AMD releases highly anticipated Linux driver for HD 2xxx series

Thursday 13th September 2007, 02:08:00 PM, written by Geo

For the last week, AMD has been sending tremors through the Linux community. Yesterday we reported on one of their promises coming to pass when documention of the internals of the RV630 interfaces showed up on the web. Today, we can add that the new Linux driver finally adding support for the HD 2xxx series is also available. Early reports on this driver core suggest that performance gains of 40-90% may be seen in OpenGL games like Doom 3 and Quake 4 for older Radeon GPUs. For those of you with long memories, this would be the fruits of the fabled "OpenGL rewrite" slowly coming to pass, and gets the Linux and Windows drivers teams onto the same OpenGL core going forward as "Orca" was integrated into Catalyst for Windows with version 7.1.

Unfortunately, there's a thorn with the rose --at the moment, AMD is not recommending that these drivers be used with anything but the HD 2xxx series, as it "may result in stability issues". Presumably the adventurous can ignore the warning if they choose to do so, rather than wait for a set that will offer the performance improvements as well as stability for older Radeon parts.

Feel free to drop in our forums and let us know your experiences with these new drivers which seem to be an inflection point for AMD's Linux efforts. 

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ati ± linux, catalyst, orca

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