The ATI R600g Driver Gets Boosted By A New Design

We've said it a few times already that the R600g driver continues to advance, but this open-source Gallium3D graphics driver that provides hardware acceleration for ATI R600/R700/Evergreen ASICs (the Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000/5000 graphics cards) has now received another huge boost with what has been dubbed as the "new design" and with the latest Mesa Git code these new code paths are used by default.

Jerome Glisse describes the R600g driver's "new design" on the Mesa development list for those interested in all of the technical details behind it and/or were curious what the stream of Git commits against Mesa master referencing this new design were all about.

Jerome mentions that this new code is faster than the previous code path (even though he hasn't done any performance optimization work yet), but he has outlined extensively some of the work that could be done inside this open-source AMD GPU driver to make it run even faster. The "new" and "old" designs of the R600g driver are now at a feature parity as well.

The R600g driver still isn't as mature as the R300g driver that provides hardware support along the Gallium3D driver architecture up through the Radeon X1000 (R500) graphics cards, but it's soon getting to that point.