While the RadeonHD developers have been busy working on Radeon HD 3200 / 780 Series support and other features for this open-source ATI R500/600+ driver, the DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) support has been lagging behind. Earlier this month Matthias Hopf was successful in getting DRM working on an RS690 GPU and he has published RadeonHD DRM code into his personal development tree, but no code has yet to reach master.

Meanwhile, as the xf86-video-ati driver is using AtomBIOS, they are able to spend more time working on the 3D features and other areas and less time "banging on registers" or even waiting on register documentation to arrive. David Airlie has been working on the R500 3D support along with Alex Deucher and Corbin Simpson. The trio has been making some great headway towards open-source 3D goodness for Radeon X1000 and HD 2000/3000 GPUs. Their most recent efforts have focused around the R500 fragment program code and today they have reached a monumental milestone.

After some recent work today, Compiz is now working on R500 graphics cards using the open-source xf86-video-ati and the latest Mesa git. In addition, the Unreal Tournament 2004 demo is even running! There is now parity between the open-source R500 3D support and the level of Mesa support for the older R200/300/400 generations! This is one hell of a milestone.

We are, of course, celebrating this major open-source achievement and we are in the midst of trying out this latest code on a horde of different R500 graphics cards. We will be delivering benchmarks comparing the Radeon X1000 performance using the open-source 3D driver to the fglrx driver in the coming days with different graphics cards and we will compare its performance to the earlier R400 parts. If you have any other requests, let us know in the Phoronix Forums.

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