AMD Promises Open Source Graphics Drivers

MoxFulder writes "Henri Richard, AMD's VP of sales, has promised to deliver open-source drivers for ATI graphics cards (recently acquired by AMD) at the recent Red Hat Summit. A series of good news for proponents of open-source device drivers. In the last year, Intel, the leading provider of integrated graphics cards, has opened their drivers as well. But ATI and NVidia, the only two players in the market for high-performance discrete graphics cards, have so far released only closed-source drivers for their cards. This has created numerous compatibility, stability, and ethical problems for users of Linux and other open source OSes, and prompted projects like Nouveau to try and reverse-engineer NVidia drivers. Hopefully AMD's decision will put pressure on NVidia to release open-source drivers as well!"

Comments

Re:Mainstream gaming

[OrangeTide]

It sure is nice when GLX works and you can do CAD, modeling, simulations and 3D programming(OpenGL) on a Linux box. So there are practical uses beyond gaming for those fancy 3D cards.

Re:Intel driver Open Source?

[Josh Triplett]

Last time I looked at the Intel driver source, there were a ton of calls into the video BIOS. Not something I would call an "Open Source" driver. This may have changed since then,- I really hope so.

Why is it important to have more source you might ask. Well, for one thing it would be really nice if we can get rid of the video BIOS altogether. A full source driver which shows how to switch video modes is a very good start to accomplish this (although not necessarily enough).

Look into the new "modesetting" branch of the Intel driver, currently moving towards the default. It moves all the work of modesetting and other related hardware manipulation from the video BIOS into the driver, and avoids the video BIOS entirely. This does indeed give the benefits you describe in your post. Some of this modesetting code also moves toward sharing between drivers, to support modesetting for all Xorg video drivers. (Some of it consists of driver-independent code, such as dealing with funky monitors.)

Re:Nice

[TheRaven64]

The high-end is still reserved for gamers, researchers, and people doing visualisation. A modern (cheap) GPU, however, does a lot more than a framebuffer. The most obvious thing it does is compositing. Pretty much every application does some form of alpha blending (see those icons on your toolbar?), even if it's with a 1-bit alpha channel, and there's no reason this couldn't be done in hardware. At the windowing system level it's even more important. Draw every window to a texture and let the GPU handle the shadows (not just a gimmick; on OS X is't a huge visual clue as to the active window) and overlaying.

Pixel and vertex shaders are a whole new ball game. There's a lot of text on my screen. All of it drawn from truetype fonts. A truetype font is basically a series of bezier curves. Microsoft Research released a paper a few years back where each of these curves was approximated to a triangle. A vertex shader program then inspects each of the rendered triangles and corrects the error between the triangle and the bezier. This allows an entire font to be uploaded to the GPU and rendered at any resolution with very little CPU load or RAM usage (compare this with Apple's hack of just storing a table of glyphs in the video RAM, which doesn't scale very well).

Pixel shaders can be used for a lot of things. With pixel shaders you can perform a lot of convolutions in hardware, giving some nice effects. You can use a pyramid algorithm to perform a number of things, like bi-cubic filtering, blurring, etc in a fraction of a second.

Sure, you could do a lot of these on the CPU, but the GPU is going to do them a lot faster, and probably use less power (important for mobile users).

Even without needing the 3D support, it's useful to have all of the features working correctly. Power management is a big one, since the kernel needs to be able to save the state of the GPU somewhere before turning it off, and Linux uses a lot of hacks to try to avoid needing to do this.

Re:Ethics? Still, nice to hear.

[stinerman]

No. Open Source is about making stuff work. Free Software is about ethics and freedom.