AMD To Enable DRI3 By Default On Latest X.Org Servers

Michel Dänzer of AMD has published a patch today that would enable DRI3 by default for the xf86-video-ati X.Org driver.

Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3 has proven to be able to deliver faster performance than DRI2 (the default) while reducing tearing, but hasn't been enabled by default due to various bugs in the X.Org Server's implementation. However, things have been in rather good shape if using the latest X.Org Server 1.18 point release, thus driver maintainers are finally back to re-evaluating their DRI defaults.

The patch today by Dänzer would enable DRI3 by default if it's being built against xorg-server 1.18.3 or newer. The patch for now is floating on the xorg-driver-ati mailing list.

If you want to manually enable DRI3 for your driver to get a better experience or reduce the OpenGL performance in select workloads, simply add Option "DRI" "3" to your xorg.conf/x.org.conf.d -- assuming you're on a newer X.Org Server. Hopefully the other DDX maintainers will also resort to re-enabling DRI3 by default too.