AMD Publishes Open-Source Radeon HD 8000 Series Driver

[Motoko.]

"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."

source:slashdot

[Yusuf M. Veteran]

Wow. That's a good move on AMD's part. It's great that companies are actually taking Linux seriously as an OS suitable for gaming. Steam is compatible with Linux and right now, there's a Steam for Linux sale where you can save 50-75% off Linux-compatible games. I hope NVIDIA follows suit. :)

[spaceelf]

http://techreport.com/review/24368/fate-of-amd-sea-islands-obscured-in-the-fog

They might already be shipping to OEMs and not users.

There's a lot of awkward in there.

[tiagosilva29]

That's nice.

[torrentthief]

they haven't open sourced their complete driver btw, they have done what they normally do with their drivers, it is just that they have released it before their 8000 series cards go on sale which is why it has made the news.

[tim_s]

Wow. That's a good move on AMD's part. It's great that companies are actually taking Linux seriously as an OS suitable for gaming. Steam is compatible with Linux and right now, there's a Steam for Linux sale where you can save 50-75% off Linux-compatible games. I hope NVIDIA follows suit. :)

It was my understanding that nVidia already has official drivers on Linux. It is why I have always used nVidia for my Linux machines.

[Growled Member]

That's a good move by AMD. :)

[Karl L.]

It was my understanding that nVidia already has official drivers on Linux. It is why I have always used nVidia for my Linux machines.

NVIDIA only has a proprietary driver (which runs on i386 and AMD64). AMD has had a proprietary for about as long NVIDIA, but it performs much more poorly and is updated infrequently. However, the (existing - before this announcement) open-source drivers are exactly the opposite. The open-source radeon driver performs very well (although not quite as well as the proprietary driver in Windows), and the open-source nouveau driver could stand some improvement. Both of the open-source drivers are VERY stable - much more so than their proprietary counterparts - but they are slower to support new hardware and features. I don't use proprietary graphics drivers anymore - not because of dogma - because I value the extreme stability more than a little extra speed.

This announcement is very exciting! Although I already primarily use AMD graphics cards because the reverse-engineered radeon driver performs much better than nouveau, I'm hopeful that now we will be able to get performance to rival that of the same card in Windows. If that's the case, I will definitely buy a 8000 series card when they are released.

[tim_s]

I may have some sort of unexplained preference for Nvidia I should revisit. I have always found Nvidia easier to setup versus Ati. Now that AMD has bought them - maybe times have changed.

[Crisp]

AMD <3

Will be picking up an 8970 as soon as it appears this year. Need to upgrade to 8350 at some point too... money, money, money.

[n_K]

I've always found nvidia to rock linux better than ATI, at least, with nvidia's home cards... Got a recentish quadro here and WOW, tried it on youtube and it runs like a complete pile of cack, it's worse than the 10 year old integrated intel chipset.

Think I might be revisiting ATI too.