Full EXA Composite For R300-500 GPUs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Full EXA Composite For R300-500 GPUs

Alex Deucher has been working on delivering full EXA Composite support for the Radeon driver and today the first bits of this work are available via his personal git repository. The full EXA Composite not only covers the R300 and R400 generations, but it already supports the Radeon X1000 (R500) graphics cards! In Alex's blog post he mentions that some blend combinations still need to be debugged, but the R300/400 support in general is pretty solid...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NjM5OQ

[fragro]

cool, when will be the next stable release? (especially for ubuntu)

[Pseus]

This is great. Go devs!

[an0n1m0us]

This news makes very little sense. I was told in an IRC chat that the Radeon driver was dead, that it was a case of RadeonHD slowly becoming usable and the proprietary driver as the only two options. Also doesn't Alex work for AMD now? Or was that somebody else. If so, why isn't this EXA support going into RadeonHD?

[Melcar]

This news makes very little sense. I was told in an IRC chat that the Radeon driver was dead, that it was a case of RadeonHD slowly becoming usable and the proprietary driver as the only two options. Also doesn't Alex work for AMD now? Or was that somebody else. If so, why isn't this EXA support going into RadeonHD?

As I understand it, radeonHD does not have "official" support for anything below R400. Why would they kill it off then?

[Michael]

RE: Radeon vs. RadeonHD... There is coincidently an article going up on Phoronix tomorrow morning surrounding the debate.

The RadeonHD driver right now has basic EXA/XAA R500 support.

[yoshi314]

I was told in an IRC chat that the Radeon driver was dead, that it was a case of RadeonHD slowly becoming usable and the proprietary driver as the only two options.

who told you that?

radeonhd is unlikely to extend support for pre-r500 cards, so radeon driver has a good reason to stay.

[Tillin9]

I thought the eventual goal was for radeonhd to merge back into radeon. The whole reason it exists was since drastic changes might be needed to support the newer chips, the developers thought it best to fork the current driver to avoid breaking pre-r500 chips while it evolved.

[Michael]

I thought the eventual goal was for radeonhd to merge back into radeon. The whole reason it exists was since drastic changes might be needed to support the newer chips, the developers thought it best to fork the current driver to avoid breaking pre-r500 chips while it evolved.

RadeonHD was written from scratch so there is no "merging back". AMD does want the two drivers to move, but the RadeonHD devs at least feel the drivers are far too different now to possibly merge.

[yoshi314]

i would not mind having two separate drivers. r5xx and newer have some substantial changes to 2d acceleration, and it seems pretty reasonable to have a separate driver for these cards.