AMD Releases Open-Source R600/700 3D Code

[hobbes]

Congratulations to everyone involved.

For awhile I'll still own a R500 VPU, please don't forget about us?

[chrisr]

Don't do it man... get a PCIE motherboard. Seriously.

Dual P4 2.66 GHz Xeon, 2 GB RAM, non-standard ATX power supply...

I hate throwing away perfectly useful and fully working hardware. And besides, the 4670's reduced power consumption makes it an ideal "final" upgrade for this machine.

Please don't make us support AGP again.

That's surely up to your hardware partners! I'm hardly likely to magic an AGP version of anything out of my (err)"boat". (Or similar... ;-).)

[[Knuckles]]

Yes! I can feel kernel mode setting coming to my X1300 soon

[oibaf]

Very nice news!

I have a question, however. What about the source of the DRM microcode? Without that the driver can't be considered fully open source.

Note that Intel is shipping full source for their assembler code (source in .g4a files, compiled microcode in .g4b files), making it a fully open source driver:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/dri...intel/tree/src

[StefanHamminga]

Congratulations to everyone involved.

For awhile I'll still own a R500 VPU, please don't forget about us?

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

[chrisr]

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

I have a laptop with a FireGL 5250 chip (R535, or thereabouts) and Wine, and its rendition of World of Warcraft with Mesa leaves a lot to be desired.

Mind you, WoW with fglrx is hardly flawless either. 8-12 was the first fglrx driver in months that I didn't swear at - once I'd managed to mend the Fedora packaging scripts again.

[hobbes]

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

Yes, it is for sure, and I'm using it now.

But, I believe there are still some room to optimization.

real 720p HD video playback, for one.

So, just what I'm saying is.

Keep showing us some love in the future.

[bridgman]

I have a question, however. What about the source of the DRM microcode? Without that the driver can't be considered fully open source.

I didn't think the Intel GPUs used loadable microcode, but I could be wrong. All of the .g4a and .g4b files I saw looked like driver code (shader code called by the driver, to be precise). Anyways, the use of microcode blobs seems to be generally accepted, although there are occasional pushes to have them loaded from user space so the kernel guys don't have to feel dirty.

EDIT - geez, Intel shader code is nearly as hard to read as ours

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.

[gururise]

Finally! Thanks AMD! I look forward to being able to use my new 4670 card that has been putting along with only 2d graphics up till now!

[StefanHamminga]

I have a laptop with a FireGL 5250 chip (R535, or thereabouts) and Wine, and its rendition of World of Warcraft with Mesa leaves a lot to be desired.

Mind you, WoW with fglrx is hardly flawless either. 8-12 was the first fglrx driver in months that I didn't swear at - once I'd managed to mend the Fedora packaging scripts again.

On the bright side, my FireGL V5200 can play 'bluray bitrate' 1080p smoothly on a aging 2GHz C2D T7200, something I couldn't do in either XP32, XP64, V32 or V64, so they are doing something right...