ATI R300g / R600g Unify Their Vertex Buffer Manager

[Chad Page]

In this case, a rising tide lifts both boats... and things like this will make it easier to get new hardware working quickly.

Release day drivers depend on vendors really - intel completely blew Sandy Bridge (although the platform has even worse problems!) and the 6900 series has a new VLIW design that will take a while to adapt to - i.e. a new/changed shader compiler.

Looking forward Linux in mobile devices (Android kinda counts) is going to become more important and getting PowerVR specs (reverse engineered or vendor) is the next big hurdle.

[Qaridarium]

he 6900 series has a new VLIW design that will take a while to adapt to - i.e. a new/changed shader compiler.

6900 series are more easy to program with thats because an 5870 shader do have 2 kind of programm units internaly 1 big and 4 smal means 5D-VLIW the 6900 do have 4 of the same big VLIW units per shader groub unit. and the 4 big ones are the same like the big one of the 5 in the 5850 means they just need to drop the smal SIMD-VLIW shader code and only use the big one 4 times per groub.
the 6900 is not really a new architecture its a dropdown of the more hard to program with smal SIMD units and the big SIMD-VLIW units are much more easy to use because an dev do not need to handle with the limitations of the smal ones.

[LiquidAcid]

I'm very pleased with the current speed of develoment. Maybe half a year ago r600g on my Radeon HD4770 was just not usuable for anything except gears. r600c was also terribly slow and had a lot of issues. I remember playing ut2004 with a friend at a insanely low resolution with most detail options reduced to the lowest.

Today r600g has not trouble running the game with all options cranked up. If multisample AA support is going to land in r600g maybe I can see performance differences again.

Currently the biggest issues for me are missing texture compression support and the aforementioned multisample support.

[another_sam]

I love the smell of DRY in the code.

Smells like... Victory.

[monraaf]

Currently the biggest issues for me are missing texture compression support and the aforementioned multisample support.

Yeah I think there are a lot of people who would like to see r600g support s3tc.

[NomadDemon]

performance.. speed... thats my problem.. my 4850 isnt working even in 5%

[TechMage89]

The Xonotic prerelease has (at least for me) exposed a bunch of driver bugs that cause lockups. I hope the devs are looking at plugging these holes, maybe once r600g supersedes r600c.

I am generally encouraged, though, especially by Fusion, which IMHO is now *by far* the best low-power platform because of the availability of drivers and specs for the GPU.