radeonHD support

[chavez243]

any hope of seeing some decent radeonHD drivers? Currently the driver is supposedly quite flakey, the ati driver hangs my system, so I have to use VESA.

[adamk]

The radeonhd driver will soon get 3D support for r500 video cards (x1300 to x1950), but it will, of course, only be available on Linux at first. No one really knows how long it will be before the 3D support will be available on FreeBSD.

Adam

[chavez243]

dernt!

looks like support for my 3850 is gonna be a bit of a ways off then...

[adamk]

2D support, via radeonhd, should probably not take much longer, assuming it's not available yet. If the driver works, but is flaky, as you say, you might want to subscribe to the radeonhd mailing list and report your problems (http://lists.opensuse.org/radeonhd/)

Adam

[BSDfan666]

Modern GPU's don't actually have hardware 2D engines anymore, so accelerated 2D is done over the 3D engine, which is clearly a problem.

[TerryP]

That's just peachy...

[adamk]

Actually, moving more functionality into the 3D engine makes a lot of sense. Nor is it a problem, in and of itself, if the specifications are available and the developers are willing to work on it.

Since the 3D specs for the r300, r400, and r500 cards has been released by ATI, my performance under linux (with the open source driver) has improved tremendously. I now have full EXA support, including accelerated RENDER, greatly improving compositing speed. Not only do I have the one Xv port for the hardware overlay, I have 16 additional Xv ports from the new textured video support.

The real problem is that the hardware vendors, and even the DRI developers, are primarily concerned with linux support, not FreeBSD support. So they push changes into the direct rendering manager, make sure it works under linux, and we (FreeBSD users) sit around hoping that someone ports the changes to the BSD code. At one point, Eric Anholt primarily worked on FreeBSD, generally making sure that the DRI ran just as well under FreeBSD as it did under Linux. Now he works for Intel, and guess what their primary conern is? :-)