14 DAY TRIAL // Michel Dänzer announced today the general availability of new maintenance updates for the open source AMDGPU (xf86-video-amdgpu) and Radeon (xf86-video-ati) graphics drivers.
xf86-video-ati 7.9.0 and xf86-video-amdgpu 1.3.0 are now available for download and they are coming soon to a GNU/Linux distro near you to improve your gaming experience if you're using an AMD Radeon graphics card.
Both releases come with the ability to use DRM render nodes for DRI3 clients if they are available, and allow the TearFree option to be toggled at runtime by using a RandR output property called "TearFree."
It is important here to mention the fact that the "TearFree" xorg.conf option can now be used to control the default value of the output properties. Also, both releases offer support for versions 1.10 to 1.19 of the X.Org Server display server.
Glamor is now used by default for 2D acceleration
The xf86-video-ati 7.9.0 driver now uses Glamor by default for 2D acceleration with Radeon R600 or higher graphics processing units and X.Org Server 1.18.3 or later. It also supports loading of the AMDGPU driver from the ATI wrapper driver.
Additionally, xf86-video-ati 7.9.0 comes with the 10-radeon.conf xorg.conf.d snippet for X.Org Server 1.16 or later, allowing the Radeon driver to be loaded automatically even if the ATI wrapper driver is not installed.
On the other hand, the xf86-video-amdgpu 1.3.0 release now uses the libdrm_amdgpu functionality to determine the marketing name of the AMD Radeon GPU you're using, removing corresponding tables from the driver.
Packagers are being informed that they need to ship the new 10-radeon.conf file in the same package as the radeon_drv.so library when updating xf86-video-ati to version 7.9.0. Many other small bug fixes were implemented so check the full changelogs for more details.