ATI Radeon HD 5850/5870 On Linux?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: ATI Radeon HD 5850/5870 On Linux?

In the early hours of this morning AMD officially launched the ATI Radeon HD 5800 graphics cards series, currently made up of the Radeon HD 5850 and Radeon HD 5870. Both of these graphics cards are based upon their next-generation RV880 graphics core that brings significant improvements over the RV770 that was launched last July with the Radeon HD 4800 series...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzU0OQ

[d2kx]

We would expect it to be at least a couple of months before there is any open-source 3D acceleration support for these new graphics cards.

Mmh I am not sure. It shouldn't be too much work to get it going with the new R6xx 3D code I think as it's still the same architecture.

[nanonyme]

Mmh I am not sure. It shouldn't be too much work to get it going with the new R6xx 3D code I think as it's still the same architecture.

Except that it's a new card generation...

[Fixxer_Linux]

Who cares having a linux support for HD5850 / 5870 ?
Find first a game that can already overload an HD4870 / 4890 AND that runs natively with linux !

That's not to say ATI shouldn't give that linux support on the same day as the windows support...

[anbog]

Who cares having a linux support for HD5850 / 5870 ?
Find first a game that can already overload an HD4870 / 4890 AND that runs natively with linux !

That's not to say ATI shouldn't give that linux support on the same day as the windows support...

Dual-booters (and I guess also VM setup?) would probably like a good gaming card for windows, that also has at least basic support (video,2D, and some degree of 3D) in linux. That is why I care about the linux support, anyway..

[nanonyme]

That's not to say ATI shouldn't give that linux support on the same day as the windows support...

Yeah, well. I'd assume fglrx will get the support at the same time as Windows Catalyst. As to when opensource drivers pick up the support, we can hope for the best.

[bugmenot]

how big is the difference between the generations? is the drm-hardware some extra part in hardware?

[ObiWan]

The driver the 5870 ships with is a 9.10 beta (8.66)
So it's very likley that the 5870 works with the 9.10 beta driver for Ubuntu 9.10.

[nanonyme]

how big is the difference between the generations? is the drm-hardware some extra part in hardware?

I recall hearing more than between r600 and r700 but less than between r500 and r600 but probably not a good idea to take that for granted.

[stikonas]

Is there any point to spend resources on userspace modesetting? Kernel modesetting for R700 now works well enough and KMS for R800 can probably be written fast enough.