AMD Releases The Radeon HD 5970 2GB

[rohcQaH]

2GB of VRAM sounds nice, GTA IV would be happy. $600 is awful lot of money .

it's still "only" 1 GB per GPU. As GPUs cannot access each other's memory, all textures etc. need to be kept twice. It'll still be a while until you can actually crank that slider in GTA IV.

Eyefinity is a pretty drastic change from previous display controllers, so there's a learning curve associated with the initial debug.

I imagine that's one of the more difficult things to debug. "Oh, it's a black screen.. again!"

[agd5f]

So it's not the ATOM functions that have changed but just the digital output table format! It's "just a matter" of writting a proper table parser, but in the end the same ATOM functions get called?

The atom table format is the same across all ATOM implementations. You use the same parser any ATOM table regardless of chip. The tables' content changes with new display hardware since the underlying hardware changes. Sometimes new tables get added, sometimes, the input parameters to the tables change. The tables are versioned, so you know what input parameters to use for each version. Evergreen added some new tables and updated the inputs on several other ones, so the driver code has to be updated to handle that. Even once the code is written there is still debugging involved to get everything set up right.
Here's the code for ATOM based modesetting in the radeon driver for r4xx-r7xx chips:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/dri...tombios_crtc.c
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/dri...mbios_output.c
As you can see, each generation has some similarities and differences.

BTW, is the eye infinity engine transparently managed througth the ATOM bios? Is it the eye infinity which pushed the new table format? That would explain much since configuring the transmitters/scalers-scanners to output one framebuffer on many displays implies a new logic.

Yes, ATOM handles eyefinity setup.

[MichaelPalin]

Thanks AMD again for giving Linux support for another dual core card and once again totally forget about the HD3870 X2 in the new Catalyst drivers,

[Kano]

They only sold THIS specific card as Win only, cool or Well i would just disable the logo with a hack you find here in the board too when you search a bit

[sylware]

Thanks AMD again for giving Linux support for another dual core card and once again totally forget about the HD3870 X2 in the new Catalyst drivers,

That will change with optimal open source drivers. We have to speed up the drivers dev in order to avoid that such things happen in the future.

[MichaelPalin]

They only sold THIS specific card as Win only, cool or Well i would just disable the logo with a hack you find here in the board too when you search a bit

Hmmm!, I'm intrigued, what do you mean by disabling the logo? I installed the Catalyst driver on various occasions to see if it worked and once (when it worked) I got the Watermark of "Incompatible Hardware", are you talking about that? I have also wondered if there is a way to treat the 3870 X2 as just one single 3870 in some way.

Any help will be very much appreciated, although I'm already waiting for Ubuntu 10.04,

[Kano]

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=19875

[MichaelPalin]

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=19875

Thank you very much!

[Kelledin]

(First off, hi guys! Long time reader, first time poster.)

I had to camp out on Newegg this evening to get it, but I just managed to order the Sapphire HD5970 card. With any luck, it will arrive by Friday, and I can upgrade my aging 9800GTX.

I'm not even 100% sure it will work in Linux, but I'll let everyone know if it works in Ubuntu 9.10. Assuming it works, I also plan to put it through its paces via Lenvik (of course!), and I'll let everyone know how it goes. I'm also open for requests if ppl want to know how well certain things work.

Some caveats, of course:

1) My system is not overclocked, and I don't plan to overclock it. I'm not even sure I can with my board. I'll just say right now that I don't expect the CPUs or motherboard to be a bottleneck, even at stock clock. Once I have the Lenvik reports, I'll dump the exact specs.

2) This card comes with a slight overclock (735MHz core clock vs the standard 725MHz). Normally I don't get factory OC'd cards, because if I want OC'd parts, I'd rather do it myself. This was hard enough to get that I decided to roll with it this once.

3) I only have one monitor. Anyone who wants me to test Eyefinity would have to lend me at least two more monitors for a while.

4) I won't be able to test Crossfire. Sorry, but Newegg put a 1-per-customer limit on this thing (quite understandably).

[sylware]

(First off, hi guys! Long time reader, first time poster.)

I had to camp out on Newegg this evening to get it, but I just managed to order the Sapphire HD5970 card. With any luck, it will arrive by Friday, and I can upgrade my aging 9800GTX.

I'm not even 100% sure it will work in Linux, but I'll let everyone know if it works in Ubuntu 9.10. Assuming it works, I also plan to put it through its paces via Lenvik (of course!), and I'll let everyone know how it goes. I'm also open for requests if ppl want to know how well certain things work.

Some caveats, of course:

1) My system is not overclocked, and I don't plan to overclock it. I'm not even sure I can with my board. I'll just say right now that I don't expect the CPUs or motherboard to be a bottleneck, even at stock clock. Once I have the Lenvik reports, I'll dump the exact specs.

2) This card comes with a slight overclock (735MHz core clock vs the standard 725MHz). Normally I don't get factory OC'd cards, because if I want OC'd parts, I'd rather do it myself. This was hard enough to get that I decided to roll with it this once.

3) I only have one monitor. Anyone who wants me to test Eyefinity would have to lend me at least two more monitors for a while.

4) I won't be able to test Crossfire. Sorry, but Newegg put a 1-per-customer limit on this thing (quite understandably).

My last info is that the radeon driver misses the eye infinity ATOM bios table entries. Was told they are ready for publication, just waiting the go from AMD.
I do believe that r8xx is almost a r7xx regarding its pipeline programming. Should not be that much programming from the r7xx code.