3D for AMD64 (was Re: Lack of Flash support is no longer acceptable. Bounty established...)

[Garrett Cooper]

On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 12:17 PM, Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:00:09 -0400 "Ben Kaduk" <minimarmot at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 6:06 PM, Thierry Herbelot <thierry at herbelot.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > is there any hope for having the newly open-sourced radeon/radeon-hd AMD
>> > drivers (and the related 3D acceleration) to work under FreeBSD-AMD64 ?
>> >
>>
>> Well, I'm using radeonhd right now on a
>> [kaduk at periphrasis /usr/src/sys/contrib/dev/ath/public]$ uname -a
>> FreeBSD periphrasis.mit.edu 7.0-STABLE FreeBSD 7.0-STABLE #4: Wed May
>> 14 00:27:26 EDT 2008
>> root at periphrasis.mit.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/PERIPHRASIS  amd64
>
> I'm not sure those are the drivers Theierry wants. The proprietary
> driver was called fglrx, not "radeon" or "radeonhd". Those two drivers
> have been in the X open source trees for quite a while now. I first
> started using the radeon driver on amd64 in late 2006. The versions I
> have checked out for FreeBSD are documented as
>
>        Radeonhd has no 2d or 3d acceleration.
>        Radeon has both, but only works for older cards.
>
> That is also on 7-stable, but I haven't updated the sources in a
> while.

fglrx is the only way that anyone's going to get true 3D OpenGL
support, and the last time I checked that wasn't available except for
ancient cards on FreeBSD.

AMD was supposed to be helping ATI, but it appears that after the
merger all that's happened is a website change and ATI's drivers have
gotten worse... last time I tried x64 support with Linux I was sadly
shocked by the poor programming that went into the driver and the
difficulty I had trying to get it to work with X11.

Then again things may have changed since that time too...

My 2 cents,
-Garrett