AMD to open up it's 3D hardware for R500 and above

[drag]

They are not going to open up their existing drivers, this is a commitment from AMD to work towards _new_ open source drivers.

They claim they will release basic 'skeleton' drivers, 2D drivers, and specifications for their newer hardware.

AMD announced this at the recent kernel summit.

some details:
http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=302

Everything is a bit vague right now, but we'll know more about it shortly.

 

[SleepWalkerX]

Wow great news. News like this will make me switch from buying nvidia hardware to ati hardware instantly. Assuming the drivers they release will be stable as well.

 

[drag]

The reverse engineered, open source dri, drivers for the r300/r400 era hardware (about 9600 through x800 cards) are pretty stable. They can do AIGLX and handle fusion and such things no sweat.

This makes them good for people who want 3D desktops as the proprietary drivers won't work well with that sort of stuff.

The big problem they have with most people is that their performance is very pokey. Nvidia's proprietary drivers are as fast in Linux as they are in Windows... while ATI's proprietary drivers are about 1/2 as fast in Linux as they are in Windows. The open source DRI stuff is much slower yet.

There are a couple reasons why open source drivers are slow..

The most serious is that they all had to be reverse engineered. That sort of thing is very difficult for a lot of hardware. There are only a handfull of developers that have the ability and the skills to do that and they can't afford to go out and buy every single ATI card type in existance. So what they do is have a few cards and get the drivers to work and then they depend on other people to try them out.

However modern hardware for 3D stuff is notoriously buggy. That stuff is rushed to market and Nvidia/ATI depend on driver work-arounds for fixing their video cards. With reverse engineering drivers they often run into problems were the drivers work work with certain hardware and be buggy on others... They don't know if they are doing it right and running into hardware issues, or if they are doing it wrong, or both.


With help from AMD engineers and documentation then the buggy hardware shouldn't be a big deal. They can go to AMD and find out from the engineers themselves on what sort of issues and work arounds they are going to need for a paticular card.


The second part is that all open source 3D drivers (except very old ones) are based on the Mesa software OpenGL stack. Keep in mind OpenGL is a big big thing, as in very large in size. It's a general programming API for developing 3D applications. Most of it doesn't need any hardware acceleration and no video card will ever come close to accelerating all of it.

So what developers do is they start off with pure software rendering then start rewriting it to accelerate what they can. This has a lot of advantages, such as if you need to have a OpenGL 1.5 card support OpenGL 2.0 (or something like that) all you have to do is update the drivers. It'll still be fairly fast and it will be compatable with latest applications. This is unlike DirectX were you need the newest hardware to support the newest APIs.

Well since DRI is based on Mesa the open source drivers can't do anything that Mesa can't do. It's only relatively recently that Mesa started supporting lots of advanced features like texture memory support, shader languages, glsl compilers, and the like.

 

[imported_LoKe]

Just in time to save their asses. They waited until the last second before linux users completely stopped buying their products, in order for them to capitalize on their new cards.

Can't say I blame them. Plus, I'm an nVidia fanboy (not sure if it's considered fanboyism if there's a good reason for it), so ATi news doesn't mean much to me personally, but I'm glad they're finally shaping up.

 

[drag]

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...article&item=826&num=1

Some more information.
Basic open source drivers and a open source programming library.
documenttion provided under nda


The new driver is going to be written from scratch and not be based off of current reverse engineered drivers.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: LoKe
Just in time to save their asses. They waited until the last second before linux users completely stopped buying their products, in order for them to capitalize on their new cards.

Can't say I blame them. Plus, I'm an nVidia fanboy (not sure if it's considered fanboyism if there's a good reason for it), so ATi news doesn't mean much to me personally, but I'm glad they're finally shaping up.

It'll just be good to have some competition in this area. From what I hear, nVidia's linux drivers aren't all hunky-dory either (maybe this is just with the latest cards, I don't remember now). If ATI improves there drivers, it will put pressure on nVidia to do the same. Plus, it's just good for another big hardware manufacturer to realize that it IS important to support your hardware for linux users.

