Что-то не заметил, чтобы осветили их на ЛОРе, посему докладываю.
Первое. Gallium3d драйвер r300g почти по всем параметрам обогнал r300 classic и сейчас находится примерно на уровне fglrx 8.25, немного отставая от него.
Второе. AMD огласили свою позицию относительно gallium3d - они полностью за. Сейчас основные силы разработки переключатся на r600g, дабы быстро довести его до ума, а то сейчас он только треугольники крутит :)
We made essentially the same decision as you 18 months ago and implemented the initial r6xx/r7xx 3D driver on the «classic» HW driver model rather than Gallium3D. Even at the time it seemed highly likely that Gallium3D was going to work out well, but between the newness of Gallium3D itself and the work still to be done on KMS/DRI2/GEM/TTM there was just too much «new» for my liking.
We did ask one of our devs (Cooper) to help with the Gallium3D effort and also look into video decode using G3D, but unfortunately he got pulled off onto another urgent non-driver project shortly afterwards so we didn't end up doing much to help at all. Fortunately the other developers pushed ahead without us (thanks guys ;)) and it's probably fair to say that our developer focus will probably jump across to r600 on Gallium3D fairly soon as well.
For what it's worth, if we were writing a new «has to work, can't afford delays» driver from scratch today we would go with Gallium3D, period. Prior to that... I think we were confident it would all work but weren't quite sure how long it would take.
The reality is that we don't have a conveniently timed architectural break to force the writing of an all new driver, and I imagine you don't either, so we're all going to have to «ooze» across to Gallium3D. The initial code to support Evergreen (HD5xxx) GPUs is being implemented on top of the «classic» r600 driver because so much of the programming model is common, but from that point on I think we would try to push the Gallium3D code ahead rather than doing more work on the classic code base.
I'll try to get a statement from our proprietary OpenGL driver team re: compatibility profiles — or, more to the point, deprecating older GL functionality. I haven't looked into the issue much myself but my first impression was definitely «uh-oh, this is going to be a problem for a bunch of our users».
Третье. Ввиду отсутствия работоспособных открытых драйверов для evergreen, принято решение написать для него драйвер с базовыми возможностями, используя месу (учитывая наработки для r600/700, карты похожи), а потом доделывать, используя gallium3d. Через него же и будет реализовано ускорение EXA+Xv.
В связи с тем, что evergreen научили KMS, появились новые прошивки. Искать, как и всегда, тут.
По поводу первой ссылки: у фороникса тесты как всегда :) От себя могу добавить, что на имеющихся у меня r300 и rv690 драйвер r300g работает значительно быстрее.