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AMD Releases Register Specs For R5xx And R6xx

Posted by Zonk on from the have-fun-storming-the-castle dept.

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."

5 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Hurrah by whichpaul · · Score: 5, Funny

    OSS 3D driver, great! Now we just need some games play.

  2. Novell's engineer started earlier by renoX · · Score: 5, Informative

    Note that the reason why Novell's engineer were able to deliver an alpha driver this week is because they had access to the ATI's specification under NDA since two month.

    So the driver isn't the result of only one week of work, even if it's still in an alpha state.

  3. Re:drivers by ameoba · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's entirely possible that they don't -have- specs written in a way that's suitable for public consumption.

    --
    my sig's at the bottom of the page.
  4. Re:glxGears needs to be updated! by Ahruman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I's not the OpenGL teapot, it's the Utah Teapot or teapotahedron.

  5. Absolutley _Spot On_ by burnttoy · · Score: 5, Informative

    I develop drivers for a living (actually for the last year I haven't). I went through the docs a few weeks ago - I spent about 2 hours having a "good" read.

    These docs will let one do the following

    1 - Setup you own video mode
    2 - Setup up a video overlay (not video acceleration)
    3 - Setup a full colour mouse cursor

    That's all. These do not explain how to blit, alpha blend, scale, ROP2, ROP3 or ROP4 or perform any other transform.

    This is useful, but not _that_ useful!

    Hopefully there will be more to come specifically more on the memory/cache controller (essential to get performance up), more on the PCI/AGP bus control, more on the 2D source/dest blit registers, pitch, loop counters and I'd like to know how much of the 2D guts is programmable. TBH I thought we'd have moved on to the point of (somewhat) programmable shaders for 2D these days with loops etc built into the HW (0 clock loops and addressing etc).

    --
    Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.