AMD News Archives

This week at AMD's Hawaii event where they announced their new high-end graphics processors, they also announced Mantle. AMD's Mantle is a new graphics API that looks to take on OpenGL and Microsoft's Direct3D as a new high-performance graphics rendering API.

Tom Stellard of AMD shared a status update on the current support level and capabilities of the open-source OpenCL implementation by Gallium3D's Clover state tracker and the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver.

AMD has finally published NDA-free public programming documentation concerning the HDA audio support on Radeon GPUs.

Open-source developers are adding run-time power management support to the open-source Radeon DRM graphics driver for supporting ATI/AMD PowerXpress laptops.

AMD has officially released Catalyst 13.9 for Linux today.

After the kernel-side AMD Berlin APU support was merged for the Linux 3.12 while the user-space Mesa Gallium3D and Radeon X.Org driver support was just merged on Friday evening for this first HSA APU.

The Linux 3.11 kernel hasn't even been released yet but the Radeon DRM driver changes for the Linux 3.12 kernel are already lined up and waiting to be pulled into the drm-next tree.

It was anticipated R600 SB shader optimizations might be enabled by default for this Radeon Gallium3D driver and now they have been for Mesa 9.3/Mesa 10.0.

Some months ago there was talk of doing LLVM point releases and it looks like this might actually happen now for the LLVM 3.3 series thanks in part to AMD.

Vadim Girlin has proposed a Mesa patch that would enable the "R600 SB" shader optimizations to be enabled by default for the Radeon Gallium3D driver. This R600 SB support has already become very popular with Linux graphics enthusiasts for its performance-enhancing abilities.

Nearly three weeks after Catalyst 13.8 Beta for Linux, AMD has now released the second Linux graphics driver beta of the month.

In recent months I have delivered a number of R600 SB shader optimization benchmarks for the AMD Gallium3D shader back-end that's part of Mesa 9.2. I've also delivered tests of the R600 LLVM back-end that's also been progressing in recent months and viewed as the future for AMD's open-source driver. This weekend are some independent tests of the R600 LLVM and SB back-ends.

While the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver now has support for the latest graphics cards, there's finally UVD video decoding, and the Linux 3.11 kernel brings dynamic power management, there's still features being desired by those using this open-source Linux graphics driver on ATI/AMD GPUs.

Version 7.2.0 of the xf86-video-ati DDX driver was released this morning. While the X.Org drivers aren't too exciting these days with most of the really great work happening within the DRM or Mesa/Gallium3D drivers, there's still an interesting number of changes to xf86-video-ati 7.2.0 for Radeon GPU hardware support.

For those concerned about the Reverse PRIME and multi-screen Reverse Optimus enablement for the AMD open-source X.Org driver, the support is now present in its Git tree.

The AMD Catalyst 13.8 Beta driver was released today and with it comes full support for OpenGL 4.3, support for the Linux 3.10 kernel, and various fixes.

Marek Olšák, the very well known independent contributor to Mesa/Gallium3D and particularly for the open-source Radeon graphics drivers, is now employed by AMD.

While NVIDIA just introduced a new Linux graphics driver to support the day-old OpenGL 4.4, AMD just released a new Catalyst Linux Beta that finally delivers full support for OpenGL 4.3.

An independent open-source developer has provided a set of four xf86-video-ati X.Org driver patches to boost the 2D rendering performance for Evergreen and Cayman GPUs right now though the optimizations can also be back-ported to R600 and R700 graphics processors too.

Greg Stoner of AMD and representing the HSA Foundation talked last week at the Linaro Connect Europe 2013 event about the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) as it concerns ARM.

For those curious about how the system performance is impacted by applying compiler optimizations to the AMD A10-6800K "Richland" APU, here's some benchmarks of GCC 4.8.1 on Ubuntu Linux.

For those curious how AMD's Bulldozer CPUs are performing with this week's release of LLVM 3.3, here are some benchmarks of LLVM/Clang 3.3 along with some early benchmarks of the latest Clang 3.4 development code from the AMD FX-8150 Eight-Core CPU.

AMD has announced a new beta Catalyst Linux graphics driver. This time around, there are some new features to this Catalyst 13.6 Beta.

