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AMD To Open ATI Specs
Several readers tipped us the followup of yesterday's AMD/ATI news, the new development hinted at by Phoronix: AMD has announced they are releasing the specs for all new Radeon chipsets, and will be working with the open source community to develop a fully functional 2D and 3D graphics driver. An anonymous reader opines: "AMD appears to be following in Intel's footsteps with upcoming releases. If AMD is successful NVidia will have real competition in the GNU/Linux gaming arena. While past support by ATI was unsatisfactory the new AMD buyout appears to be having some effect."
Lets see, ~2% of the users run linux. What fraction of those are actually gamers?
Seems like a move more for the high-end workstation market.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Has something to do with this news, read Red Hat and GNOME developer blog post for more information http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=302
"Steve Jobs invented the world" -- Bill W. GATES
That GNU/Linux gaming arena is *super* cut-throat, I'm not sure what NVidia is going to do after hearing about this! Those Tux Racer benchmarks are going to totally blow everyone out of the water! And I don't even want to mention how fast Life and KAsteroids...totally ridiculous!
I guess this development will have an effect on my fanboyness towards nvidia . . .
okey-dokey. time to put our money where our mouth has been the whole time. let's get coding :)
(do i want to know what sort of NDA the specs are going to be under?)
They are going one step further than nVidia (good binary drivers, documentation lacking). This looks like it is aimed more at redressing AMD/ATi's current shortcomings vis-a-vis Intel: with a 3D-accelerated open-source graphics driver, the only thing missing from an AMD-on-laptop equation is reliably-open Wi-Fi.
And no, Atheros does not count. I refer to the pre-n fiasco, which took months before the only open-soure developer with NDA access was able to come up with specifications. Perhaps AMD should come up with a wireless NIC next?
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
Could this be becuase ATI might be falling behind nVIDIA technologically, rather than the AMD purchase of ATI? They might feel they don't have so much IP to protect any more. Just guessing.
Does everything include nothing?
I hope they release info on the video capture and TV out features of all of the ATI chipsets. It would be great to be able to support all of the features in the "all in one" chipsets. Especially the new HDTV tuner / capture cards.
If quality Linux drivers actually materialize and they have a fully open spec, I'll jump ship from nVidia in a heartbeat. An open spec will help a lot with gpgpu projects. I'd love to be able to take full advantage of my otherwise idle GPU while say . . . transcoding video . . .
I think these news might have different implications than we might suspect. While we may think "that's cool, although so few gamers are running Linux", I think this move might have other repercussions than just help the Linux PC game market.
In this day and age, we've got Open Source Anything, handheld consoles, cell phones, toasters, anything. Now if we imagine that some people somewhere decide to make a gaming console to rivalize with the Xbox 360 and the Wii, an Open Source Console, running Linux, or even some Open Source AppleTV-like box, which GPU will the makers choose? Obviously the most FOSS/Unix friendly, and that would be AMD/ATI.
They might be feeling that a large market might open up soon, and that's why I think they chose to do this move, while they can easily become the first ones there.
You just got troll'd!
I know everybody asked for this, and they're finally giving in but.
More important than open graphic drivers is open disk controller drivers, open USB controller drivers, etc, etc, etc
Still, a great step.
And even though I would be one of the first to say "talk is cheap, show me the specs", someone further behind the curtains told me some companies knew (and possibly working with) it already.
how long until
very sweet!
i know it won't happen over night, but it will still be nice to apt-get my ATI updates.
I read this, then the comments, and realized that a lot of people see vid cards as just gaming accessories. This couldn't be further from the truth. Look at industrial graphics and video workstations! nVidia is dominating there, and AMD is hungry for a piece of that pie. Open up docs, get the geek that the office keeps in the closet to get excited, he sends the list of the part upgrade to the boss for the graphics workstations, bada-boom AMD market share of ATI video cards grow.
The help for gaming is just incidental, AMD is keeping its eyes on the real prize, the industrial market.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
FTA:
Does this mean they don't have them yet?..
