R7xx Users w/o 3d Acceleration - Timeframe for radeonhd?

[Maarte]

The current proprietary fglrx drivers have been a complete nightmare with blank screens on reboot or simply refusing to show a display. It's something I won't even think about installing anymore because it's painfully broken.

When can we realistically expect the open source radeonhd driver to support 3d acceleration for the r7xx range, - in this case the HD4850. 2d performance has been excellent, the icing on the cake would absolutely be 3d performance, not even gaming quality 3d performance, just 3d that actually works.

Are we looking at weeks? Months?.. Years..? I'd really like to keep the HD4850 because it's an excellent card, and open-source drivers are absolutely the way forwards. Any pointers on this question would be a great help!

Many thanks!

[bridgman]

Current thinking is some time around April for parity with 5xx 3D support, with a couple of steps along the way (eg running glxgears, then running compiz).

We have an in-house shader assembler/compiler (not the one from the proprietary drivers) running; Richard has finished the initial integration of that code into Mesa and is in the process of matching up Mesa-generated opcodes with the 6xx/7xx opcodes. As of this morning he was up to LIT

[Maarte]

Current thinking is some time around April for parity with 5xx 3D support, with a couple of steps along the way (eg running glxgears, then running compiz).

We have an in-house shader assembler/compiler (not the one from the proprietary drivers) running; Richard has finished the initial integration of that code into Mesa and is in the process of matching up Mesa-generated opcodes with the 6xx/7xx opcodes. As of this morning he was up to LIT

That's fantastic, - I had the impression it would be a case of months.. lots of months, - to the point of it being the end of the year. Keep up the great work, between an open-source ATI and a closed NVidia, - with the level of effort and progress being made, ATI wins, hands down.

[Maarte]

On a side note, is there anywhere where we can see progress or development of the drivers? Perhaps a devblog?

[bridgman]

We are trying to push the code out to public repositories as soon as it actually *does* anything, so you can see the progress for yourself. The kernel and X drivers are already in the public, of course... the 6xx-7xx-support branches of radeonhd and drm.

Alex and Matthias are both blogging about them from time to time :

http://www.botchco.com/agd5f

http://emmes.livejournal.com

Commits to the radeonhd driver also get mailed to the radeonhd mailing list at http://lists.opensuse.org/radeonhd

Finally, it's worth following the usual IRC channels - #dri-devel, #radeonhd and #radeon. The last two are logged here, and all three are logged at cbrill's site on fdo.

[Maarte]

Thanks for these links, - much appreciated. Seeing things move forwards week by week is heartening

[Maarte]

With 2d being pushed out for the R7xx range today, it looks like we're getting closer to 3d being available for AMD's latest chipsets, is that right?

Either way great work all Really appreciate the long hours and nights involved in catching up to NVidia's closed-source blob. While they may be going balls-to-the-wall on releasing updates, I'm still planning on staying with ATI during this time. Keep up the work

[bridgman]

We hope to push the current 6xx/7xx code out into a mesa branch next week and then start merging chunks of code from *that* branch into *another* branch based on radeon-rewrite (since radeon-rewrite will become the standard mesa implementation for ATI/AMD graphics soon).

The IP review for 6xx/7xx 3D started quite a while ago and we're getting pretty close to completion. Note that this will not be a release (ie it doesn't correspond to any particular development milestone), just that we will be able to do all the subsequent work in public repositories.

Once the main radeon-rewrite branch (in mesa/mesa) gets merged to master we should be able to move our ongoing work into mesa master as well, but we haven't discussed that with the other developers yet.

[Vighy]

but then, please please mind about powermanagement!

[kernelOfTruth]

but then, please please mind about powermanagement!

++

yes please !

those gentlemen are doing an excellent job !

now let's see how the 3D performance will be in some more months (or weeks ?)