From the read of this Phoronix article: [Phoronix] The Open-Source ATI Driver Is Becoming A Lot Faster](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ati_r500_pflipper&num=1) there is good news coming for ATI graphic card users (especially users with legacy hardware) that performance levels getting closer to that of the proprietary driver may be coming with the Linux 2.6.38 kernel.
Some quotes:
Now that the kernel mode-setting page-flipping for the ATI Radeon DRM kernel module has been merged into the Linux 2.6.38 kernel and the respective bits have been set in the xf86-video-ati DDX, we’re in the process of running new open-source ATI graphics benchmarks under Linux. Our initial results (included in this article) show these latest improvements to cause some major performance boosts for the open-source ATI driver as it nears the level of performance of the proprietary Catalyst driver.
Unfortunately this won’t make it into openSUSE-11.4, but it almost certainly will see its way in the openSUSE release AFTER 11.4. And I suspect adventurous 11.4 users will likely be able to update to unofficial 2.6.38 kernels, and update their xorg and mesa apps as applicable (with some stability risk in return).
>
> From the read of this Phoronix article: ‘[Phoronix] The Open-Source ATI
> Driver Is Becoming A Lot Faster’ (http://tinyurl.com/4slvr7a) there is
> good news coming for ATI graphic card users (especially users with
> legacy hardware) that performance levels getting closer to that of the
> proprietary driver may be coming with the Linux 2.6.38 kernel.
>
Great news! - Looking forward to trying it out in 2.6.38 if this comes
in that kernel.
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Thanks, Andrew
Posted from openSUSE 11.3 “Teal”, KDE 4.6 RC2
These are good news for my lovely company. These bad news for intel. I look forward from amd buldoser processors which will crush intel’s sandy bridge!!!
- Looking forward to trying it out in 2.6.38 if this comes