selectparks - New ATI proprietary Linux driver released

Ati released the new proprietary linux drivers last night, giving support for new boards and a whole bunch of fancy features like vertex and fragment shaders, support for X.org (the new X Window system for linux) and the x86_64 architecture. The release notes (read quasi-changelog) can be found here.

For the impatient ;)

glxinfo | grep shader

GL_ARB_fragment_program_shadow, GL_ARB_fragment_shader, GL_ARB_point_sprite, GL_ARB_shader_objects, GL_ARB_shading_language_100, GL_ARB_vertex_shader, GL_ARB_window_pos, GL_ATI_draw_buffers, GL_ATI_element_array, GL_ATI_envmap_bumpmap, GL_ATI_fragment_shader, GL_ATIX_vertex_shader_output_point_size, GL_EXT_abgr, GL_EXT_bgra, GL_EXT_texture_rectangle, GL_EXT_vertex_array, GL_EXT_vertex_shader

So hopefully now we can start playing with the OpenGL shader spec GLSL .. especially using the new Shader Designer for linux from Typhoon Labs.

For the very recent kernel 2.6.10, users need to patch the driver sources. Once they are installed in the default location for your system (Debian users in /lib/modules/fglrx) you'll need to patch source in the /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod directory before compile.

Here is the patch. Download it to a known location and use it like so:

cd /path/to/fglrx/build_mod
patch -p0 < /path/to/radeon.patch

Compile with 'sh make.sh'. Move up a level to /path/to/fglrx and 'sh make_install.sh' before loading the module.

Works a treat!