Where to find drivers
Most of the recent Linux and Solaris distributions include open source driver support for all of the GPUs which were in production before the distro release locked down. In some cases newer driver packages are available from the distro packagers; if not, you may need to build the drivers from publiclyl available source code.
Latest News
This page was created Aug 5/09, work in progress.
Status
- R100/R200 (Radeon 7000 – Radeon 9250) and R300/R400/R500 (Radeon 9500 – Radeon X1950) class chips:
- 2D: accelerated (EXA), stable
XVideo: accelerated and tear free, stable
- 3D: accelerated, stable
- R600/R700 class chips (Radeon HD 2300 – Radeon HD 4890):
- 2D: accelerated (EXA), stable
XVideo: accelerated and tear free, stable
3D: experimental, development at mesa master (r600 mesa driver), and drm r6xx-r7xx-3d (radeon drm driver), instructions for usage at radeonhd:experimental_3D
More 3D information at DRI wiki: ATIRadeon. See also RadeonFeature and RadeonProgram for feature and supported program lists. And R300 Portal for some older stuff. All of these pages would need combining to a more coherent resource where all could point at.
Documentation and Support
A number of programming guides and register specs are available at http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/
Downloading and building source code
Please see the pages for each of the individual drivers. If you are building the drm driver as well as other drivers, the drm driver should be built and installed first.