AMD Releases 900+ Pages Of GPU Specs

An anonymous reader writes "Ending off the X Developer Summit this year, Matthew Tippett handed off ATI's GPU specifications to David Airlie on a CD. However, the specifications are also now available on the X.org site. Right now there is the RV630 Register Reference Guide and M56 Register Reference Guide. Expect more documentation (and 3D specifications) to arrive shortly. The new open-source R500/600 driver will be released early next week."

Comments

Re:You may be right ...

[Ford Prefect]

Better idea: instead of popping up a dialog asking to install 3D acceleration, the installer just does it. After all, it'll be free software.

No, it'll have to ask the user - because the 3D driver will have various instabilities and have a tendency to hard-lock the machine at random intervals for some ill-defined reasons. Years will go by, and the situation won't improve - because by then, the hardware in question will be obsolete, and nobody will be bothering to improve the drivers.

Okay, I'm being pessimistic - but something pretty similar happened after Matrox released the specifications for its 3D graphics cards. There were fully open-source drivers, but they weren't exactly high-quality. I moved on to Nvidia after that...