A few days ago when publishing the results of benchmarking a lot of graphics cards on their Gallium3D drivers (about a dozen graphics cards) this left a number of people surprised. A number of these results from the open-source Gallium3D drivers illustrated the older graphics processors as being much faster than the newer hardware, even though the newer hardware is far superior to the vintage products. This shouldn't have been a surprise if you stay up-to-date with the Linux graphics news on Phoronix, but it comes down to features found in the older Gallium3D drivers not yet implemented in the newer open-source drivers.
AMD News Archives
1,663 AMD open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.
AMD has put out their first public documentation concerning their Radeon HD 6900 "Cayman" series graphics processors. This 492 page document describes the Cayman instruction set architecture. We have also received an update at Phoronix from AMD concerning the Radeon HD 6900 series open-source support under Linux.
If you use the open-source ATI Linux graphics driver, there's a major stable update available. At long last, xf86-video-ati 6.14.0 has been released. This open-source X.Org driver brings official support for the Radeon HD 5000 series, Radeon HD 6000 series, and AMD Fusion Ontario hardware. This release also has a plethora of bug-fixes and flips on the KMS page-flipping support.
While NVIDIA puts out beta Linux graphics drivers quite often as a means of soliciting testing prior to declaring a new stable GPU driver update, AMD does not but rather they rely upon their NDA-covered select beta testers to put each Catalyst release through its paces before declaring a stable update in their timed monthly manner. Today though it seems AMD has put out a Catalyst Beta driver that's targeting their workstation customers (those with the FirePro / FireGL / FireMV hardware) but as in their usual unified manner, it will work with any supported Radeon (R600+ GPU) as well.
For the past few years there's been a tradition where AMD supplies Canonical with an early snapshot of their very latest Catalyst driver prior to the next Ubuntu release. This hasn't been done to ensure Ubuntu ships with any magical graphics driver features (in some cases though it can provide a glimpse of what's to come), but rather is provided so that there is actually a Catalyst driver that works on the given Ubuntu Linux release. There's an unfortunate tradition where by the time the next Ubuntu release rolls out that the latest publicly available Catalyst driver does not support either the latest Linux kernel and/or the X.Org Server used by that release. The Catalyst snapshot provides that belated support.
With the Linux 2.6.38 kernel DRM update having been pulled into the mainline tree last night by Linus Torvalds, AMD's Alex Deucher pushed the page-flipping support from the DDX X.Org driver side into the mainline xf86-video-ati tree.
Yesterday afternoon AMD released the Radeon HD 6000 series open-source support for all non-Cayman GPUs. We covered the initial information regarding this kernel DRM / Mesa / DDX code drop well, but there's a few more tid-bits of information to pass along now that we have received additional feedback from AMD's John Bridgman and Alex Deucher and have also had time to look at the code patches ourself.
I've now been in Las Vegas for less than 48 hours in preparations for the Consumer Electronics Show this week. Interestingly though something has come up twice already when talking with various AMD stakeholders in recent days: they are evidently working on improvements to their Linux video acceleration playback. Right now Catalyst Linux users are basically left using this closed-source library written by a third-party (Splitted Desktop Systems) by applications that utilize the VA-API interface that is then translated to AMD's internal XvBA (X-Video Bitstream Acceleraton) interface used by the Catalyst driver, but this may soon change.
AMD has allowed their Radeon GPUs to be overclocked on Linux since 2008 when using their Catalyst driver with OverDrive support. Previous to that there was Rovclock for overclocking select ATI Radeon ASICs using an open-source program along with support for tuning the video memory timings and other options, which was a program written via reverse engineering. The Catalyst Linux driver supports OverDrive manipulation of the core and memory clocks, which is enough for most enthusiasts, but if you've been looking for more extensive features there is a new option.
AMD's Toronto developers working on the ATI Catalyst Linux driver have just released their last public update of the year. The Catalyst 10.12 Linux driver (along with the Windows version) is now available for those interested in this high-performance, but proprietary, driver.
Yesterday we reported that AMD's Catalyst Linux driver team lost another key developer with Piranavan Selvanandan, a senior engineer at ATI since 2003 when Matthew Tippett built-up the original ATI Linux driver team, leaving the company. While it's unfortunate to see AMD lose another long-time Linux engineer, it appears they are hiring for both their open and closed-source Linux driver teams.
