Intel Publishes Ivy Bridge Programming Documentation

[jockinator]

my old PC had a nvidia 8800 GTS, and that was working nicely with Linux for years.
Now I have an Ivy bridge i7-3370 with a wonderful open source driver.
the truth is I can't play anymore very simple games like the one in the humble indie bundle (Trine 2 and Shank for example).
and due to the S3TC issue, I find it easier to install & configure nividia binary blob than intel driver.

So nvidia has closed source driver which is bad, but at least you can play 3D games with it.

[Gusar]

and due to the S3TC issue, I find it easier to install & configure nividia binary blob than intel driver.

Oh come on, libtxc_dxtn is a simple library, compilable with the usual

./configure --prefix=/usr; make; sudo make install

There may even be some pre-compiled packages for your distro available in a third-party repo.

[Kayden]

Anyways back to the article, IMO, documentation that in-depth isn't helpful at all. What good is a reference when you've got that many pages to go through? Its a GPU reference, how much info could they possibly supply that'd be relevant to anybody, including intel's own developers?

It is rather daunting at first :) I remember when I first started looking into GPU programming, and figured I'd read through the G965 documentation. Then I discovered it was nearly 2000 pages (small by today's standards!), a lot of which doesn't make much sense without the right background, and quickly got lost.

I pretty much live and breathe these documents now, referring to them almost every day; the trick is to ask someone for pointers on where to find what you need, and after a while, you begin to see how they're organized and where to find stuff. We definitely could use some more overviews and introductory level documentation though. I've meant to try and put together a Gen assembly tutorial at some point, as it's considerably more complicated than your usual x86 stuff.

[eugeni_dodonov]

It was announced at the intel-gfx mailing list and on Eugeni's blog, which is aggregated at planet.freedesktop.org. You have an interesting definition of "quietly", I must say

I also posted this to google+, facebook, twitter and irc. I don't know how much more louder should we announce a new set of documentation releases .

[eugeni_dodonov]

It is rather daunting at first I remember when I first started looking into GPU programming, and figured I'd read through the G965 documentation. Then I discovered it was nearly 2000 pages (small by today's standards!), a lot of which doesn't make much sense without the right background, and quickly got lost.

Yeah, I had the same experience. It looked like all that odd symbols from matrix to me in the beginning, and after looking and looking at all those registers and their content it suddenly transformed itself into something meaningful. Like in Matrix movie, when you look at some strange symbols and discover that it is a kernel panic^W^W Neo running away from the GPU hangs .

But speaking seriously, it is a very interested read, as those documents explain lots of background behind the programming of different stages of GPU. At least for execution units programming, 3d engine programming and core stuff it is a very interesting read to understand how things work under the hood. Display part is very interesting as well, but it requires much more background to make sense though..

[dashford]

eugeni_dodonov & Kayden,

How much involvement from the Open Source community do you see after these documentation drops are made?

[asdx]

Well, even on Window$, the HD4000 video display engine and its encoder/decoder is lightyears ahead of Intel's competition. There's a smoothness and clarity to it in Blu-ray (1080p) films I just can't describe. I'd love to see developers tweak Intel's newest GPU and see just how awesome it can perform in Linux. Intel should be applauded for their noble efforts to help drive open documentation on open source platforms. These are exciting times!

How do you explain this?

http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/commen...ntel_atom_gpu/

[Gusar]

How do you explain this?

http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/commen...ntel_atom_gpu/

That's not about Intel's graphics. So it's not Intel's call whether docs will be released or not.

[pakolo]

Hello to everybody, first I apologize for my poor english. As far as I know there is no support in Linux for Intel Quick Sync. This release would help in the future for having that technology available? It would be great to have such thing for ffmpeg, for example.

[Kano]

$ vainfo
libva: VA-API version 0.32.0
libva: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva: Trying to open /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/i965_drv_video.so
libva: va_openDriver() returns 0
vainfo: VA-API version: 0.32 (libva 1.0.15)
vainfo: Driver version: Intel i965 driver - 1.0.17
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
      VAProfileMPEG2Simple            : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileMPEG2Main              : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264Baseline           : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264Baseline           : VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileH264Main               : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264Main               : VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileH264High               : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264High               : VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileVC1Simple              : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Main                : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Advanced            : VAEntrypointVLD

basically you have got the encoder available, but if there is an app to make real use of it i don't know...