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AMD Confirms Drop of Monthly Driver Support for Radeon HD 2000-4000 Series
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 AMD will be moving the AMD Radeon HD 2000, AMD Radeon HD 3000, and AMD Radeon HD 4000 Series of products to a new driver support model. We will continue to support the mentioned products in our Catalyst releases, but we`re moving their updates to a quarterly basis, whereas our AMD Radeon HD 5000 and later products will continue to see monthly updates. The Quarterly Catalyst releases will focus on resolving application specific issues and critical updates."
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AMD To Drop Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 Catalyst Support
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In what will certainly be controversial and disappointing to some Radeon Linux desktop users, AMD will soon announce that they will effectively be discontinuing support for several Radeon product families from their proprietary Catalyst driver. After that point, for future Linux distribution updates, the open-source Radeon Linux driver will be your only option for accelerated graphics. This is likely happening with the Windows Catalyst driver too, but at least there they have a better-maintained legacy driver process."
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AMD Fusion On Gallium3D Leaves A Lot To Be Desired
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It`s been a few months since last running any AMD Fusion tests under Linux, so here`s a look at the AMD A8-3870K Llano APU performance under both the latest Catalyst driver and the open-source Radeon Gallium3D stack with Ubuntu 12.04. Besides the open-source driver being handily beaten by the Catalyst binary driver, the power efficiency is also a disappointment."
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Qualcomm Calls To Kill All Proprietary Drivers For Good
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Next week at the 6th annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in San Francisco, two Qualcomm Atheros engineers will be speaking about their Linux device driver development experiences and will go as far as calling for all proprietary drivers to be killed for good. They talk not just about killing proprietary drivers for Linux, but for all operating systems. Can the plans they lay out to kill all proprietary drivers work or is this just a big pipe-dream?"
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Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Approaches Stable State
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Nouveau, the reverse-engineered open-source graphics driver for NVIDIA`s entire range of graphics processors, is reaching a stable state where it`s exiting the staging area of the Linux 3.4 kernel and being considered part of the standard, stable kernel configuration. How though is the Nouveau driver working out compared to NVIDIA`s official, closed-source Linux graphics driver? Here are some new benchmarks from ten different graphics cards and other information on the state of Nouveau."
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AMD Catalyst 12.3 Windows 7 Driver Analysis
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I think the first thing we can say is that it`s nice to see that AMD got the Catalyst out on time this month and it did indeed come out during March unlike the Catalyst 12.2 which fell into March. The second thing is that this is a weird driver release. The Catalyst 12.2 was labeled as 12.3 and it made us wonder a bit. Was AMD just throwing an earlier version of the 12.3 drivers out there to keep up with the monthly schedule? In the end we`ll probably never know the truth."
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TitaniumGL: A Faster Multi-Platform Graphics Driver Architecture
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"After first being introduced on Windows years ago, and then
FreeBSD and ReactOS support added last year, this week finally marked
the release of TitaniumGL for Linux. TitaniumGL is self-described as a
"freeware driver architecture" and carries a goal to support OpenGL on
graphics cards with broken, bad, or missing OpenGL hardware drivers.
Here are some benchmarks of TitaniumGL compared to NVIDIA's binary GPU
driver and the Mesa/Gallium3D LLVMpipe software rasterizer."
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TitaniumGL: A Faster Multi-Platform Graphics Driver Architecture?
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After first being introduced on Windows years ago, and then FreeBSD and ReactOS support added last year, this week finally marked the release of TitaniumGL for Linux. TitaniumGL is self-described as a freeware driver architecture and carries a goal to support OpenGL on graphics cards with broken, bad, or missing OpenGL hardware drivers. Here are some benchmarks of TitaniumGL compared to NVIDIA`s binary GPU driver and the Mesa/Gallium3D LLVMpipe software rasterizer."
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AMD Catalyst 12.2 Windows 7 Driver Analysis
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I hate to say it, but since Terry Makedon left the AMD driver team it just hasn`t felt the same and if there was any situation that would cause AMD to miss a month it was going to be that and while it`s been a while since he left, they work so far ahead that it was going to take time for the cracks to begin to show. This February the company also had an extra day thanks to the leap year, and they still didn`t hit it. While AMD released a Pre-Certified version of the driver earlier in the month, which they say is exactly the same; it just doesn`t have the Windows logo. The bottom line is they`ve prided themselves that for some odd 7 years they`ve offered a WHQL driver every month."
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Nouveau Project Reverse-Engineered NVIDIA OpenCL Driver
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There`s another big accomplishment within the open-source graphics camp: Nouveau developers now having an initial working OpenCL implementation for NVIDIA GeForce graphics hardware on the driver that the Linux community developed themselves via reverse-engineering without NVIDIA`s support. "
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AMD Leo DirectX 11 Demo Released @ NGOHQ.com
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The Leo demo showcases a real-time DirectX 11 based lighting pipeline that is designed to allow for rendering scenes made of arbitrarily complex materials (including transparencies), multiple lighting models, and minimal restrictions on the number of lights that can be used - all while supporting hardware MSAA and efficient memory usage. Specifically, this demo uses DirectCompute to cull and manage lights in a scene. The end result is a per-pixel or per-tile list of lights that forward-render based shaders use for lighting each pixel. This technique also allows for adding one bounce global illumination effects by spawning virtual point light sources where light strikes a surface. Download"
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Catalyst 12.1 Windows 7 Driver Analysis
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If we look back to the 11.12 release that made its way to us just before December came to an end, it was one we said to skip, instead we suggested that you skipped the official WHQL driver and jumped onto the 12.1 preview that was released at the same time. This release sees a similar kind of setup when it comes to the release schedule. Outside of the new WHQL 12.1 driver we`re going to be looking at today, AMD have also released a Catalyst 12.2 preview driver."
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Preview: Intels Open-Source Driver Can Beat Mac OS X
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Thanks to recent advancements by Intel`s Open-Source Technology Center, the open-source Linux graphics driver not only supports more OpenGL 3.0 functionality than Apple`s Intel graphics driver for Mac OS X, but the performance is more competitive. In some cases, the OpenGL performance is now superior under Linux with the open-source driver that is developed by Intel in conjunction with the free software community. This article is looking at the performance of Intel Sandy Bridge graphics under Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and Ubuntu Linux."
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NVIDIA 2011 Driver Year In Review
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After re-testing every AMD Catalyst driver from 2011, the tables have now turned to do the same for the NVIDIA binary graphics drivers from 2011 as the year comes to an end."
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Catalyst 11.12 Windows 7 Driver Analysis
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I shouldn`t be doing this at the moment; instead I should be packing for my holidays, but after discovering that we haven`t missed a Catalyst Driver Analysis in seven years, I didn`t want this to be the first one. So with that said, we`ll move with haste and just get stuck into the performance side of things to see what exactly is going on with the latest driver set from AMD - the Catalyst 11.12. Quickly before we do that, though, we need to check out the release notes. To be honest, going through the release notes, you`re not going to see anything that stands out too much. We`ve got some improvements in some areas and as always we find ourselves with a decent list of resolved issues, but on the performance side of things we`re not seeing a whole lot."
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AMD Catalyst 2011 Driver Year In Review
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With AMD having published the Catalyst 11.12 driver yesterday, the year is now complete as far as their graphics drivers are concerned. As such, for the sixth year, it`s time for the year-in-review articles looking at how the NVIDIA and AMD GPU drivers have matured over the past twelve months in terms of features and OpenGL performance."
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Beginners Guides