The ATI/AMD Catalyst Linux driver has improved vastly over the years with the switch to their new architecture back in 2007 and hitting many milestones since that point with reaching a performance and near-feature parity with their Windows Catalyst driver thanks to a largely shared code-base. The Catalyst Linux driver is now largely on-par with the AMD Windows driver (except with areas like XvBA for video acceleration), but today AMD's Linux team is facing a new loss.
As was pointed out in our forums, the AMD Catalyst 10.11 Linux driver has tipped up today. This driver, with its installer package approaching 120MB in size, is now available for download at AMD's web-site.
There's good news for those of you wanting to quickly go out and pickup an AMD Fusion system as soon as it's available: there's already open-source drivers for Fusion.
The first-ever MeeGo conference is going on this week in Dublin, Ireland and from that event that's about furthering this open-source mobile/embedded Linux distribution founded by Intel and Nokia, AMD has announced they want in on this Linux lovechild too. They have officially announced from Dublin they have joined the MeeGo project and will begin contributing to this OS that targets netbooks, smart-phones, in-vehicle computer systems, and other embedded devices.
Being worked on this past summer were improvements to the open-source ATI R300 driver when it comes to GLSL compiler optimizations. This work was done by Tom Stellar as part of Google's Summer of Code for student developers. While we reported on some of the R300 compiler improvements back in June, there hasn't been too much more information to pass along, especially as the summer is now over. However, there is now a new branch by Stellar containing some additional optimizations.
It was just over the weekend that we reported XvMC and VDPAU may come to the ATI R600 Gallium3D driver that would allow those with Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000/5000 series graphics cards (what's supported by R600g) to enjoy accelerated video playback using GPU shaders beyond just the limited X-Video extension. This work was being done by Christian König and today he has one hell of a surprise: it's to the point that today you can try out the code and it should work for XvMC! Yes, that's the case, I just read the email twice and am now scurrying to test out the appropriate ATI DDX and Gallium3D driver.
When looking at our 2010 Linux Graphics Survey results, the second most popular technology sought after by Linux desktop users was video playback acceleration. This isn't surprising considering only with NVIDIA's proprietary driver using VDPAU on modern GeForce hardware can you get a decent experience or with select Intel chipsets supporting VA-API. With everything else, you're pretty much limited to nothing or the not-too-useful X-Video. There's also cases like with the ATI Catalyst driver providing XvBA support, but that's often buggy and rubbish, the same goes with the Intel Poulsbo blobs and their VA-API support.
While users of Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" have had access to an early release of the Catalyst 10.10 Linux driver that AMD had sent over to Canonical in advance in order to provide X.Org Server 1.9 support, the rest of the Linux-using public now finally has access to the official Catalyst 10.10 build. Those that have already used Catalyst 10.10 in the Ubuntu Maverick release have been rather excited for its changes.
In what has become an unfortunate tradition for the past few releases, prior to the release of Ubuntu 10.10, AMD provided Canonical with a pre-release of their latest proprietary Catalyst driver at the time. They have done this to fix some major bugs, but primarily to provide a working ATI/AMD proprietary graphics driver that will run against their latest Ubuntu Linux release as usually their latest public releases at the time do not support Ubuntu's kernel and/or X.Org Server. With Maverick Meerkat, which was released yesterday, there is a pre-release of the Catalyst 10.10 Linux driver, which will not be released to the general public until later in October.
Besides Linux drivers for gaming peripherals (like mice and other things) being an area where Linux tends to struggle compared to the level of support and functionality offered under Windows, enthusiast-oriented programs for being able to overclock your CPU and RAM is another area where Linux really provides no suitable alternatives to the plethora of Windows utilities. There is though a new open-source program for manipulating certain AMD CPUs under Linux.
We've said it a few times already that the R600g driver continues to advance, but this open-source Gallium3D graphics driver that provides hardware acceleration for ATI R600/R700/Evergreen ASICs (the Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000/5000 graphics cards) has now received another huge boost with what has been dubbed as the "new design" and with the latest Mesa Git code these new code paths are used by default.
While most of the exciting action for open-source graphics now occurs within the Linux kernel for the DRM and KMS and there is all the work being poured into the 3D side via classic Mesa and Gallium3D drivers, the DDX drivers continue to play a role for 2D acceleration and other X.Org features. AMD's Alex Deucher today has announced the first xf86-video-ati driver update in quite a while and that bumps it to version 6.13.2.