 

[Robor]

Originally posted by: Brazen

Originally posted by: LoKe
Just in time to save their asses. They waited until the last second before linux users completely stopped buying their products, in order for them to capitalize on their new cards.

Can't say I blame them. Plus, I'm an nVidia fanboy (not sure if it's considered fanboyism if there's a good reason for it), so ATi news doesn't mean much to me personally, but I'm glad they're finally shaping up.

It'll just be good to have some competition in this area. From what I hear, nVidia's linux drivers aren't all hunky-dory either (maybe this is just with the latest cards, I don't remember now). If ATI improves there drivers, it will put pressure on nVidia to do the same. Plus, it's just good for another big hardware manufacturer to realize that it IS important to support your hardware for linux users.

:thumbsup:

 

[JohnOfSheffield]

Originally posted by: Brazen

Originally posted by: LoKe
Just in time to save their asses. They waited until the last second before linux users completely stopped buying their products, in order for them to capitalize on their new cards.

Can't say I blame them. Plus, I'm an nVidia fanboy (not sure if it's considered fanboyism if there's a good reason for it), so ATi news doesn't mean much to me personally, but I'm glad they're finally shaping up.

It'll just be good to have some competition in this area. From what I hear, nVidia's linux drivers aren't all hunky-dory either (maybe this is just with the latest cards, I don't remember now). If ATI improves there drivers, it will put pressure on nVidia to do the same. Plus, it's just good for another big hardware manufacturer to realize that it IS important to support your hardware for linux users.

TBH, from what we know now there has been an open exploit in the drivers for a long time that recently was fixed, other than that they have worked pretty well, but other than that doesn't really work, does it?

That they are releasing specs and information about everthing about their cards is extremely welcome IMO, that means that we will have built in stable drivers fully compatible with AIGLX which is to be released next month.

This is great news, especially since they are not just releasing stupid code that no one can read but actual specs. I bet Theo is jumping up and down right about now.

 

[drag]

I bet Theo is jumping up and down right about now.

Doubt it. The specs are still under NDA.

Plus OpenBSD doesn't 'do' 3D.

That they are releasing specs and information about everthing about their cards is extremely welcome IMO, that means that we will have built in stable drivers fully compatible with AIGLX which is to be released next month.

Not quite. The drivers are going to be very basic. It's up to the X.org/DRI folks to sit down with AMD at that point and then write the new open drivers. So it would probably be a few months after the code release before you start seeing usable drivers, and even then performance is going to be pretty bad until they start implimenting OpenGL extensions and other special features that go beyond 'simple' (relatively) 3D support.

It all depends on how much time and effort people are willing to give AMD/ATI at this point. Hopefully the idea of open 3D drivers for higher end consumer video cards is exicting enough to get lots of people involved.

Once the basic drivers get written then it shouldn't be to hard to for programmers to start messing around with the hardware, even if they don't have access to the NDA'd documentation.

Meanwhile AMD has released updated proprietary drivers. I beleive they completely revamped them with a new OpenGL stack and the R500-era video cards have gotten a 50-90% performance boost over the old drivers. This is getting close to Nvidia or ATI on Windows performance levels. Phoronix (the ATI fanboys that they are. ) have all the details.

I am hoping that the idea of using the ATI hardware for much more then 3D graphics would help propel the Open Source driver development. GPU is a pretty powerfull thing and it would be nice to make that power aviable to other types of computing that can benifit from it (such as media encoding).

Nowadays '3D acceleration' realy means '3D software libraries that run on both GPU and CPU'. Maybe stuff like OpenRT would be possible for realtime raytracing on a massive scale, I don't know.

 

[Cogman]

I really hope this takes off. For quite a while I have been buying nothing but Nvidia Video cards for the sheer fact that ATI linux drivers SUCK! With the specs available to a few developers, it will only be a matter of time before some code monkeys figure out what the specs are from the basic drivers and both release and tweak to the extreme.

