cgvis the IT thing

Open Source ATI on it’s way

I just had the chance to checkout the fairly new Ubuntu Lucid Lynx Alpha3 for testing it with ATI/AMD r700 (in my case Ati Radeon 4830) compatibility. With FGLRX there was and is a lot of stress. Fedora 12 already brought some light but you had to install some experimental sources. (all citations from private blog).

The result is impressive. Yes it's an alpha version, but the Ati Driver runs out the box. With Kernel Mode Switching (KMS) and Compiz with moderate memory consumption (in contrast to FGLRX). Also window minimizing/maximizing/resizing and Ctrl+Alt+F1-Text-Console switching is fast and seems stable. Phoronix has some benchmark about the poor 3D performance in contrast to FGLRX but I think this will be a matter of time. A bit more annoying is the absence of modern OpenGL2.0+ features, so it is not really possible to do GLSL hacking with these driver yet. I don't know whether we can get Powerball running on it, but anyway no one has time doing something on it in the moment. The X11 driver git-trunk has some GLSL2.0 features already, it's just unclear whether the Ubuntu Team will put it into Lucid Lynx as it will be a Long Term Release (LTS).

For fans, there is also a new theme:

(Image from Ubuntus gallery)