AMD Releases Cayman Documentation, Open Driver Is Close

[Qaridarium]

Nope. The architecture behind is kinda different. Shader processors are 4-way (cayman) instead of 5-way (barts), and they are also organized differently.

5D way means 1big+4smal shaders is better

cayman is 4 big and no smal shaders and the big one are the same as the big one in r800green

the cayman is much easyer to programm with because they don't need to handle with the smal shaders all shaders have the same feature set in the group.

[Qaridarium]

Why is it that using ATI/AMD cards and Linux I have to use Nvidia's texture tools to compress S3TC textures? Because these texture tools are MIT-licensed open source, while ATI/AMD's ATI_Compress library and Compressonator are closed source, and worse, they're Windows only.

this s3tc patented stuff hurt opensource much more they ever can to for OS with this tool and the MIT license-

[Adarion]

Hehe. I know why I stick with AMD-ATI.

I know it is not perfect and there are some open building sites, and yes, a few features are missing still but these are often the patent/DMCA issues.
And with AMD & intel (minus ImgTec) we have a situation in the GPU area that has never been so good before on the Linux/BSD side.

[Adarion]

edit took longer than 1 minute to write, goddamn, Michael fix it plz
And yes, 8 years ago I would have used nvidia. But things change, and sometimes they change for the better. My old nvidia cards are loooooong "legacy" not supported by anyting corretly and nouveau just starts to get into the shoes. (Kotau to the nouveau devs but I have these old geforces for so many years now and they still would not really work. So I am glad to have ATI GPUs to my AMD CPUs (that I nearly always had).)

Still I would welcome any other GPU vendors (nv, via/s3, ImgTec,...) if they would open up.

[leeyee]

I'm glad to see ATI's open-source support is getting stronger. However, on my Intel+ATI thinkpad, I still prefer to disable ATI HD3400, as its power management still cannot silent my fan even I didn't do nothing. Anyway, I like gallium3d. After r600g is enabled by default in mesa 7.xx, I will definitely switch back to ATI.

[PsynoKhi0]

Thanks for delivering, AMD

[mirv]

this s3tc patented stuff hurt opensource much more they ever can to for OS with this tool and the MIT license-

Agreed. I wrote my own program to use a driver's stack for compressing a texture to s3tc (the theory being there was no sense in using other tools if the driver itself couldn't support it).
I really hope that when the open source drivers are far enough along to use full OpenGL 3.x/4x, that there'll be additional pressure from AMD to get some of the problems such as s3tc sorted.

[GDJacobs]

Agreed. I wrote my own program to use a driver's stack for compressing a texture to s3tc (the theory being there was no sense in using other tools if the driver itself couldn't support it).
I really hope that when the open source drivers are far enough along to use full OpenGL 3.x/4x, that there'll be additional pressure from AMD to get some of the problems such as s3tc sorted.

S3TC is a requirement for higher OpenGL versions, no?

[marek]

S3TC is a requirement for higher OpenGL versions, no?

No, it's not, but floating-point render targets are.

[Qaridarium]

Agreed. I wrote my own program to use a driver's stack for compressing a texture to s3tc (the theory being there was no sense in using other tools if the driver itself couldn't support it).
I really hope that when the open source drivers are far enough along to use full OpenGL 3.x/4x, that there'll be additional pressure from AMD to get some of the problems such as s3tc sorted.

openGL3 do have many more problems not only s3tc the sgi floading point HDR patent for example.

OpenGL3/4 is an absolute no go for opensource drivers...