Heres to hoping that a linux display driver finally offers BETTER performance to its corporate sponsored and developed windows alternative.

 

[drag]

Ever want to see what hardware documentation looks like?

http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/

There are the documentation for the 2D interfaces for ATI M56 and rv630 chipsets.

Both were handed out on cdroms to X and kernel developers without any NDA. Novell is currently working on new drivers that should be out in a week or so.

http://airlied.livejournal.com/50613.html

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: drag
Ever want to see what hardware documentation looks like?

http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/

There are the documentation for the 2D interfaces for ATI M56 and rv630 chipsets.

Both were handed out on cdroms to X and kernel developers without any NDA. Novell is currently working on new drivers that should be out in a week or so.

http://airlied.livejournal.com/50613.html

So what does that mean for 3D? These specs are for the 2D interfaces, but are they going to help out with the 3D acceleration part of opensource ATI drivers?

edit: I just saw the Slashdot article on this and it says "Expect more documentation (and 3D specifications) to arrive shortly." so I guess the 3D part is still on it's way!

 

[drag]

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...article&item=838&num=1


That contains various important hacker's views on whether or not AMD is being genuine or not with the release of specifications.

All in all it's good news according to them.

 

[cmv]

Originally posted by: SleepWalkerX
Wow great news. News like this will make me switch from buying nvidia hardware to ati hardware instantly. Assuming the drivers they release will be stable as well.

I'll wait until it becomes reality! This is indeed good news for everyone. Those who use MythTV and other applications that can play HDTV streams have had to deal with various issues interlacing/deinterlacing issues with the Nvidia driver for some time. Not show stoppers but annoying. If fully open drivers emerge for ATI's products...

 

[smack Down]

I would be more impressed if they released the specs on their catalog of older GPUs. Realease it only for a new chip just looks like marketing BS.

 

[drag]

It's still quite substantial, IMO. Older cards already have open source drivers for them that work fairly well and this sort of thing is very expensive and difficult to do, I beleive. In 3D software-land it's a patent and legal nightmare for these companies to do anything open source.

Anyways. It took them less then a week to make very basic drivers for ATI/AMD's hardware, but it's going to take a lot longer for full featured 2D and 3D acceleration to come out. Your looking at a timeline were the previous generation (R400) video cards are going to be all but completely obsolete by the time good open source OpenGL drivers are aviable for most people on current generation hardware. The pool of people that are experianced enough to realy hack on open source 3D drivers are still pretty small so it's best to just concentrate on current and next-gen stuff.

I am looking forward to the release of documentation for 3D hardware...

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: drag
It's still quite substantial, IMO. Older cards already have open source drivers for them that work fairly well and this sort of thing is very expensive and difficult to do, I beleive. In 3D software-land it's a patent and legal nightmare for these companies to do anything open source.

Plus you know they want to check and double-check and double-double-check their documents to make sure they didn't accidentally sneak a trade secret in there but still have all the necessary information. And for something of this magnituge, that's a lot of checking and very tedious checking.

 

[SleepWalkerX]

Originally posted by: cmv

Originally posted by: SleepWalkerX
Wow great news. News like this will make me switch from buying nvidia hardware to ati hardware instantly. Assuming the drivers they release will be stable as well.

I'll wait until it becomes reality! This is indeed good news for everyone. Those who use MythTV and other applications that can play HDTV streams have had to deal with various issues interlacing/deinterlacing issues with the Nvidia driver for some time. Not show stoppers but annoying. If fully open drivers emerge for ATI's products...

Oh and I just realized! If they make a completely open-source AMD/ATi driver for linux then it'll include support for h264 acceleration! YES! Right now my computer struggles when playing 1080p video so I could either just upgrade my processor to a dual-core (which I'd rather not do since I could start saving up for a lga775 system) or just upgrade the video card which would be a better decision in the scheme of things.