While today's unveiling of the RadeonHD driver for the ATI R500 and R600 series is great news, this driver right now is targeted solely for developers as it's still experimental and doesn't yet support 3D acceleration and other key functionality generally needed in production environments.

Whenever bringing up the RadeonHD driver at Phoronix it generally leads to a heated discussion in our forums between community members, developers, and other representatives over the history of the RadeonHD driver and what really was its purpose, among other dissenting views.

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.

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.

It's going on two weeks since the RadeonHD driver was made available, which is AMD's sanctioned open-source driver for the Radeon X1000 (R500) and Radeon HD 2000 (R600) series (as well as future generations of AMD GPUs).

This is the first year that there were more people using the open-source ATI driver (through the xf86-video-ati DDX driver) than AMD's official Catalyst (fglrx) driver! There were 3,117 counts for xf86-video-ati, 2,770 for the Catalyst driver, and then 1,185 installations still using the xf86-video-radeonhd driver.

The fruit of the announced open source driver effort between amd and novell have already been released in preliminary form.

Novell lays off Luc Verhaegen (of the RadeonHD driver team), thus putting the whole project in jeopardy

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.