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AMD Releases 3D Programming Documentation
Michael Larabel writes "With the Free Open Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) starting today, where John Bridgman of AMD will be addressing the X.Org developers, AMD has this morning released their 3D programming documentation. This information covers not only the recent R500 series, but goes back in detail to the R300/400 series. This is another one of AMD's open source documentation offerings, which they had started doing at the X Developer Summit 2007 with releasing 900 pages of basic documentation. Phoronix has a detailed analysis of what is being offered with today's information as well as information on sample code being released soon. This information will allow open source 3D/OpenGL work to get underway with ATI's newer graphics cards."
Would fglrx work at last? Or community devs will do all the work to have a decent driver?
Does it have info on Hybrid cross fire and other cross fire setups as well?
sad but true. they had there chance years ago. but now. team green all the way.
i'd like to support amd/ati because of there friendlyness to oss but they just can cut it. alltho they are getting better. the R670's are _allright_ (crossfireX is there only hope) . and they should suck it up and release the 411 for that line and not vintage ones that are very quickly becomming very inadituquite.
bored? try this http://jadmadi.net/blog/2005/01/27/linux-wine-how-to-running-windows-viruses-with-wine/
But it's even worse when they don't release the code.
I'm not a fan of opensource. Or closed source. I'm purely agnostic on that field. I believe licenses should be chosen on a per-case basis. But hardware makers loose little by opening their software accessible interface documentation. Actually they have more to win, because with open documentation, other people can write drivers for software platforms where that piece of hardware has so far been unsupported. That may actually increase their market share.
Onda Technology Institute
For ages, the FOSS community has said "just give us the specs for your graphics cards and we'll write the drivers". Well it looks like AMD is taking real steps in that direction, and I for one, say Thanks!
According to TFA, the small group at AMD who has spent time clearing the docs for legal issues are going to speak at FOSDEM, and the maintainer for the open source driver for AMD/ATI graphics (RadeonHD) will be giving an update.
And thanks also to Intel for putting out their 3D graphics specs last month. These are good days for Linux.
dude, let the devs get some single card setups going first before asking about crossfire o_0
which is totally what she said
Feature parity with Windows must be the goal if they want to beat NVidia. I hope we can get some sort of media acceleration beyond the stale old XVideo & XV-MC.
I'm the owner of 5 boxes all with Nvidia graphic cards.
... until I found out that Nvidia doesn't time its
I've been using only Nvidia cards since 2000 because they had
the best 3D graphics card for my Linux box. I was willing to deal
with binary drivers because there was nothing else available to me
at my price range (loooow budget) for 3D graphics.
But.... over the years I would get burned every now and then
when
1) I would upgrade the kernel and then the X server would get borked
because the Nvidia kernel module didn't match the new kernel, or
2) Some funky memory leak in the binary Nvidia module would lock
up my box hard because of some damn NvAgp vs. Agpart setting or
some funky memory speed setting. Of course, this didn't happen with
every Nvidia driver so of course I wouldn't bother writing down
what it took to fix the problem.
Finally when I switched to Debian Linux in fall 2004 and had
beautiful apt-get/synaptic take care of all of my needs I thought
I was done
driver releases with kernel releases so if I wanted to upgrade
my kernel painlessly with apt-get/synaptic I would have to
wait for Nvidia to get off it's damn rocking chair playing their
damn banjo and release a driver to go with the newer kernel.
The final straw for me was when all of my 5 nvidia cards were
now listed in the "legacy driver" section. Can you guess what
"legacy driver" means about Nvidia fixing their closed source
driver? Yeah, that's exactly the point.
That's when I started looking around for open source 3d drivers.
I know about Nouveau for Nvidia, but frankly I'm too pissed off
about Nvidia to consider them. Ati had a long history of treating
Linux customers like second class scum. Intel on the other hand
earned the "golden throne" by providing full open source for their
graphic chipsets. So now that I'm looking for getting a dual core
64 bit cpu + 3D graphic chipset the only viable choice was intel,
which I was happy to do business with.
Now that Ati has decided to come forth with 3D documentation I'm
willing to give an intel/ATi or AMD/Ati combo serious consideration.
Way to go ATI!!!!
I see that as a reason not to open source the existing drivers, but not to preclude releasing the details needed by the open source community to produce an open driver with their own shader programs, which may be lower performance, but good enough for default operation for a lot of distributions.
I find an interesting perspective being hinted at by AMD in this context. That they approach a common open source layer at the low level, and plug in their proprietary 'good stuff' as a replacement for higher layer things. As an example, they feel their powerplay stuff isn't top secret, so putting it at a layer where everyone can bang on it and improve it is ideal for everyone. Same with things like display handling. AMD and nVidia both do bizarre things requiring proprietary tools to configure display hotplug, instead of the full xrandr feature set, which has grown to include display hot plug.
In general, there are *many* things AMD has historically gotten wrong in their drivers. Mostly with respect to power management, suspend, stability with arbitrary kernels/X servers. One thing they seem to do better relative to the open source community is good 3D performance if all the underlying stuff happens to line up. If they can outsource the basic, but potentially widely varying work to the community, it would do wonders if their driver architecture lets them leverage that. And by giving open source 3D developers a chance to create a full stack, it's the best of all worlds. I would be delighted to see the Open Source 3D stack surpass the proprietary stack, but wonder what patents stand in the way of that being permitted...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It's actually quite nice when they tell us how to write our own drivers, so we're not dependent on them for needed maintenance (bug fixes, updates for newer kernels, etc). Companies can have all sorts of reasons to stop supporting a product, or to provide sub-par support, and being able to write our own drivers means that that isn't a problem.
