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AMD Puts Out Radeon HD 6000 Open-Source Driver

Posted by Soulskill on from the incremental-promise-fulfillment dept.

An anonymous reader writes "AMD has just released their open-source driver for the Radeon HD 6000 series graphics cards (sans the Cayman GPUs) with KMS, 2D, and 3D acceleration."

9 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Put your money where your mouth is by Enderandrew · · Score: 5, Insightful

    For all the Slashdot posters who keep begging for Linux support and talking about how big companies constantly ignore you, this is your chance.

    Buy AMD. Be vocal that the reason you're buying an AMD video card is because of their driver. Vote with your wallet.

    (On the CPU front, you can make an equal case for Intel supporting open source).

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    1. Re:Put your money where your mouth is by CynicTheHedgehog · · Score: 4, Informative

      For what it's worth, my AMD CPU and ASUS motherboard (quad core AMD 870 chipset) work just fine in Linux, as does my AMD/ATI video card. As did my previous AMD CPU/motherboard. I have yet to be disappointed by them.

    2. Re:Put your money where your mouth is by Carewolf · · Score: 4, Interesting

      NVidia's linux drivers have been incredibly buggy for years now. I recently changed the open source nouveau drivers which easily solved all performance problems I had. NVidia is both poorly implemented, has poor support for moderen X11 extensions (XRandr), the recent 26x series also has VERY serious memory-leaks which slowly brings your computer to a crawl.

      Btw. I am not stating this as a user, I am stating this as a develop who has been working on getting KDE to work better on NVidia hardware.

  2. VAAPI Acceleration? by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I didn't see any mention of VAAPI or XvBA Acceleration for playing media? How about OpenCL support?

    Granted the HD 6000 looks more like a gamers card than something you'd stick in a home theater pc, but I'd think that OpenCL support would interest quite a few people doing massive number crunching. Especially since there's even PyOpenCL available.

    1. Re:VAAPI Acceleration? by Evanisincontrol · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Phoronix released a followup article today. A driver supports X video acceleration, but no VAAPI yet. Like you said, these cards seem to be aimed at gamers, but with the prevalence of HD video content these days, I'd be surprised if VAAPI wasn't a high priority for this driver.

    2. Re:VAAPI Acceleration? by CynicTheHedgehog · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I think the issue with the open source radeon drivers isn't that the developers don't know how to implement stuff, or that it's a closed API or whatever. The problem is one of manpower. Reading the Phoronix forums it looks like there's maybe 2 guys that do the majority of the commits (for the really hard stuff anyways) and they just have too many things to do. I recall one post explaining that some kind of compiler was needed, and so one of the developers stubbed out a very simple one to be able to move forward on something else, with the intention of coming back and replacing the stubbed out compiler later, when the more critical issues were addressed. The compiler was a key component to all sorts of 3D stuff and was a critical factor in performance, but functionality and performance take a back seat to compatibility and stability.

      My hope is that with the release of these open source drivers a lot of that boilerplate stuff will come with it, so that the community can truly focus on implementing newer APIs and such, although I don't know enough about video driver development to know whether that's necessarily the case.

  3. AMD has taken ATI to a new level by NtwoO · · Score: 4, Informative

    In the past two years I've migrated from 10+ loyal Linux NVidia years to ATI. The ATI closed source drivers were reasonable whilst the NVidia drivers showed a slide in performance and stability (on my system in any case). Since September last year I've migrated my machines to the open source 3d drivers and what a beaut! My MythTV frontend with ATI onboard is impeccable. It'll require much to convince me to change away from ATI/AMD if they keep this kind of support available.

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    1. Re:AMD has taken ATI to a new level by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Come back when we have hardware acceleration. Linux video playback needs CPU horse power. Even the iphone/ipod touch handles h.264 video better than linux. Whether we like it or not, that's the defacto codec these days and decoding is built into just about every device and video card. And yet, linux still cannot use them. Windows had it in '06.

  4. AMD Puts Out Radeon HD 6000 Open-Source Driver by thomst · · Score: 5, Funny

    I didn't realize it was on fire.

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