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AMD Releases Register Specs For R5xx And R6xx
ianare writes "AMD has recently released register specifications for the ATI Radeon R5xx and R6xx graphic devices. This will (theoretically) allow the OSS community to develop drivers, given time. In fact, engineers from Novell have released a first alpha quality Open Source driver which currently supports initial mode settings. Although current work is focused on 2D, rather than 3D acceleration, this type of information sharing could conceivably lead to an OSS 3D driver."
I's not the OpenGL teapot, it's the Utah Teapot or teapotahedron.
When ATI were making their first murmurings of releasing specs a few weeks ago, I have to say I wasn't convinced - I've been burned by ATI's shoddy Linux support in the past, and it was going to take alot of convincing that AMD (traditionally very friendly to FOSS) was trying to steer the ship in a different direction.
And now they've released scads of docs - kudos. This was probably the only way to make a FOSS driver a reality without violating reams of licensed IP. On top of that, I believe their latest set of Linux drivers fix a number of long standing issues, as well as vastly increasing 3D performance (although obviously there are still are QA problems).
Granted, it's almost all 2D stuff at the moment, but being able to ship a functional, fast and non-crash-prone driver for ATI cards with every modern distro will be another win for Linux in general.
I'm quite interested to hear about advanced features though - will implementing things like iDCT in XvMC for MPEG2, MPEG4 ASP and H.264 be a reality? Can these things be implemented with 2D registers or do these things need to be run through the 3D shaders nowadays? The low end ATI cards, including the IGP's, would be ideal for HTPC boxes, espcially with Intel dragging their feet on similar support/documentation for their (admittedly otherwise excellent) GMA X3xxx series.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
I'd also love to see some documentation for the terms and concepts you've mentioned. What are ROP2/3/4, why do we want them around, etc. Not just the registers for them, because not all of us know what those are for or why we care. How does one go from knowing little if anything about graphics to knowing what to do with registers defined in these and other Radeon documents?
I sort of recall hearing sometime down the line that some of the 3D specs were released, but critical stuff needed for acceptable performance or modern effects was missing.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Seriously though, I agree with you about closed source drivers showing gaming is still very weak on Linux, but OSS drivers will allow distros to include accelerated 3d by default and installing a game or 3d effects will be much easier. If only that was the obstacle to gaming on Linux!