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AMD Launches World's First Mobile DirectX 11 GPUs
J. Dzhugashvili writes "Less than 4 months after releasing the first DX11 desktop graphics card, AMD has followed up with a whole lineup of mobile graphics processors based on the same architecture. The new Mobility Radeon HD 5000 lineup includes four different series of GPUs designed to serve everything from high-end gaming notebooks to mainstream thin-and-light systems. AMD has based these processors on the same silicon chips as its desktop Radeon HD 5000-series graphics cards, so performance shouldn't disappoint. The company also intends to follow Nvidia's lead by offering notebook graphics drivers directly from its website, as opposed to relying on laptop vendors to provide updates."
Who the hell other than the poor sods still doing x86 Windows only game/graphics development still uses that turd of an API DirectX?
Let's just go over the platforms I work on:
PC graphics development - OpenGL
Linux graphics development - OpenGL
Mac graphics development - OpenGL
Android graphics development - OpenGL ES
iPhone graphics development - OpenGL ES
Embedded ARM based system development - OpenGL ES
even some OpenGL for console development.
1995 called and wants their "ATI drivers are crap" comment back.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
2010 called and wants their ATi card to run stable and stop crashing in any number of PC games: Borderlands, Saboteur etc. There have been public known issues with the 5xxx line of their cards causing system locks because of poor drivers and incompatibilities. http://www.joystiq.com/2009/11/03/borderlands-glitch-watch-2009-radeon-powered-pc-crashes/ http://www.evilavatar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=101665 etc. etc.
1995 called and wants their "ATI drivers are crap" comment back.
Obviously you have never tried running Linux on a system with a ATI graphics card.
DirectX 11 in a mobile device? So the device doubles as a hairdryer?
I want this account deleted.
I have three in my system. :3
~ C.
Support in the open-source drivers is being written as fast as ATI can verify and declassify docs. Also the r600/r700 3D code should be mostly reusable for these GPUs.
~ C.
As well as a good deal of other Windows graphic programs. You can stick your head in the sand and pretend that Microsoft Windows isn't a major player, but you are fooling only yourself. Windows development matters a whole lot, and DX is the native API and thus many use it.
However, in this case the reference is to features of the card. See OpenGL is really bad about staying up to date with hardware. They are always playing catchup and often their "support" is just to have the vendors implement their own extensions. So when a new card comes out, talking about it in terms of OpenGL features isn't useful.
Well, new versions of DirectX neatly map to new hardware features. Reason is MS works with the card vendors. They tell the vendors what they'd like to see, the vendors tell them what they are working on for their next gen chips and so on. So a "DX11" card means "A card that supports the full DirectX 11 feature set." This implies many things, like 64-bit FP support, support for new shader models, and so on. IT can be conveniently summed up as DX11. This sets it apart to a DX10 card like the 8800. While that can run with DX11 APIs, it doesn't support the features. Calling it DX10 means it supports the full DX10 feature set.
So that's the reason. If you want to yell and scream how OpenGL should rule the world, you can go right ahead, however the simple fact of the matter is DirectX is a major, major player in the graphics market.
hmm xrandar support, new kernel support? can i run vs. git sources? or just 1-2 releases back? does it support the 57xx and 58xx cards yet? how about TVout? Also can i use the card "hard"(WoW raids) for 4+ hours? and maintain uptimes of weeks? how about the current release of xorg? All of the above only applies to linux.
Anyways until then i'll be sticking with nvidia cards.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
AMD is developing the open-source drivers. It's paying people to work on them. Does that make them not AMD's drivers?
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I have a system with a Radeon 9800 Pro card in it, no problems so far with Ubuntu.
A BenQ Joybook with X300, and a Toshiba Satellite with HD3470. And I have been running ubuntu since 7.10 to 9.10 with ATI drivers in these machines. Issues, such as flickering video and incompatibility between 3D acceleration and Compiz do exist you know. I can only Google Earth on top of compiz fine only just recently (9.04 & 9.10) if I'm not mistaken. Xinerama support, which was excellent in 8.xx became unusable in 9.04. I can't hook the notebook to projector during the 8.xx series if compiz is running.
Well...he does have a point for some cards..take r500 series for example (such as x1550). Proprietary drivers dropped support for drivers >9.3, radeon opensource drivers get an average of 10fps in older games such as UT2004 or less powerfull games like Touhou 8. radeonhd drivers work, but aren't much faster and are still fairly unstable (15-20fps average, crashing every 10 minutes or so, driver has a long way to go still as the game is still more or less unplayable). Note that this is on a card roughly equivalent to a geforce 7600, and rarely dips below 60fps with the proprietary drivers.
I applaud their efforts and overall my experience with ATI on linux has been great but there IS still a huge problem with them dropping support for some cards. For ones like mine there's only a few options.
1. Stop playing 3d games.
2. work on the radeonhd driver to help support my card. (a LOT is still not implemented, or incompatible with my specific card, I'd love to help but this would be very time consuming)
3. get a new video card. (I'm actually happy with my hardware though..just the drivers lately are the issue)
4. (what I actually do) Patch the proprietary driver for new kernel/xorg-server versions, the changes between a few versions are relatively minor, and easy to debug and track down. It only takes a few hours to get it working on an unsupported kernel version or xorg version, though tbh i haven't tried to get it working >=1.7 yet, I'm running the proprietary driver 9.3 currently on 2.6.31.6-rt19 with xorg-server-1.6.5-r1
I use ATI myself and won't bash them for doing a good thing, but he does have a point, ATI DOES still drop cards from driver support very quickly, and well before many of the cards are adequately supported by the OS driver (which means your system effectively can't update X, mesa, etc, and that latest ubuntu ISO has no option for 3d acceleration for his card without painful downgrades or modifying the driver himself).
Well, perhaps it’b BECAUSE THEY STILL ARE!
I have written many lengthy comments about it. When they did still use APIs that were so old, that after being deprecated for a long time, they were taken completely out of the kernel. Rendering the drivers useless.
The same thing now happened with Xorg 1.7.
And how long ago did neither compositing, nor xrandr work? One or two months?
Hell, video still does not work. (Oh, it renders it. But unless you want to see huge black and white blots of over and underexposure at the same time, while having huge blocking in that tiny color space in-between, you can not call it “working”.)
Also, acceleration is NIL.
And let’s not forget that I can reproducibly crash the driver, by compiling the kernel or a big program in a terminal. Or swich a monitor off when in console mode. Basically everything where that crutch called “atieventsd” does not receive an event.
And don’t even dare to ask about proper OpenGL 3.0 + GLSL support.
And for the Linux driver being a the piece of shit that the Windows driver is, with a emergency layer wrapped around by a one-man team (seriously: ATi Linux driver development is one poor guy), that’s still impressive!
I will never again buy an ATi card, unless they open-source EVERYTHING! No exceptions. And then I wait a year on top of that, for the Xorg team to catch up.
You can say what you want about nVidia’s binary blob. But when I could not use my brand-new HD 4850 at all, a year ago, I was very happy that the onboard nVidia chip “just worked”. No hassle. emerge nvidia-drivers, and DONE.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.