ATI Radeon Driver Re-Write Still Has Work Left

With the ioquake3-based Tremulous test, the results were identical.

Beyond some OpenGL regressions and no real performance gains with the new Radeon rewrite code when in use without the TTM memory manager, the kernel mode-setting code is not yet ready for ATI's newer hardware (the R600/700 series; Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000) and there is still no OpenGL support ready for end-users with this newer hardware. AMD and other outside developers though are, of course, working on this code. What is also still early on in development is the Gallium3D driver support for ATI graphics card. We also recently looked into the ATI kernel mode-setting experience.

While there has been a lot of great news this week surrounding the open-source ATI graphics stack on Linux, there is still a fair amount of work left and this work is not immediately the miracle driver for ATI Radeon customers. The next few quarters should definitely be interesting in the ATI Linux world.