While most of the open-source Linux graphics drivers are currently in Toulouse for the 2010 X.Org Developers' Summit, David Airlie of Red Hat Australia is not among those in attendance. He, however, is continuing to work on one of his latest efforts in conjunction with AMD: R600g, or the ATI R600/700/Evergreen Gallium3D driver. In the latest batch of Git commits to Mesa there is now a number of new features implemented.
AMD has just released their monthly proprietary Linux driver update, which this month puts it at Catalyst 10.9. The only new "feature" of AMD Catalyst 10.9 for Linux is early support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 (RHEL6), but there are some bug-fixes.
The Linux community is still in awe from today's announcement that Broadcom has released an open-source WiFi driver for their newest 802.11n chipsets after not backing any Linux support for their wireless hardware in years past. In the Phoronix IRC channel the question was jokingly begged if hell has frozen over, but now we have another announcement to share today, which makes us wonder if hell has really frozen over. No, we aren't sharing more news right now on Valve's Steam/Source Linux client that's still coming, but that there is now Gallium3D support for the ATI Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" series!
While just earlier today we reported that the ATI Evergreen open-source 3D code may soon move into a Gallium3D driver while for now it's rather stagnate within the classic Mesa R600 driver, there is good news today to report from the Evergreen DRM/kernel side too. AMD's Alex Deucher has just released a patch to the Radeon DRM to enable blit support using the 3D engine for ATI Radeon HD 5000 series hardware.
AMD finally pushed out open-source 2D/3D acceleration code for Evergreen (a.k.a. the ATI Radeon HD 5000 series graphics cards) last month, but since then these drivers haven't received too much attention. AMD's few open-source developers are beginning to turn their attention to supporting the Radeon HD 6000 series more promptly in the open-source world while the community developers seem to still have their attention on the Gallium3D driver for the ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 (R600/R700) hardware.
It was three years ago on this day that we were the first to detail AMD's open-source strategy. Yep, it's only been three years since AMD became public with pushing out NDA-free GPU documentation and register specifications, open-source code for the xf86-video-ati and Mesa drivers, and employed a small set of developers to contribute towards their open-source Linux stack. It was also three years ago from this month that the now deceased RadeonHD driver was launched.
Last month the Catalyst 10.7 driver for ATI Radeon/FirePro graphics cards brought Eyefinity support to consumer-grade graphics cards after it had been available within the Windows Catalyst drivers for months. Meanwhile, the Windows version of Catalyst 10.7 brought OpenGL ES 2.0 support so that web browsers can take advantage of it for accelerating HTML5 rendering and WebGL. While the Catalyst 10.7 for Linux release went without this support, it's been added to the just-released Catalyst 10.8 build.
Nearly two hours ago we shared the news that there's finally open-source 2D/3D/video acceleration for ATI's Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" family of graphics processors, which is currently the newest and best consumer-grade GPUs from AMD's GPG unit. At the time though only the xf86-video-ati DDX driver code was publicly pushed into a branch of the driver, but now the 3D portion of the code has publicly landed.
As was just talked about in announcing the open-source 2D and 3D support for ATI Evergreen GPUs, the R600g driver has been gaining lots of momentum in the past few weeks. Ever since this open-source Gallium3D driver that aims to provide hardware-acceleration for ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 (and potentially Radeon HD 5000 series) hardware took a shader compiler shortcut a few weeks back, it seems almost every time our RSS feed for the Mesa Git change-log refreshes there is a new R600g driver change.
AMD has released a new ATI Stream SDK this morning and, among other improvements, it features OpenCL 1.1 support. The OpenCL 1.1 specification was released by the Khronos Group back in June as the first major update to the Open Computing Language since it's original draft in 2008.
Martin-Éric Racine has just announced the release candidate of the X.Org Geode 2.11.9 driver in preparations for the X.Org 7.6 Katamari. The AMD Geode driver is not to be confused with the AMD/ATI Radeon drivers for Linux, but rather this is the driver Geode GX and Geode LX embedded SoC such as what's used by the One-Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. When announcing this driver, Martin-Éric has shared that AMD engineers are back to actually contributing work towards this driver.
