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AMD Brings 3D GPU Documentation Up To Date
jones_supa writes "Things are starting to look even better for the status of open specifications for AMD Radeon HD hardware. AMD's Alex Deucher announced via his personal blog that programming guides and register specifications on the 3D engines for the Evergreen, Northern Islands, Southern Islands, and Sea Islands GPUs are now in the NDA-free public domain. These parts represent the 3D engines on the Radeon HD 5000 through Radeon HD 8000 series graphics processors."
Valve seems to have stirred things up a bit. I know some of this was in the works before, but the timing is nice.
Better late than never, eh. This really needs to be standard practice across the industry.
Sure, it will take time to sort out the legal issues.
But if AMD can do it, so can nVidia.
They aren't releasing their driver code. It's just documentation. nVidia can do that just as easily.
Then you haven't been paying attention. There are three majors players: Intel, NVidia, and AMD.
NVidia has great proprietary Linux drivers but their documentation has been lacking. Open source developers do what they can with nouveau but without the full documentation, they are guessing in places. NVidia is working to make more documentation available.
AMD has better documentation but their Linux drivers have not been as good as NVidia.
Then there is Intel who has good documentation and drivers. The problem is their video cards are not as good as NVidia or AMD. If you need a basic video card with average multimedia capabilities like h264 support, Intel is good. If you want to play games with Steam, the experience might be lacking.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Irrelevant. We're not asking for their driver code, we're asking for documentation on the hardware that we buy from them, so that we can write our own driver code.
The main reason Open Source video drivers for newer nVidia and AMD GPUs have had such a checkered history is precisely the lack of public hardware specs. The driver teams have been forced to reverse-engineer some of the hardware features to develop the drivers, which is far from ideal.
Open Source drivers for Intel GPUs have historically been pretty good (well, at least until they started using the PowerVR-based junk...); the issue there has been slow hardware, not buggy drivers.