Ever since
the RadeonHD driver switched to using AtomBIOS, there has been little in the way of feature differences between the
xf86-video-ati and
xf86-video-radeonhd drivers. One of the few differences though is that Novell's RadeonHD driver has had
HDMI audio support so that with the R600 GPUs and later, which contain an integrated audio processor, there is audio support for capable HDMI devices when also using a supported version of ALSA. The RadeonHD driver has supported the HDMI audio for some months now, while the other driver has not, but finally this work has been ported over.
An independent developer had decided to port the HDMI audio work from the -radeonhd driver over to -ati. This code has not yet been tested, but it can be found on the
ATI driver mailing list. Once this patch has been verified, cleaned up, and pushed into the driver's master branch, this means there is one less difference between these two open-source drivers that both support the same ATI R500/600/700 graphics hardware.
