“On the same day that we learn VIA’s Linux support is basically dead and after a troubling week for Intel with regards to open-source graphics support for their new Sandy Bridge CPUs, Advanced Micro Devices has come forward and released open-source graphics driver support for their AMD Radeon HD 6000 series of graphics cards.”
Sadly it still doens’t support OpenCL or did I miss something? *hopes so*
OpenCL support in Mesa is a long, long way away. This just enables current Mesa functionality on the new hardware, so support is basically the same as for Evergreen (5xxx series)
Out of curiosity, which app are you trying to use OpenCL with? I would think anything that uses it would be far better off using the proprietary drivers anyway since they have much higher performance.
Edited 2011-01-08 03:29 UTC
OpenCL support is part of the Gallium3D driver stack, but it’s still listed as a yet unstarted portion of the Radeon drivers http://wiki.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature
Someone has started a proof of concept state tracker, it’s nowhere near ready to be used by any drivers.
http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=15604 According to Phoronix there is still a far far way to go for the open source drivers … so does this mean that “AMD release the specs and we will make the drivers ourselves” group was wrong? I am for sure very happy with NVIDIA which has shown almost exemplary support throughout the years (minus some KDE4-related issues which took some time for them to fix) .. but I would be perfectly happy to jump on some open-source drivers wagon .. however even Intel who supposedly commited itself to Linux even before AMD made its decision, its open source drivers are even more pitiful. Try running some serious graphics on it and compare the results to Windows drivers. So is anybody actually happy with non-NVIDIA graphics cards on Linux and actualy doing serious and modern stuff with OpenGL?
Edited 2011-01-08 04:07 UTC
Nah, Michael as usual is blowing smoke for page hits and thinks that we should already be at zero day support with 90% of binary blob performance. But then he also thinks that there will be Steam and Unreal Tournament 3 for Linux any day now!
The community is doing a great job so far, they’ve gotten very far in the actual OpenGL implementation for the backlog of cards and is still working around the legal issues with the OpenGL 3 spec.
Currently they are only focusing on getting everything working on all R300+ cards and finalising Gallium3D before they can begin performance optimisation. Why get everything tweaked for performance with half the spec implemented only to have to redo half of the optimisation to get more features in place?
Having said that, I noticed
http://wiki.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature
that the Page Flipping support for all models has recently been marked as “Done” (requires kernel 2.6.38).
Page Flipping was said to be one thing that was relatively low-hanging fruit, that is to say it wasn’t seen as too hard to do, it was being worked on, and it would yeild significant performance gains.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODcyMA
Accelerated video is still some way away, however XvMC and VDPAU may be coming to the ATI R600 Gallium3D driver as well as the R300 Gallium3D driver. This willwould allow those with Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000/5000 series graphics cards to enjoy accelerated video playback using GPU shaders beyond just the limited X-Video extension.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODcxOA
It seems that after the Linux 2.6.38 kernel is released, the Gallium3D open source drivers may become the default preference for Linux distributions instead of the classic mesa drivers.
At that point, maybe sometime this year, the open source drivers for Radeon GPUs would begin to challenge the closed source drivers certainly for functionality and perhaps for performance as well.
Some new information on the current state of XvMC acceleration: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2011-January/004731….
Also, just to clarify this article: the current support is for the 68xx and down cards. The 69xx cards use a different architecture and support for them is estimated to still be 1-3 months away.
Yes we all know what a big fail atiamd is and it’s not surprising that the losers group getting extended with via which was producing one of the most unreliable garbage chipsets for motherboards like asrock, abit, whatever noname.
These companies srsly has to die. Every nix user knows Nvidia + Intel is the way to go. ATI only has market because of gamers even tho they have integrated and mobile gpus as well. AMD only has market because ?!? guess because of marketing
until they can sell the shit to their corp partners they wont die.
Someone knows jack all about what they’re talking about… FYI, ASRock is part of ASUS, Have a look at their current lineup, they currently offer the some of the best boards for AMD.
VIAs chipsets, while not great got a worse wrap then they deserved. Their biggest problem right now is short sightedness in the X86 market. But maybe they can come up with a good implementation of the ARM Cortex A15 spec. The only issue there is, “can they actually get a OSS driver together for their GPUs?”
more like /dev/troll it seems
NVidia + Intel? Seriously?
You mean a solution where you ship with 2 GPUs because you can’t have good low-power and good-performance GPU integrated into the chipset? I am sure the overpriced notebooks with both of them could fathom it, *cough*MacBook Pro*cough*, but why should everyone else suffer?
Don’t be quick to rule out Zacate yet, Intel has yet to answer with a better cost solution.