Unixlord

While many thought this day would never come or that it was some form of propaganda, it's coming and it's coming this month. The AMD fglrx 8.41 driver features a brand new underlying code-base that has been under development for well over a year. At Phoronix we have literally spent hundreds of hours using and testing this new driver, and to say the least it is truly a new experience on the ATI Linux front. The new driver delivers massive performance improvements, Radeon HD 2000 (R600) support, and a whole lot more. This article is the first of five articles that will be published today at Phoronix as we examine the new AMD Linux driver extensively on all fronts from seeing how it can handle the flagship ATI Radeon HD 2900XT graphics card to going back to past graphics card families to show the dramatic performance improvements.

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Additional links:
R300/400
R500
R600
Open-source Acceleration

It's about time. Nice one phoronix (for the articles) and AMD (For obvious reasons).
Almost double performance with some cards compared to previous driver (8.40) and sometimes much more than that ! Nvidia is still ahead but the gap is much narrower now.
Everyone will have something to play ET Quake wars in Linux!

For wouldbe beryl/compiz users AIGLX support will arrive with the 8.42 display driver
next month.

PS: Keep in mind that while these drivers are only recommended for R600 GPUs. The performance increase is stellar but my personal recommendation is to wait for the next two releases which will fix important bugs with the new codebase.

Download

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Unixlord

Following up on the open-source acceleration speculation. Some really hot news:

Rumors and speculations have been flying around for months about ATI/AMD opening up the source-code to their Linux display driver or providing their GPU specifications to community developers. This for the most part had started after Henri Richard's statement at the Red Hat Summit earlier this year. Well, those rumors can finally be put to rest. AMD will be providing NDA specifications, an open-source library, and there is a new open-source graphics driver as a result. AMD will continue producing a closed-source proprietary driver; however, they are opening the source-code to a critical library with accompanying GPU specifications for X.Org developers. To get the ball rolling, AMD is also funding the development of a new open-source R500/600 driver.
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This is a big step in the right direction. So the buyout wasn't so bad after all! The open source battle will likely take place between this and (unsupported by nvidia) Nouveau.

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blindartist

now if only more companies made games that ran on linux, and honestly the fact that amd bought ati is one of the reasons im switching to ati, that and nvidia is really starting to kinda suck, but microsoft will do that to any product.

Cheers

Mac Daddy

I agree Bro on Linux and sure Unix does as well ... there will come a time when software and drivers will stray away from the MS monopoly

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Unixlord

A trusted source informs that if all goes well the new driver will be released by the end of this week. The windows driver will probably be released first. Personally I'm waiting for 8.42 so I can get AIGLX on an ATI powered laptop. I'll be satisfied when the opensource driver provides that kind of support.

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Unixlord

The new ATI Linux driver has finally been released. Download page added.

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IQ, when aggregated, follows Ohm's law.