The ATI R600g Driver Gets Boosted By A New Design

[BlackStar]

Good luck running a window manager without X.

Wayland.

(The edit limit sucks)

[Jecos]

If you use the classic Mesa driver (r600c) + latest X driver + latest kernel:

- OpenGL 2.1
- Profile-based powersaving works well. Dynamic powersaving works, but is glitchy
- Desktop effects work great
- Most games work, see the matrix here: http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonProgram
- Performance is not fantastic. Things are considerably slower than with the proprietary driver, but playable (I've just finished Doom3 on high quality on my budget $40 card)

With the r600g driver, it should be similar, but somewhat slower and buggier. However, the future development will concentrate on this driver, and it should exceed the classic driver significantly in the future.

They need to add Heroes of Newerth to that Native games list.
you can download it and try it for free now as well.

[pingufunkybeat]

Wayland.

Is that what you're running?

[markg85]

Ah, neat another cool update for the r600g.
But seriously, isn't anyone finding it very remarkable that suddenly (since a few weeks) the development in this driver is boosting by 10x or even more...

I bet ATI is trying to shoot this driver up, boost gallium usage and release a working r600g driver with ATI 6xxx series cards when they get released! After all, a working OpenGL 2.1 through gallium is a lot better then a severely crippled OpenGL 4.1

And besides that, if ATI has a fully functional gallium driver for the 6000 series then gallium state trackers for higher OpenGL version will probably follow fast.

I do wonder how they are gonna do hardware video decoding in gallium though... Perhaps they are gonna release an API for that after all?

I wish i could see how this driver and ATI 6xxx support looks in 6 months on linux.

The way i see this (and i hope i'm right and that it doesn't take YEARS!) is that the ATI driver state in linux is going to dramatically change for the better in the coming months. And with that all graphic drivers in time.

[NomadDemon]

is r600g for r700 chip also?[4850 radeon] ?

[pingufunkybeat]

is r600g for r700 chip also?[4850 radeon] ?

Yes.

It is.

Stupid character limit.

[bridgman]

I bet ATI is trying to shoot this driver up, boost gallium usage and release a working r600g driver with ATI 6xxx series cards when they get released! After all, a working OpenGL 2.1 through gallium is a lot better then a severely crippled OpenGL 4.1...

It's actually Red Hat and independent developers doing the work on the Gallium3D drivers. We provided the initial classic code and documentation which is being used as a reference, and we are trying to answer technical questions that come up during the development effort, but that's essentially it. I'm not trying to distance AMD from the effort (far from it -- we think it's really cool), just want to make sure we don't take/get credit for work that others are doing.

[nanonyme]

Also the neatest thing is that since Evergreen apparently goes to r600g too, some of this neat new development is applicable there too. \o/

[darkbasic]

Is that what you're running?

No, but it probably will in a 'not so near' future with my Meego smartphone

[Nille]

Suse(NOvel) is still involved in the development? or they have withdrawn after radeonhd=