x.org 7.0 & new world order

[Roland Scheidegger]

Gene Heskett wrote:
> Greetings all;
> 
> I've been doing some reading in the docs available, and I don't see any 
> changes between the 6.8.1-901 I'm running, and 7.0 for my card, a 
> radeon 9200SE.
> 
> Can someone condense the new bells and whistles as they might apply to 
> me?  Or do I need to go get yet another video card in order to take 
> advantage of the newer code?  That will probably wait till this one 
> fails...
> 
> FWIW, this build has worked as close to bulletproof as any X I ever 
> dealt with, and my hat is off to the guys in the trenches churning out 
> this truely great stuff.
There are quite a few changes between 6.8 and 6.9/7.0 for radeon. On the 
2d side there is for instance support for EXA, video-in was added and 
probably some other stuff. The 3d driver is much updated, it is faster 
(mostly thanks to color tiling which is a ddx driver option enabled by 
default, texture tiling, and hyperz which must be manually enabled with 
driconf due to some restrictions), and supports some more features (for 
instance EXT_fog_coord).
Hyperz and tiling should boost your quake3 fps a lot :-).
You also get partial s3tc support (partial because it is compiled wrong, 
for software compression/decompression you need an external library 
which can't be used due to the wrong compile switches), but that partial 
support is good enough for games like nwn or ut2k3/ut2k4 (but no ut2kx 
is still unplayably slow due to missing arb_vbo / sometimes incredibly 
slow draw arrays fallback).
For the latest and greatest you'd still need to use mesa cvs, this one 
would support ATI_fragment_shader, ARB_texture_env_crossbar (required 
for glest), and large antialiased point sizes (an often requested 
feature...).
Along with some bugfixes, probably.

Roland