The R500 cards only have crossfire via the external cable.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It may be easy to add it later if they plan for it when they start working on then hacking it in later.
I think this is all that 3D Realms needs to finish Duke Nukem Forever!
Finally, I can buy a new computer and not have to use a PCI Radeon 9250. Although stable drivers probably won't be here until after the R800 comes out. Assuming AMD lasts that long.
But yes, HUZZAH. I intend to buy AMD for my next computer.
Next make coreboot (i.e. LinuxBIOS) the default for the new AMD 8-series motherboard chipset. Hopefully that would endear them to super computing farms and open source enthusiasts alike.
Now that AMD/ATI has come over from the Dark Side, I expect that Nvidia and all of the other graphics chip manufacturers are going to be close behind. It may take them a year or two to work out the logistics, but they'll be here.
More and more people are moving over to Linux/BSD Free/Open software, and letting yourself be locked out of a growing market is the kind of things that CEOs and CTO's get fired for.
It used to be the case that manufacturers could peacefully close their eyes to the Open Source / Free communities and drink the Microsoft brand Kool-Aid because all of their competitors were doing the same thing. Now, however, with one of The big guns having committed to solid support of the Open Source universe, their less responsive competitors have a massive flank open that is going to have to be responded to.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I ordered an Nvidia card yesterday.
So what's left before the complete documentation sets are in our hands?
We all know the equations don't work out well with 4 dimensions. If they're going to start adding more, I think they should go with 10 minimum, maybe 11.
I used to buy/recommend mostly AMD CPUs and Nvidia graphics cards till now.
I guess it's time to make it AMD / ATI now.
If they have released what we needed to get the drivers made, which is what we have always wanted, it's time we reciprocated by supporting them.
This will show other graphics companies *hint hint* that releasing the specs = good business.
"More and more people are moving over to Linux/BSD Free/Open software, and letting yourself be locked out of a growing market is the kind of things that CEOs and CTO's get fired for."
Uh huh. And just how many CEO's and CTO's have been fired for using ATI or Nvidia's binary blob? I suspect the number's between zero and your imagination.
"This is the end of the beginning. "
The total number of hardware and still growing that's released with a binary blob is still greater than the total number that have open source drivers.
There's just ONE problem with that argument. The Windows and Mac market. Just because the FOSS group is all gung ho about writing drivers for every piece of hardware known to man doesn't mean that the Windows and Mac side is. Nvidia and ATI will both still have to write binary drivers for them and that means all the other arguments .e.g. support, legacy, etc stay the same. All that open sourcing has done is reduced the noise level from a demographic that's demonstrated that it can be noiser and hard to please than most (squeaky wheel and all that).
But the Superstring Theory hasn't even been proven yet!
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
Well a couple things. One UVD isn't as big an issue because ATI use to use shaders to impliment that feature before the latest series buit it in. Now I've notice this documentation doesn't cover the latest chip. So FOSS will always play catchup (and they'll never be free from proprietary hardware if ATI changes their mind.) Also note the feature set revolves around DirectX not OpenGL so the tripack that's NVIDIA/ATI/Microsoft will still be ahead of FOSS. And last let's hope FOSS 2D/3D driver knowledge is up to the task.
Comparing my R500 part with fglrx with an R300 part with the open source driver:
-With fglrx kernel module loaded, my laptop has not been able to suspend ever (using Ubuntu Gutsy)
-I have to do a goofy Virtual 1408x1050 resolution with fglrx to make 3D applications not look horribly corrupted. This is weird, but as long as I don't xrandr over to it, it's not a big deal, however..
-After doing above trick, fglrx shows corruption in lower right hand corner and hardware cursor if trying to do 3D apps at 1400x150 (native resolution). Have to run at 1280x960 to prevent that corruption.
-All acceleration (3D and 2D) has a horrible diagonal tearing effect.
The *ONLY* net improvement in the interval you deem 'massive' improvement is in the frames per second area. Though important, the top priority should be reliability.
Meanwhile, though much slower, the open source driver on the R300 part behaves quite in line with what I expect. I look *very* much forward to what the open source initiative ultimately yields. If AMD can cram the fglrx performance into binary blobs that leverage the open source layers for everything they get right, I would be ecstatic.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The open source drivers have had the reliability advantage, so I'm guessing you agree with the perspective of the parent post?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Maybe now we can finally get a decent Windows driver!
Sig? What sig? Do I have to have a sig!?!?
You've followed through! My next video card purchase won't be for a while, so there's a good change that free drivers will be available, and you just got yourself a customer!
I know everyone was skeptical when this was announced some months ago. I though "well, it could happen." The silence on the issue lately made me think I had spoken too soon. I was beginning to wonder where the specs were. Well, here they are.
Thank you ATI!
The R500 cards only have crossfire via the external cable.
Not entirely true. The RV570 (x1950 Pro) was the first internal Crossfire-capable GPU. But you're basically right, because every other card in the R500 range had the Crossfire glue logic external to the GPU die, and thus required special "Crossfire Edition" cards.
The RV570 got the internal Crossfire treatment because it was completely redesigned to (1) reduce power consumption and (2) create a cheap midrange card.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
I'm a real hardliner on the belief that interfaces should not only be unprotectable, but should be required to be released in any and all cases, period, no exceptions.