(English, Techstuff). One week ago, i just tried out the Fedro 12 Beta. There were some small issues, but one thing is just remarkable. The long time efforts, all the developer’s hack around, AMD’s release of hardware information and the development of Gallium3D seem to mature in last time. The first time we see free 3d rendering on noticable speed on non-Intel cards in Linux.

I tested it on a r700 card and hey, it did not crashed. Fglrx would not have hit that line;) What worked? Compiz worked (out of the Box without restarting X after installation of the driver), speed was quite Ok (can be better), glxgears did run (don’t know how fast), kernel mode switching (no flickering!) and even multi monitor support (dvi external device) worked without problems despite that during customization (the part after regular installation) all important GUI parts went to the secondary DVI with a smaller resolution, so that I could not see the relevant ‘Forward/Backward’ buttons.

KWin could also start the 3D accelerated mode, but there were some glitches (like wrong transparency). If you do not rely on GLSL features than you should really give it a try. Window resizing is notable faster, but still slow due X sync problems and problems of some programs, whereby gtk seems faster than Qt. The latter has some work in progress.

So what’s up for the future? If it would just be some uninteresting hardware piece like a printer or a Wifi-Card everybody would have changed this part of the computer. But for today it is as important (and as not changeable) like the CPU itself doing a lot for a proper machine-human-interface. And the developers know, this is one of the parts Linux lacks the most for the moment. In the moment it’s all about stabilization and adding necessary features like GLSL (sharers are yet supported). The chances are good that the free radeon driver will bring it into Ubuntu 10.04.

Some nice links:
What works with the free Radeon driver
Phoronix OpenSource Ati Driver forum
Phoronix review of ATI driver in Fedora 12 Beta