AMD's OverDrive and CrossFire Come To Linux

twljagflba writes "Since last year AMD has made ATI increasingly Linux friendly by releasing 3D programming guides and helping out the open-source community. At the same time they have been continuing to develop their binary Catalyst driver for the Linux platform and most recently they delivered same-day support for their new graphics cards. Today though they have released the Catalyst 8.8 Linux driver that adds two very important features: CrossFire and OverDrive support for Linux. Linux users are now able to use CrossFire to split the rendering workload between multiple GPUs and they're also able to overclock their graphics cards now using the binary-only driver. Phoronix has a complete run-down on both features — including benchmarks — in their AMD OverDrive on Linux and ATI Radeon CrossFire On Linux articles. Other features were also introduced in this update such as Linux 2.6.26 kernel support, Adaptive Anti-Aliasing, and other fixes."

Comments

Nice

[ByOhTek]

It's nice to see they are providing both their own driver implementation AND the specs for OSS drivers.

Once the OSS drivers are done, then even within the realm AMD cards, users will still have some choice.

At least in Linux. Us FreeBSD users will have the OSS only...

Re:Second choice

[wild_berry]

2005 called and asked for their gripe back. The reputation of the most recent ATI drivers is much enhanced from what it was. And whether someone will buy nVidia, Intel or ATI graphics for Linux depends upon their preference for powerful but proprietary binaries, free software compositing and low power consumption or the choice of reasonable performance in ATI's binaries or high-performance free software from the X.Org drivers.

Re:And on Windows?

[binarylarry]

That's completely wrong.

OpenGL supports all the latest features of graphics hardware. Some of the features are ARB extensions and the like, but you can do anything in OpenGL that you could do in Direct3d.

Do you honestly think id would be developing their next gen titles with OpenGL, if OpenGL was a crippled shadow of d3d might? No, OpenGL is comparable. OpenGL's main problem is that its really, really crufty because it supports every feature known to man, things Direct3d doesn't. Unfortunately, most of these things are very old.

OpenGL fixes that problem by cleaning up the API. That's what all the bitching was about last week when Khoronos announced the new specs. All the newbies were bitching about how certain extensions weren't moved to core, which doesn't matter in a practical sense anyway.