Open Source AMD Driver Now Supports OpenGL 3.3 — and It's Getting Faster 100
An anonymous reader writes "With the latest open source Linux code published today the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver supports OpenGL 3.3 and GLSL 1.50; this is the open source Linux graphics driver used for Radeon HD 7000 series and newer, including the new Hawaii GPUs. The OpenGL 3.3 support appeared in patches spread across Mesa and LLVM that should appear in their next releases. It was also found that the RadeonSI driver is becoming a lot faster and starting to compete with Catalyst, AMD's notorious Linux binary driver."
Re:The firmware remains proprietary (Score:4, Insightful)
Both hardware and firmware are proprietary, the main feature of an open source driver is that it replaces binary blobs in kernel space. Basically it makes it easier for kernel developers to track down bugs since they can debug everything that runs within kernel space. While the buggy firmware can still kill your GPU that is isolated from the remaining system and easier to track down than a driver with write access to everything.
Re:Non-free Nvidia driver already at 4.4 (Score:4, Insightful)
How is it embarrassing? Several current and former AMD employees work on the Gallium 3D driver implementation as a side project, people like Tom Stellard. If anything, AMD is reaping the benefits of having opened up their hardware documentation.
Re:Non-free Nvidia driver already at 4.4 (Score:5, Insightful)
Non-free AMD driver is also up there somewhere. Can't find exact version for Linux but whatever, it's probably at 4.2 or later.
The problem is more that MESA only supports 3.3 - But the free drivers (e.g. Nouveau) does NOT support 3.3 so AMD is actually better at the moment. I do believe Nouveau will get 3.3 support soon however.
The real news here, though, is that performance of the free drivers are catching up to the proprietary drivers. That means AMD can ditch the proprietary drivers completely within a couple of years - which, if they can stay afloat that long, means great news for us Linux desktopers! :)