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."

Comments

Way to go AMD

[schwaang]

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.

Re:Way to go AMD

[644bd346996]

Depends on what you mean by better. There's no doubt that the open source drivers will be more stable and have better software compatibility than the proprietary stuff. The 3d performance will really only matter to the Linux gamers (a very small market, that), as the performance should definitely be more than enough for simpler things like compiz, etc.

You should take a look at the existing 3d drivers. The folks reverse-engineering the r300 series did a pretty good job (well enough for it to be the development platform for xgl). And the open-source drivers also guarantee that the card will continue to work just as well with software written long after the demise of the company (eg. with the 3dfx drivers).

Re:Way to go AMD

[forkazoo]

Gamers are not the only ones who like 3D acceleration.

Quickly and off the top of my head, here are two big ones:
1. Compiz/Fusion and the like is gaining popularity.
2. Some applications NEED good 3D or they crawl. See Blender for instance.

Of these, I would say gaming would be the least demanding - at least if my assumption that "stable is harder than fast" is correct.

Sure, Blender needs good OpenGL acceleration. But, nobody is going to be that concerned about getting an extra 1 fps in Blender. If proprietary drivers go twice as fast, or ten times as fast, then the open source devs would look like idiots. If the open source ones are ten percent slower, then 99% of people will be completely satisfied. Games are flashy, and they sell cards, and people will complain about getting killed by somebody with a faster machine because it couldn't possibly have anything to do with lack of skill. In Blender, you just need sufficient speed to work. If the guy next to you has an extra 2 fps, it doesn't make him appreciably more productive, and you certainly can't justify needing to display faster than the refresh rate of the monitor in Blender!

Yeeha!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm the owner of 5 boxes all with Nvidia graphic cards.
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 ... until I found out that Nvidia doesn't time its
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 would think that's more reason for specs..

[Junta]

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...

Re:H.264 acceleration included?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I hope we can get some sort of media acceleration beyond the stale old XVideo & XV-MC. You won't get it, and the reason is DRM.

ATI's cards that have h.264 acceleration (and all kinds of other good stuff like smart de-interlacing all collectively branded as "UVD") are unlikely to ever have the specs for UVD disclosed because they integrated the good stuff with the bad stuff (DRM) and are afraid the exposing how to use the good stuff in UVD will also expose how to circumvent the bad stuff on microsoft windows systems.

So, once again, those DRM apologists who say that DRM is purely optional, that if you don't want to use it, it won't hurt you, are proven wrong again.

On the plus side, the next gen cards will have the DRM broken out into a separate part of the chip so that they can feel safe in publishing the specs for good video stuff while leaving the bad stuff locked away.

One of many such statements by ATI/AMD.

Re:What's left?-experience

[z0M6]

Actually, r600 documentation is expected in a few months. That can hardly be called catching up compared to how it has been earlier.

Using the gpu to decode h264 etc is something I see as quite possible, but it is likely that it is something we have to implement ourselves (something I think we are capable of).