Last month AMD introduced the ATI Radeon HD 3800 series as “enthusiast gaming performance for the masses” through the Radeon HD 3850 and Radeon HD 3870, which are both sub-$250 graphics cards. While rudimentary, the Catalyst 7.11 Linux driver (also released last month), supports these two RV670 GPUs with better support coming through the Catalyst 7.12 Linux driver this month. To see how well these two PCI Express 2.0 graphics cards are able to perform under Linux, ASUS had sent out their EAH3850 TOP and EAH3870 TOP. We have tested both of these graphics cards using Ubuntu 7.10 and have compared the results to other products using the fglrx driver, including the ATI Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB. These are the world’s first Linux benchmarks of these new mainstream ATI graphics processors.

The ATI Radeon HD 3850 and 3870 are designed to be affordable GPUs and direct competition for NVIDIA’s recently released GeForce 8800GT, which we should be showcasing here under Linux shortly. These two ATI graphics cards use the RV670 core and are built using a 55nm TSMC process, which results in a smaller die size and a more energy efficient graphics processor. However, as this is an “RV” GPU, it does have a reduction in memory bandwidth and the internal ring bus compared to the flagship Radeon HD 2900XT.

Asus Radeon HD3870:

• 851MHz Core Clock (RV670 reference: 775MHz)
• 2286MHz Memory Clock (RV670 reference: 2250MHz)
• 512MB 256-bit GDDR4 Memory

Asus Radeon HD 3850:

• 730MHz Core Clock (RV670 reference: 668MHz)
• 1900MHz Memory Clock (RV670 reference: 1650MHz)
• 256MB 256-bit GDDR3 Memory

Common Specs:

• DirectX 10.1
• OpenGL 2.0
• Dual Dual-Link DVI
• HDCP Supported
• PCI Express 2.0

Complete Review

Related: Using HDMI With ATI Radeon HD Linux Drivers

Adobe Systems today announced it will release the remoting and messaging technologies used in Flex, Flash and other Adobe products as open source projects. Because the technologies are fairly mature, Adobe isn’t so much looking for help from the open source community as it is looking to get its technology into more hands.

Adobe intends to release the remoting and HTTP-based messaging technologies in its LiveCycle Data Services ES along with the Action Message Format (AMF) protocol specification under the named BlazeDS. They will be made available as public betas under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) v3 and downloadable from Adobe Labs

The Action Message Format (AMF3) is a binary data protocol specification used in a variety of Adobe products, including Flash, which is used on almost every computer due to its availability on Linux and Mac OS in addition to Windows.

Adobe said BlazeDS will allow developers to add data connectivity to rich Internet applications (RIAs) (define), such as its Flex and AIR client technologies, for real-time collaboration and data-push capabilities. It will also allow RIAs to easily connect back to server applications ranging from Java apps to Adobe ColdFusion components. >>>>>