It was just a month ago that the open-source Avivo driver for the ATI Radeon X1000 (R500) series was introduced to the public, but in this time we've seen some great progress made. This open-source R500 driver now contains RandR 1.2 support, support for a variety of R500 graphics cards, and most recently support for Shadow Framebuffer was added.

From the release of Mesa 7.1 Release Candidate 1 to Multi-Pointer X being merged to master to the R500 3D milestone, it's been an exciting past 24 hours for the X.Org community.

The open-source Avivo driver is currently bound to supporting the ATI R500 GPU family and with efforts now being focused on the RadeonHD driver, this reverse-engineered driver will likely never support the newer GPUs (The Death Of The R500 Avivo Driver). However, the RadeonHD driver that was pushed out into the public a few hours ago does support the R600 series.

AMD just announced that its upcoming Catalyst 7.9 drivers for Linux will not only finally provide support to HD 2000 series on the OS, but it is also claimed to host the most significant series of enhancements ever for Linux users. As far as AMD graphics drivers are concerned, that is.

Prior to launching their next-generation graphics processors, NVIDIA dropped their obfuscated open-source driver and have said they will not provide any open-source support at all for their GeForce GTX 400 "Fermi" series as they just recommended their customers use the X.Org VESA driver until they can install the official binary Linux driver.

Back in September when the RadeonHD Linux driver was finally introduced, it offered support for both the R500 and R600 series. On the first day of the driver's availability, we couldn't help but to use the RadeonHD with the 2900XT, which has been ATI's flagship graphics card.

For ATI Linux customers, last month was certainly a very exciting time from AMD announcing open specifications (and the subsequent delivery of the first batch and the creation of the RadeonHD driver) to the release of the fglrx 8.41 display driver.

While ATI/AMD claim that they provide enough support for developing open source ATI Radeon drivers, developers of open source drivers tell a much different story. Very few of them have specifications, and those are stripped down and a lot of needed information is missing from them so they have to use time-consuming error-prone reverse engineering.

AMD continues to abide by their commitment to provide open-source support for their graphics cards and as proof of that this afternoon they have released their initial hardware acceleration code that supports the ATI Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" family of graphics processors.