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Haiku Gains Support For Current Radeon HD Cards

Posted by timothy on from the old-and-new-together dept.

As reported by Phoronix, the Haiku operating system "has added (untested) support for the newest AMD Radeon graphics cards to its open-source driver for the BeOS-compatible operating system." (Specifically, that support is for the "Mullins" and "Hawaii" graphics processors.) Impressive that this project keeps the BeOS flag raised and continues to modernize; Haiku has been around since 2001 — years longer than Be, Inc. itself lasted.

4 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. No acceleration by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Remember, no graphics (not "No modern Radeon HD graphics" or even "No Radeon graphics" but no graphics at all) in Haiku are hardware accelerated.

    The ONLY acceleration they offer at all is YCbCr scalable overlays for video on old chipsets that still did that sort of thing, which obviously Radeon HD does not. No 3D, no compositing, no blit operations, everything is done in RAM and then the whole frame is copied to the framebuffer.

    Of course today's CPUs are really fast. So long as you do simple 2D graphics or you have a really poky high-end CPU, Haiku can make this look pretty good despite not using virtually any of the transistors on your $200 graphics card.

  2. Re:Who knows by rudy_wayne · · Score: 4, Funny

    I have to give them credit. Haiku is even more irrelevant than BeOS.

    That's not easy to do.

  3. Awesome! by viperidaenz · · Score: 4, Funny

    Open source OS nobody uses provides support for graphics acceleration hardware without any hardware graphics acceleration.

  4. Re:BeOS kicked butt, give Haiku a break! by cide1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    On hardware from circa 2001, BeOS had an audio latency of about 3 msec from input to output. I don't know the x86 / x64 number, but in 2014 running on the best ARM hardware available, by default, the Linux scheduler runs every 10 msec, so audio latency of 40-80 msec is pretty common. In many applications, that is quite a significant difference. There are good reasons why Linux has this latency, but it is a question of optimizing for different use cases. BeOS had a laser focused use case of Desktop performance. Linux is used on servers, desktops, embedded, super computers, and all kinds of wierd places.

    --
    -- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.