Slashdot Mirror
Open-Source 2D, 3D Drivers For ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series
An anonymous reader writes "AMD has now rolled out open-source 2D and 3D drivers for their ATI Radeon HD 5000 series graphics processors. As described at length over at Phoronix, it's taken nearly a year to complete but there is now public code released that enables 2D, 3D, and video hardware-acceleration for this latest generation of ATI GPUs. For now this code is intended for developers and enthusiasts but with time it will make its way into stable Linux distribution updates. AMD's open-source developers are also beginning to work on ATI Radeon HD 6000 series support, which is hardware not to be released until late in the year."
I guess this is more than what nVidia has been doing.. Plus for AMD users.
http://www.snaver.net/
After years of being a die-hard Nvidia-on-Linux user, I took a risk and went with a laptop that had integrated ATI graphics when I made my most recent upgrade.
Nothing but instability, incompatibility, artifacting, underperformance, a mess. I regret it. I finally got an IBM Advanced Mini-Dock and put an Nvidia PCI-Express 8600GT in it (needed something low power enough to draw from the slot alone, small enough to fit in the tiny mini-dock space).
Installed the Nvidia drivers and away I went, stable and fast.
Meanwhile, on Windows nobody (neither IBM nor Lenovo nor ATI) have managed to release updated, much less Windows 7-compatible, drivers for the integrated ATI graphics in my Thinkpad. The machine is only two years old but it's all EOL as far as ATI is concerned.
This is a good move by ATI, I suppose, but it's woefully late, and it doesn't do anything about existing hardware on any platform. ATI's hardware might be okay, I have no idea, but their driver support on every platform sucks ass.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
But how does ATI know that you bought an ATI card because of the open-source drivers?
Perhaps an alternative (and cheaper approach) is to go and download the drivers from ATI's website while using a browser that sends a user agent that is clearly identifiable as a Linux system.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I'm in favor of this, so let's give AMD some proper recognition. I deal a lot with AMD servers and bladeservers as well as the Intel ones. The memory architecture of recent AMD servers is four channels rather than Intel's three. This allows for configurations of memory that are in the more familiar powers of two, as well as providing 1/3 more memory bandwidth. In some cases the AMD servers offer more net memory. In addition it allows more special things, like 256GB on a two processor server, which Intel currently can't do in a retail server.
The AMD twelve-core servers open the possibility of a terabyte of RAM if you're looking for that. They considerably alter the cost-benefit analysis of Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI).
AMD has done away with the multi CPU premium, so as your real world problem scales the cost of servers scales linearly rather than logarithmically - up to the point that your problem can be solved with 96 x64 cores.
The cost point now isn't about the CPU, it's about the RAM.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
nouveau does not support CUDA nor OpenCL yet
One of the projects I've recently been involved with is a GPGPU compiler for nVidia cards using a friendly fork of Nouveau. The interfaces to the compute units have been reverse engineered, as have the instruction sets for the compute shaders. This means that we are currently able to load and run GPGPU programs compiled without any nVidia code. So, there is enough information available to implement OpenCL for nVidia cards, meaning it's likely to appear in the next few months.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Good luck getting VDPAU in the open source drivers.
Apparently, releasing the specs required to support the hardware video decoding in the ATI chips would compromise Windows based DRM (i.e. where the app decrypts the video file and sends decrypted but compressed video data to the video card, the specs for the video decode part would let you build a program to intercept the compressed video data before it gets sent to the card)