ATI R600/700 3D Acceleration In Mesa Next Week?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: ATI R600/700 3D Acceleration In Mesa Next Week?

In a Phoronix Forums thread where a user had asked about the open-source 3D support status for the ATI R600/700 hardware in Mesa, AMD's John Bridgman has shared that it might be coming next week. It has been a long time coming, but the developers for the past few months have been working on the Mesa and updated DRM code in a private code repository, but next week we could finally see that code pushed into a public Mesa branch. Bridgman shared that the R600/700 Mesa code will ultimately be merged into the Radeon Rewrite driver, which in turn will be merged into the mainline Mesa code-base in the near future...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzE5Ng

[Darkfire Fox]

Awesome.

I wonder how the new changes can be integrated smoothly into K/X/Ubuntu 9.04?

[russofris]

I wonder how the new changes can be integrated smoothly into K/X/Ubuntu 9.04?

Unless you are looking to switch to a vanilla kernel and make a couple other "off the path" X/mesa changes, it would be more reasonable to expect this to be included (in some form)in the 9.10 release of Ubuntu.

F

[Kano]

The drm code is already ok in 9.04 as the used 2.6.28 kernel has the needed drm update patch. So you basically only have to update the mesa part.

[Darkfire Fox]

So the only packages that would require updating are "libgl1-mesa-glx" and "libgl1-mesa-dri" ?

The less I have to tamper with, the less likely I'll irreparably break something....

[bulletxt]

"but it's still not in a finished state yet and there is still work left in even bringing it up to the same level of support as the ATI R300/400/500 driver."

In other words, what level of 3d support does it have?

[TechMage89]

Probably glxgears. Maybe compiz if we're lucky. Probably won't play Nexuiz or Sauerbraten yet. I would guess it'll take another month or two before most games are fully working.

[SolidSteel144]

Only very basic 3D support.
OpenGL applications won't work yet as far as I know (correctly) such as Compiz.

[mirza]

"He also adds that the intellectual property review on this code had started a while ago, but they are nearing completion."

This is where SW patents lead. I guess this reviews cost as much money as developing stuff itself. Anyway, what about power saving modes?

[NeoBrain]

"He also adds that the intellectual property review on this code had started a while ago, but they are nearing completion."

This is where SW patents lead. I guess this reviews cost as much money as developing stuff itself. Anyway, what about power saving modes?

This is not really about software patents. AFAIU the most troublesome areas are DRM and patented algorithms which make the hardware itself "faster". If we didn't have the latter one we'd only have 60% of our current FPS in graphics intensive games, so I wouldn't complain about them