Here's The R600 Gallium3D Driver Running Gears

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 23 July 2010 at 08:19 PM EDT. 27 Comments
MESA
If you read the previous R600g news post from less than an hour ago this should come as no surprise, but: the ATI R600g Gallium3D driver has finally reached the milestone of being able to properly run glxgears. This GLX demo is simple and useless as a benchmark, but is an important development milestone and as talked about in that previous news piece, Jerome hopes to tackle texture support within a few days so then we will see more interesting OpenGL capabilities and we are potentially just days away from being able to run Quake with R600g and a modern ATI graphics processor (you can already do so with an open-source driver stack using the classic Mesa R600/700 driver).

Moments after seeing the R600g commits to Mesa today and reading Jerome's message, I verified that glxgears was indeed working. The below screenshot was atop an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installation running today's Linux 2.6.35 kernel, X.Org Server 1.7.6, xf86-video-ati 6.13.0, and of course the very latest Mesa 7.9-devel Git code running atop an ATI Radeon HD 4600 series (R700) graphics card.


Of course, the R600g driver for now is going without a proper shader compiler. For those wanting to watch three rotating gears for a while, the R600g driver that provides Gallium3D support for ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series graphics cards can be built from the latest Mesa code using the --enable-gallium-r600 flag and you may need to point your LIBGL_DRIVERS_PATH environmental variable towards the Gallium library directory to pickup the new r600_dri.so file rather than that of the classic Mesa R600 driver. Besides that it's a pretty standard Mesa build/install process to get the Gallium3D driver running.

Those that are not driver developers or interested in watching glxgears, you'll want to stick with the R600/700 classic Mesa driver for now that is fairly mature or the proprietary ATI Catalyst Linux driver if you are looking for the feature-rich, performance-oriented experience.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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