AMD Releases Open-Source R600/700 3D Code

Congrats to all of us AMD/ATI users and developers! Let the gates to the bazaar open!

Now we just need to see a timely release of some new supported, powerful, green and affordable cards available around summer or so to go with this.

Great job!

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Originally Posted by Extreme Coder

As far as I understand, there should be no differences in playback performance between fglrx and radeon/radeonhd driver, since both just use Xv for playback. and the CPU has to do the decoding in both cases.
Maybe this will change after AMD's XvBA for fglrx is released. Hopefully something for the OSS driver is implemented too.

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OSS driver. That's my only hope. It doesn't appear that will be XvBA or something in fglrx that I actually can use it to smooth Full 720p / 1080p playback on my hardware (AGP x1600pro)

Let's hope for the best.

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Originally Posted by bridgman

re: ongoing 5xx love, I think the plan is to implement KMS/MM all the way back to R100 and Gallium3D/GL2 as far back as R300, so no worries.

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Unfortunately, R500 support is not complete in all aspects. While I can run compiz and watch movies at the same time on radeon, I still have googleearth tearing with compiz, and tv and vga out support are lacking (see bug http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16781 ). Even arlied's latest tv out patch does not work here (M54, aka X1400 Mobility). So, I still have to keep a dumb M$ partition for when I want to use the S-video out. While fglrx supports tv and vga out, it does not allow compiz while watching videos. So, switching to it does not provide a full featured driver either. It would be nice if you could take fglrx's support for tv / vga and slap it in the radeon or radeonhd.

So, as requested, please don't forget about r500.

regards,
paul

This is awesome! I'm considering getting a 4670 and this certainly makes my decision much easier :)

Keep up the good work, AMD :)

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Originally Posted by StefanHamminga

The R500 is perfectly supported, full 3D and all!

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Sorry but for "perfectly" we miss some Features http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature

Yes, we know. That doesn't mean there should be no support for R600/700 because of that.

thats some pretty nice news! lets see what next year brings...

Look at

http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature

XvMC is listed as TODO across the board. When can we expect to
see FLOSS AMD/ATI drivers supporting XvMC?

There hasn't been much interest in XvMC so far -- general feeling seems to be that even a laptop CPU can handle MPEG2 decoding well enough. There seem to be an increasing number of HD MPEG2 use cases, and we have already released enough information to implement MC on 5xx (and, as of today, 6xx/7xx I guess) but nobody has even asked how to implement it, which surprises me. We have IDCT on the list of hardware to try and open up, but given the lack of interest in MC it doesn't seem like a real priority (MC eats more CPU time than IDCT and is probably easier to implement).

If the issue is simply that not enough developers know how to implement XvMC then we could probably put together a sample implementation to get things started, but nobody seems to even ask about XvMC let alone show any interest in implementing it. I guess the issue is that the only place XvMC really buys you much these days is playing HD resolution MPEG2 streams, typically from off-the-air HDTV (ATSC, DVB), and not many people seem to do that.

EDIT -- I might have found the answer. The "classic use case" for XvMC was European digital TV, which was heavily standardized on MPEG2 at HD resolutions. Looks like many countries have already jumped ship to MPEG4 for most of their HD broadcasts, so the demand for HD MPEG2 acceleration seems to have evaporated. Given that, I think interest in XvMC is going to continue to be lukewarm until there is some agreement on an API which cleanly handles H.264 and VC-1 as well, whether it be an XvMC extension or something new like VAAPI, XVBA or VDPAU.

from the article,

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Today's Drop

What's encompassed by today's drop is a working DRM (for the newbie, Direct Rendering Manager, not to be confused with Digital Rights Management), working EXA acceleration, an initial X-Video implementation and the working r600_demo program. There was about 180 pages of 3D register specifications set to be released, but all of the AMD officials didn't come to a consensus before leaving for the holidays. This documentation should be publicly released within approximately one month.

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You'll likely never see those registers. The powers that control AMD have already decided to stonewall the opensource movement.. probably led by a dominant faction controlling microsoft.

linux will never see 3d opensourced.. just ain't gonna happen.