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AMD Publishes Open-Source "ATI Evergreen" Driver
Several readers have written to tell us that AMD has published their code to support the Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" graphics cards on Linux in an open-source driver. Unfortunately the driver isn't quite as complete as some might hope. The current offering doesn't promise 2D (EXA) acceleration or 3D support. "The DDX driver supports mode-setting on the Evergreen/R800 series GPUs with VGA and DVI connectors while the DisplayPort connectivity is still not working right, according to AMD's Alex Deucher who had written most of this code. These new AMD graphics cards have been around since September while there was no open-source support at that time. In December just before Christmas there was Evergreen Shader documentation that was made publicly available and around that time it was confirmed via our forums that initial VGA mode-setting was working with Evergreen internally on unreleased code. Since then the digital connector support has been added in and this code has finally cleared AMD's legal review. The revised target was to publish this code by FOSDEM, which is this weekend so AMD did hit the target this time."
FTFS:
The DDX driver supports mode-setting on the Evergreen/R800 series GPUs with VGA and DVI connectors
The driver is functional for your regular 2d needs. Browsing the web and moving windows around is fast enough. It doesn't crash all the time (only tried it for a few hours, and no problems so far), but it does lack video overlays, so it's not quite ready for media use just yet.
Wow, attack the guy's name. Nice. Maybe he should go by "Anonymous Coward" like all the cool kids.
In fact, Alex has been developing open source drivers for ATI cards for years on his own dime, and AMD only relatively recently hired him to do the same thing for money. Would a little gratitude to either of them kill you?
Alex, the only reason I could see anything from my Radeon card for the last six years was because of your work. Thank you!
Windows 7 manages to support the same graphics driver interface as did Windows 2000, which is nearly ten years old.
I don't think this is correct. While Windows Vista and 7 support Win2K drivers for many devices unchanged, video driver model in particular was completely rehashed in Vista. I'm not aware of any video drivers for XP, much less 2K, working in Vista or 7.
Every GPU that doesn't have a WDDM driver uses a 2000/XP driver. This includes chipsets like the GMA 900 (famous for not having Aero support).
Yes, Windows Vista/7 do support 2000/XP (XPDM) drivers.
It's unfortunate that you can't get your hardware working in Windows 7, but that's no reason to insult anonymous people on the Internet.
Actually, we're fortunate to be able to reuse most of our code on lots of GPUs -- there are some bits that apply from r100 to r700. The "fun" is in the sheer complexity of the hardware, the inability of the hardware to cope with incorrect programming, and the lack of documentation, manpower, and testing available to assist us.
Oh, and hardware bugs. You don't wanna know how many there are. Really. Try getting an RS480, or RC410, to do 3D. It ain't fun.
~ C.
I've had a R600 based radeon HD3870 on linux for a while. I used to go with the fglrx proprietary drivers, but I've recently switched to the radeon (ddx) driver.
I have to say I'm extremely happy with the Open driver. Now is it Free Software? I'm not sure, I mean *most* of the driver seems to be, but you still need to load microcode firmware.
As far as the quality of the driver though, it seems very bug free and the kernel mode setting is awesome. Switching from vt-1 to an Xorg session for example is instantaneous. Mesa seems to need some work on the 3d side, but you can play quakelive on it and run the kde version of compiz.
It's really great that ATI has both released documentation and paid developers to work on getting these drivers up and running, they should consider both sponsoring some 3d work on the mesa side and also figuring out a way around the microcode situation.
Liberty.