May Peace Prevail On Earth
You can currently only use ATI and NVidia drivers on windows to off-load decoding of h264 video, this makes playback under linux of HD DVB streams almost impossible (you get frames dropped even with top of the line CPU's).
Hopefully this will mean we can get XVmC support for ATI cards to do h264 decoding, this would be awsome, and a big boost to the media centre community. I look forward to seeing the developments, maybe soon I can put an ATI card in my Freevo Media Centre and actually be able to view HD content - woot!
If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let'em go, because, man, they're gone.
Um... ever hear of a game called World of Warcraft? or how about a game called Doom or Quake? Transgaming, the makers of Cedega / Wine, have had deals with EA (you may have heard of them before) in the past, for their Mac software sure, but to say that Linux is still completely off the map is a bit short sighted. I still prefer Windows for gaming, sure, but Linux gaming has come a LOOOOOONG ways from even a few years ago.
:P
Now if someone would find a way to get FFXI running under Linux, me and the other 3 people on the planet that care about that would be quite happy.
To play proprietary video games from major publishers on a Mac running Mac OS X or on a PC running GNU/Linux, try using an external gaming accelerator. This comes in two pieces sold separately: a "TV tuner" that you put in an internal slot, and an external "PlayStation 2" unit that you connect to the TV tuner and your sound card. Then you use xawtv to connect to the gaming accelerator. I did something similar a decade ago, by running a "Nintendo 64" unit through the TV tuner of a Macintosh Performa 6230.
You can continue to play Free video games using the hardware already in your PC.
"Hello? Is this the Daily Gazette? I'd like to report a story!" ... A**hole!"
"There were five of them! Pink! Well, one was kinda yellow. I think it was a pot-bellied one."
"What? No! Pigs! Outside my window!"
"Maybe in a farm it ain't, but I live on the 10th floor in the City."
"Yes, that's right! Flying pigs!"
"The wings? White."
"Yes, like an angels I guess."
"What? No, I haven't been drinking..."
"..or taking drugs."
"Look I'm not kidding! There were 5 flying pigs outside my window Oinking at me!"
"Hello? Hello?
Hmmm. This is awesome news. The last 40 or so systems we purchased were all Intel based purely because of the fact that they were so much less trouble due to being supported with Free drivers. This changes the equation though. It sounds from the announcement that we'll be getting better quality drivers because AMD/ATI will be releasing the full specs and not merely documenting through the use of code (which is cool and still makes Intel supportable).
Some things I still wonder about are whether or not the comparably priced AMD/ATI systems will have good Free drivers for other integral components such as wireless (which Intel have also got a lead with due to their IPW3945ABG). Intel have also got some very important work underway with PowerTOP. The upcoming Fedora 8 will be benefiting from the results of extensive testing with PowerTOP (which is written by ex-Red Hatter, now Intel employee, Arjan van de Ven). This allows monitoring of the major drains of power in laptops and can also be a major factor in server rooms.
I'm delighted by this whole move and it means that I can now make recommendations which include ATI cards as part of the specifications to purchasing. In terms of whether the AMD/ATI platform as whole will be a competitor that depends on whether the AMD motherboard chipsets will also be as open, Free and supportable. Intel have an incredible headstart in this area and possibly this will prevent them from moving into the stand-alone 3D card market (which is what I thought was going to inevitably happen). It looked as though AMD/ATI were headed for extinction, but I guess the reality of sales started to catch up with them.
All in all good news that opens up some more options for us. Perhaps we'll be seeing some interesting Dell machines soon!
I have a different interest in this. With documentation, even SVGATextMode can be enhanced to run at higher geometries, and adjust modelines to better fit various displays ... on the new ATI hardware. But someone will have to hack it, given the many years that SVGATextMode has been stagnant, and that may end up being me.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Wow, a hardware producer is opening up the specs of their graphics chips. There's a longtime gripe solved. Tomorrow on Slashdot ...
... same thing, but for NVidia.
... same thing, but for all wireless chipsets.
... the RIAA will give up on lawsuits and DRM, realizing that both are ultimately ineffective and bad for their business, and promote a prepaid, peer-to-peer approach to music distribution. They will also rename themselves the Recording Industry Cartel of America.