Now that the Linux 2.6.36 kernel is set to ATI R600/700 tiling support within the Radeon DRM code, patches for hooking into this tiling support have been committed to the xf86-video-ati DDX and the classic Mesa DRI R600 drivers.
It was just one week ago that the R600g driver that is to provide open-source Gallium3D support to ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 (R600/700) graphics cards didn't do much as it's shader compiler was far from complete. However, after the author of this driver, Jerome Glisse, embarked on a new strategy, the the glxgears milestone was quickly hit.
As was widely anticipated, today AMD is rolling out their Catalyst 10.7 graphics driver for Windows and Linux platforms. On the Windows side, their Catalyst 10.7 rolls out support for OpenGL ES 2.0. ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000/5000 series graphics cards (along with the FirePro hardware) running Windows can now take advantage of OpenGL ES 2.0 support with HTML5 for in-browser graphics rendering. However, that support hasn't yet made its way to the Catalyst Linux driver, but there are other changes packed away in this month's update.
Just days ago we reported on the lack of progress with the ATI R600g driver that intends to provide Gallium3D support for ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series graphics cards, but fortunately today there has been some activity in the Mesa Git repository for this open-source driver and a statement issued by the lead developer (Jerome Glisse) about its progress and he also has shared a TODO list.
Splitted Desktop Systems has updated their closed-source library that provides an XvBA back-end to a VA-API front-end so that those running the ATI Catalyst Linux driver are able to take advantage of the UVD2 video engine on newer Radeon HD graphics cards.
As the first stable open-source ATI X.Org driver update since the release of xf86-video-ati 6.13.0 back in April, David Airlie has today announced the immediate release of xf86-video-ati 6.13.1. This new driver update while a stable point release update does bring some notable changes.
Apologizes that the monthly Catalyst release news is not near-instantaneous as usual as I had been getting back from Germany for LinuxTag and other business, but Catalyst 10.6 was released today. This June update actually brings some notable changes unlike releases found in the past few months.
It was over two years ago that AMD first released its R500 3D programming documentation to the general public without any NDAs, which was followed by the R600/700 3D documentation along with older R300-class documents as well. While we have yet to see proper 3D programming documentation for the ATI Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" GPUs that were released last year, the R500 3D documentation continues to be revised.
While the ATI Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" graphics cards launched last September, the proprietary Catalyst driver supported the new GPUs since they began appearing in retail channels, and Evergreen KMS support has been available since February, the open-source 2D/3D acceleration support for these newest ATI graphics cards have been non-existent. Fortunately, however, that is finally changing.
Earlier this month we reported on vastly improved ATI power management support within the open-source Radeon graphics driver stack for Linux that now supports dynamic power management along with different power management profiles. Following that we provided a detailed look at the ATI Linux power management support with plenty of charts showing how the power management is working out with this latest open-source code.
For those of you not interested in today's ATI Catalyst 10.5 for Linux driver, if you pull the very latest open-source ATI Radeon Linux graphics driver stack there is now tiling support for the R600/700 (Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series) graphics processors.
AMD has just put out their Catalyst 10.5 Linux driver update. Unfortunately, there isn't anything too exciting in this release.
The R600 Gallium3D driver for ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 graphics cards is not yet in a state for testing by end-users unlike the R300 Gallium3D driver that is running great these days. However, it is slowly getting there.
For years we have been talking about open-source ATI Radeon power management for their Linux driver and it's finally all coming to fruition. Back in April of 2008 we talked about dynamic clocks coming to R500+ ASICs and various other initiatives to improve the Radeon power management in their DDX driver, but everything got shook up with the migration to their ATI kernel mode-setting driver, which finally now allows for real power management capabilities.
Last year a new set of DRI2 extensions came about for sync and swap support of display buffers to better reduce potential "tearing" that may appear on displays in some composited environments. This work that's exposed to the client through OpenGL/GLX extensions also can lead to improved performance, video memory savings, and other benefits as talked about extensively on the Composite Swap Wiki page. A new GLX swap event extension also came about out of expressed needs by the Clutter/Mutter developers.
While early adopters of Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" have had access to the Catalyst 10.4 Linux driver for more than a month (in fact, two pre-releases) this afternoon AMD has officially released their April Linux driver.
1663 AMD news articles published on Phoronix.