AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series Gallium3D Merged

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series Gallium3D Merged

Even if you're not a NVIDIA graphics customer and not interested in the state of the Nouveau driver and its big advancements today, there still is some Mesa Gallium3D news of importance to share. AMD has merged their Radeon HD 7000 "Southern Islands" Gallium3D driver to mainline...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTA4NzM

[Adarion]

Good to read. First progress is made, and yes due to the new HW it won't pop up and be all shiny for prime time. I expect maybe a third of the time that r600 stuff needed to grow for it until it is starting to be really shiny. Until then fglrx will hopefully do.

[scottishduck]

Amazing that an officially sponsored driver lags behind a reverse engineering project.

[Drago]

Amazing that an officially sponsored driver lags behind a reverse engineering project.

If you look at the latest benchmark Michael did for nvidia chips, you will se it doesn't lag that much On the other side geforces are easier to program.

[Nedanfor]

Amazing that an officially sponsored driver lags behind a reverse engineering project.

Reverse engineering, in some fields, is faster because doesn't need lawyers in the process, but for AMD HD7000 vs nVidia 600 there is a simple explanation: the first is a completely new architecture, the second one is very similar to nVidia 500 as far as I know, so the AMD developers had to rewrite a driver "from scratch", nouveau developers had to add few lines in the existing driver. You are comparing a pyramid with a small house IMHO (with all respect to nouveau developers, their work isn't simple at all).

If you want to make a right comparison, compare nVidia 600 and AMD Aruba, that is an evolution of Cayman. The code is already public, while no AMD Trinity APU is being sold at the moment

[curaga]

Geforces just got harder to program with Kepler, and Radeon got easier with GCN

[Kano]

I dont think it got harder, nouveau has got still the same problem as years ago: reclocking is not fully stable as it should be. I guess this is very hard to do this correctly, nvidia guys should give em a hint maybe. Opengl features seem to be more easy to RE than to read docs, i really like what nouveau devs already managed to do. I don't use it all day but as soon as vdpau is working it could be considered as replacement for lowend cards. I doubt that somebody who plays the whole day will use nouveau als long as the nvidia binary is much faster. But for office systems it should not matter at all, a few desktop effects maybe and the user is happy - stability is the key.

[darkbasic]

stability is the key.

That's one of the biggest issues of all open drivers except radeon. Radeon git is somehow stabler than intel stable releases, not speaking about nouveau...

[garegin]

from my experience gnome shell works better under intel than radeon. on my main rig the desktop effects are downright painful.

[Adarion]

A.t.m. I am quite happy with KDE 4.8.2. and its desktop effects. Kernel is 3.3.1, X whatever is latest in Gentoo, mesa is Gentoo ~amd64. Works fine. HW is a HD 5670. Didn't check with gnome for a long time Besides by Gnome 2 on a different computer (an ECS G320 slowly falling apart after all the years) but that has a VIA CLE266 so there is nothing like 3d at all. :/ But then I use that one for typing and stuff only.