... President Bush will sign the Software Patent Invalidation Act, which will have cruised through the House, Senate, and Ways and Means Committee overnight, effectively ending patent protection for software ideas. A small town in Texas will immediately go bankrupt.
... Having signed the act and finding nothing else important to do, the president will resign.
... Microsoft will cave in and adopt ODF for Word. Features in OOXML that they want to keep will be carefully documented and formally submitted for inclusion in the ODF 2.0 standard.
It would be understandble if they need to edit the documents or have the legal team review them.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
At some point, your LCD has to toggle pixels in the "cleartext" not the "ciphertext". At that point you can decode the signal. Just crack open the case, and try to find the easiest place to tap the unencrypted signal (1600x1200 wires is a bit tedius to solder).
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Work has been underway for quite a long time. R200 specs were released quite awhile ago and R200-based cards are somewhat workable with #D-accelerated desktops. R300 specs until now were not released and a substantial effort was underway to reverse-engineer the platform. The same goes with NVidia--the Nouveau project has been very active in the past year adding Free 3-d acceleration support to their drivers and has collected a lot of data for reverse engineering purposes.
The money's ALWAYS been where our mouths are, it's just that reverse-engineering these cards is a pretty monumental task (many orders of magnitude more work involved than what was involved in reverse-engineering the entire IBM PC platform in the 1980s). For reasons completely unrelated to technical issues or even market demand, we end up having to settle for using previous-generation hardware on Linux systems because of the time it takes to wade through "trade secrets".
This news from ATI is great news for the entire community. Perhaps with NVidia being the last holdout of the big graphics hardware players they'll finally succumb to "peer pressure" and drop their unreasonable stance regarding the release of specs. I've seen the remarkable progress made by the Nouveau team despite NVidia's stonewalling. With ATI actually showing signs of cooperation I think Free ATI driver development will advance extremely quickly. Furthermore, this may have implications beyond the Linux community--in everything from embedded uses to the Windows community. If the interface spec for ATI hardware is public it means that the quality of open AND closed drivers for all platforms has the opportunity to improve, as those outside ATI will be able to give more constructive input on found bugs.
Hopefully this is an early sign of an overall trend towards opening hardware. I've been worrying lately that as open software gains traction that big companies will try to cling to their old business models by making hardware more closed.
Does anyone sense a "perfect storm" brewing? OOXML is delayed (but not quite derailed, yet) and many want to standardize on ODF. Vista adoption is crap--moving requires a rewrite of all your business apps, anyhow, and the hardware drivers aren't stable yet, so if you're going to transition to something else, now is the time. Ubuntu is proving itself usable by the computer illiterate. Now we have the potential for good graphics drivers, not to mention major retailers selling Linux machines. Microsoft is bogged down with anti-trust suits everywhere and they're chasing Google's advertising dollars now, because growth is nearly impossible for them to find.
Don't get me wrong: Microsoft won't just implode suddenly. But it's pretty amazing that their lock-ins are weaker now than they've ever been and that they're only getting weaker, not to mention that they're trying to compete on so many fronts at once while their two profitable divisions, Office & Windows, are suffering.
Anyone else suspect that we might possibly be seeing the start of the slow decline of Microsoft's empire?
Screw 3D and gamers... I just glad ACPI developers will finally have the docs they need to get ATI video cards to come out of S3/Suspend successfully.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
That might be why yours is slow -- WoW can, in fact, be configured to run in OpenGL mode, even the Windows version, meaning there's no translation to run.
If it'd been done right, maybe. It's possible they are running into problems supporting X, which is entirely different than the Mac GUI.
What's more, right now, they cooperate very nicely with the Wine people to make sure everything works, but they aren't required to actually support it. If they were to release a native Linux client, that means they actually have to give it the same level of support that they give Windows, which is more than just "churning out" a client.
I wouldn't mind a Linux port, but I don't think it would actually be much better than what we've got now.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Hacking the Radeon driver: So easy, even a Caveman can do it!