if you watch what the devs are talking about memory management is on the top of pretty much everyone's list.

[sundown]

What about that thing Kano always brings up, GLSL or whatever it is called?

According to him that is what modern day gaming requires.