AMD Publishes Open-Source Radeon HD 8000 Series Driver 117
An anonymous reader writes "The hardware hasn't been released yet, but AMD has made available early open-source Linux GPU driver patches for supporting the future Radeon HD 8000 series graphics cards. At this time the Radeon HD 8800 'Oland' series is supported with the Mesa, DRM, X.Org, and kernel modifications. From the driver perspective, not many modifications are needed to build upon the Radeon HD 7000 series support."
Qualifications? (Score:5, Informative)
Every time I've bothered to dive into one of these AMD open source driver stories I find qualifications. It's 2D driver code only, or mode setting code only, no MPEG-2/4 AVC acceleration, etc. What are the qualifications this time? Is this the real McCoy, full stack accelerated OpenGL driver with video acceleration and everything?
Didn't think so.
Want good video drivers on Linux? Intel or NVidia. Want good open source video drivers? Intel.
Blender and cycles (Score:2, Informative)
With all of the previous versions of the AMD drivers there were some problems with the implementation of the Cycles engine in Blender. The problem was a limited HLSL implementation that made it impossible to compile the necessary thing on the graphics-card. Because of this Cycles has disabled hardware-rendering for AMD graphics cards. Has this been addressed or will it only be possible to use nVidia cards with GPU rendering with the Cycles engine for Blender?
Re:Kudos to AMD for this, but... (Score:4, Informative)
For the same hardware which has not been released, I dunno :)
You should head to phoronix [phoronix.com] which has comparisons between open and closed drivers.
In my experience, with an obsolete hd2400 that I run with debian wheezy and the experimental fglrx-legacy driver, gamers should opt for the closed source one, while desktop effects, simpler games etc are handled perfectly by the open source drivers. Both closed and open drivers seem not to have problems with kernel updates thanks to dkms, and are stable. Of course free software is easier to deploy-distribute-use in business.
Re:Qualifications? (Score:2, Informative)
In terms of today's Oland work, there was a simple commit to Mesa to "add support for Oland chips" inside the RadeonSI driver. This ended up being a fairly trivial commit for introducing the Oland GPU chip support, but again the RadeonSI driver is far from being feature-complete.
Another commit added in the new Oland PCI IDs: 0x6600, 0x6601, 0x6602, 0x6603, 0x6606, 0x6607, 0x6610, 0x6611, 0x6613, 0x6620, 0x6621, 0x6623, and 0x6631.
There was also a fairly trivial commit to the xf86-video-ati DDX for introducing Oland GPU support, which again is not really any different compared to the Southern Islands support. Likewise, a commit went into Mesa's DRM library (libdrm) too.
So all the work done was simple commit adding basic support. Nothing spectacular ...