airlied posted a note that the RandR 1.2 branch of the free ATI driver was merged into master. This means that the next release of the ATI driver might already be RandR 1.2 capable release.
Recently the RandR 1.2 branch of the free X.Org ATI driver got quite some attention: besides the already working RandR 1.2 implementation the driver also got (beta) TV-Out support.
In the meantime the main development tree, 6.7, didn’t get that much love and therefore the developers decided to merge the RandR 1.2 tree into master and ditch 6.7:
really the 6.7 tree isn’t getting much developer loving, so I’ve branched ati-6.7-branch off and merged the randr-1.2 love into master
This means that the next release is likely to already have RandR 1.2 and TV-Out support. That wasn’t planned originally, but I like it!
This development however sheds some pretty bad light onto AMD/ATI: while there have been big promises in the past regarding a completely and totally new driver there have been only disappointments in the last releases. In fact, wrt features the free driver has much more to offer at the moment than the solution offered by AMD/ATI. The only advantage of the proprietary driver is its performance – but even in that regard it is hardly comparable to the performance of the Windows drivers. If you’d like to be mean you might say: they can not even do a proper job although they have the hardware specs.
And slowly I do wonder how AMD/ATI is going to make good the damage – they would have to release a driver which at least supports AIGLX and maybe also TV-Out. I would need to see RandR 1.2 support as well (like it is planned for the proprietary NVIDIA drivers) to like AMD/ATI again.
