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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."
Closed-source drivers can be OK, except they tend to discontinue support after a while. Eventually the binary driver won't load into a current kernel and you are high and dry. With open-source drivers, the prospects for long-term support are better.
The specs are for the brand-spanking-new RV630 series, the mid to low range chip in the r600 line. And the specs are only for 2d modesetting at the moment, so they likely apply to the whole r600 series. When the 3d specs are released they'll likely be a separate spec sheet for each specific chip. So to answer your question, they are for the newest cards ATi currently makes not their old, outmoded ones.
thisnukes4u.net
Sure, the geek cred is a nice by-product of the choice they made. But that was inevitable, since they were geeks making geeky choices about technology (rather than marketing choices).
The RV630 chip is anything but "old", and what runs the Radeon HD 2600 PRO and Radeon HD 2600 XT. These belong to the very latest Radeon R600 line -- AMD's Direct3D 10 / Shader Model 4.0 supporting GPU's. These are high end chips from 2007, currently only beat by the Radeon HD 2900 XT in performance, if only speaking of AMD/ATI. The M56 chip is the core of the ATI Radeon Mobility X1600 (released December 2005), which is still a very decent mobile chip, roughly corresponding to an NVIDIA Geforce Go 7600 in performance.
Hmm, I now also see the ATI FireGL V7600 runs the RV630 too. Maybe that could work out for something too...
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Actually, (IIRC) the driver has been sitting in somebody's desk drawer for months, waiting for AMDTI to bless it. The developer got the specs under NDA or something quite a while ago.
Specifically, google "over nine thousand" since the OP was paraphrasing. On a related note, my karma is over NINE THOUSAND!
I've had a quick look at the PDFs. It seems like they have a lot of registers for setting up the display modes, including dual display. They don't, however, seem to specify the registers for doing things like loading vertex arrays. The specifications to date don't seem to include enough information to produce a good 3D driver.
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Specs for r500(the X1k series) are supposedly in the pipleline. For matching codenames->marketing names, I recommend http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_ATI_Graphics_Processing_Units And the reason why they are so "deficient" is they have a team of a few engineers helping the X.org folks write the drivers. They have also said that they will be providing code snippets in the future to help clear up unclear parts of the spec. This is just a teaser release, not all we're getting.
thisnukes4u.net
Yeah, but the article clearly states 3D specs sometime soon (next week was it?). So why complain?
Bah
They won't work in your SLI rig. Only NVidia cards support SLI. ATI have a different system that uses a different motherboard, so you'd have to replace that too, if you want SLI type performance.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
In the past the hardware did not change much between releases (which is why one can have unified drivers). In particular, having documentation for one card goes a very long way to figuring out how to use a similar, slightly modified card. What happened after R300 is that ATI ripped out their 2d engine which made it impossible to figure out how to set modes on the new cards. Thus, we did not even have a 2d X-server, let alone 3d. With this documentation one can have a driver that allows distributions to boot directly to the largest supported mode - and then download binary driver if they feel like it.
Secondly, these documents are now public as opposed to limited to ATI-approved select developers. This makes a huge difference as more people would be able to contribute. Before, with experimental drivers, the outside developers could only provide feedback and getting them approved was not a speedy process. With docs available, not only the driver quality will go up but also one can hope for new and creative use of the chips. I really can't stress enough importance of having public documentation.
- Eagerly waiting for the 3d part - which is also needed for old-fashioned 2d graphics..
As I understand it, the X.org DRI (Direct Rendering Infrastructure) project are doing just that. In fact, they have been doing just that for ATI cards (among others) for some time, but progress has been slow, because they've needed to reverse-engineer everything (they previously could get specs with an NDA, but not since the 9200 cards). As a result, the DRI Radeon drivers currently only work with older cards (up through X850, IIRC), and provide little or no 3D acceleration for all but the oldest cards. Even so, the general consensus has been that their drivers are superior to the proprietary, FireGL drivers that ATI provide for Linux (and they work on *BSD, which the FireGL drivers do not[1]). With this information, they should be able to make steady progress on providing support for recent ATI cards under X.
[1] Not natively, at least. Last winter, I believe, they were finally made to work under FreeBSD with Linux binary compatibility.That's great, except x64-native versions of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP were not released until 2005. Until then, Windows Server 2003 was available only in 32-bit x86 and Itanium-compatible flavours. Grandparent's observation is quite astute.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
I've seen real register reference PDFs for ATI chipsets and what was released was generic 2D support register references. Don't expect OSS to build *real* 3D OpenGL implementations based on what was provided.
Um, the summary says "expect more documentation (and 3D specifications) to arrive shortly".
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
I don't even understand why they're still in business today.
The world does not revolve around 3D. Matrox produce fine gear for high-quality 2D work, like medical imaging.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Bzzzz - wrong.
Read David's blog - http://airlied.livejournal.com/ - there are a whole pile of potential problems about that driver. David accepts that it was on questionable ground, and so it will probably never see the light of day.