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."
Well done AMD (Score:5, Insightful)
This is excellent from AMD to release source in a very timely manner. It shows commercial companies can support Free Software losing the ability to compete (which AMD will have factored in).
They are supporting us so I suggest we support them - vote with your wallets gentlemen! We win because we get drivers that will be supported for a long time, we also win because AMD GPUs generally have the best price-per-perfomance value (even if not always at the insanely expensive peak of absolute performance), and AMD will also win because it gets sales from customers that recognize the mutal win.
Hopefully NVidia will also see this move and get the hint. That would be a further win.
Re:Well done AMD (Score:5, Insightful)
Not gonna happen until the FOSS driver built from sources like these shows itself to be competitive in performance with nVidia's closed Linux drivers on comparable hardware.
Re:Kudos to AMD for this, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well done AMD (Score:5, Insightful)