Linux graphics drivers have come a long way in recent years for both the open and closed-source solutions from AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel. In this Sunday article, a Phoronix reader has shared his experiences in going from failing to setup two monitors under Linux just a few years ago with NVIDIA to now successfully driving six monitors on a single system using the AMD Linux driver.

The open-source AMD Linux graphics driver now boasts support for AMD's next-generation "Hainan" GPU products, a.k.a. the Radeon HD 8800 series.

Vadim Girlin's shader-optimizing back-end for the AMD R600 Gallium3D driver has been merged into mainline Mesa.

Earlier this month I wrote about Bitcoin Mining coming to the open-source Radeon Linux GPU driver. In the weeks since, Tom Stellard of AMD has made more improvements to the AMD R600 LLVM back-end that benefit the performance of Bitcoin mining.

With less than one week left to the month, AMD released today the Catalyst 13.4 graphics driver for Linux x86/x86_64 customers.

Now having shown that Intel Ivy Bridge graphics are faster with the latest Mesa 9.2-devel Git code and also that the Gallium3D LLVMpipe driver is significantly faster, here's a new round of AMD Radeon "R600g" Gallium3D performance benchmarks.

For being a project that's just a few months old and up until recently wasn't touched by BSD developers, the port of the open-source AMD Radeon kernel mode-setting driver from the Linux kernel to FreeBSD kernel is progressing nicely.

While Mesa has some level of support for GL_ARB_debug_output, Intel developers are implementing support within Mesa for AMD's OpenGL performance monitor extension to assist game developers and others with monitoring the performance of their software.

AMD has released a new Catalyst Linux graphics driver, which supports modern Linux kernel releases while having various other fixes in store too. Some of the OpenGL fixes will help those playing some Linux Steam client games.

Tom Stellard of AMD, the developer that has been working on open-source OpenCL support, has proposed to the upstream LLVM development community that they begin doing point releases.

More of the Radeon kernel mode-setting (KMS) driver stack being ported to FreeBSD from Linux is beginning to function.

Yesterday it was exclusively announced on Phoronix that AMD was releasing open-source UVD code so that their open-source Linux graphics driver can finally benefit from GPU hardware-accelerated video playback. Here's some more details.

New kernel patches by AMD for the Linux kernel provide "frequency sensitivity feedback" for the powersave bias in cpufreq. This hardware feedback feature is to be introduced on future AMD processors.

It was just one week ago that AMD released the Catalyst 13.3 Beta 2 driver while now it has been succeeded by Catalyst 13.3 Beta 3.

Michel Dänzer of AMD has provided a patch so that PRIME multi-GPU sharing will work with the GLAMOR 2D acceleration architecture, as needed for the Radeon HD 7000 series support and optionally for other generations of AMD and Intel GPUs.

AMD has uploaded the Catalyst 13.3 Beta 2 driver to their website for Linux x86/x86_64 users.

Last month I reported on the AMD Linux DRM/KMS driver being ported to FreeBSD. With the developer receiving funding from the FreeBSD Foundation, progress on this open-source AMD kernel mode-setting driver is moving in a steadfast manner.

It looks like there will be open-source Linux driver support from launch-day for AMD's forthcoming "Richland" Fusion APUs.

AMD has released a new Catalyst Embedded driver for Linux systems prior to calling it a week.

The initial scheduler code has been merged into AMD's R600 GPU LLVM back-end.

Two weeks after the release of Catalyst 13.2 Beta 6 for Linux users, AMD has released the seventh beta of the forthcoming Catalyst 13.2 Linux graphics driver.

AMD has made available a new Catalyst Linux graphics driver for Linux, the Catalyst 13.2 Beta 6 release.

A rather simple patch by Vadim Girlin has led to a reported significant performance improvement within the R600 Gallium3D graphics driver.

This week was marked by quite a steady patch flow of improvements to the AMD R600 GPU LLVM back-end that's used for Radeon Gallium3D OpenCL support and is also being bettered for its handling of OpenGL.

Merged into the mainline LLVM repository on Wednesday was support for indirect addressing within AMD's R600 GPU back-end.

While AMD has yet to officially introduce their Radeon HD 8000 series, published today was the initial open-source Linux graphics driver support for handling the Radeon HD 8800 "Oland" graphics cards.

The xf86-video-ati 7.1.0 graphics driver was released today as stable with several changes.