2008-11-19 01:00:11
It's taken an eternity (well, to the Linux community that has been eagerly awaiting code and documentation since very early this year when it was first promised), but it looks like the open-source 3D support for the ATI R600/700 (Radeon HD 2000 through Radeon HD 4000 series) graphics processors may finally be coming soon!

Back in February around the time of FOSDEM, AMD had released the R500 3D programming documentation that allowed the open-source community to achieve initial OpenGL R500 acceleration just a month later. At that time we were told the R600 3D documentation should be out in roughly a month, but that never ended up materializing.

Since then we've been told the open-source R600 3D is their leading focus and that they're working to provide the needed documentation or source-code (either a straight-up Mesa implementation or internal AMD software projects like TCore and KGrids), but due to their limited staff and being burdened with intellectual property issues, it's been a slow process to say the least.

In late June there was an initial R600 Direct Rendering Manager, but it was without any 3D support, and then earlier this month we found out that they're close with their R600 DRI support... 

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