NVIDIA Open-Source Christmas Present: Some Documentation

Written by Michael Larabel in NVIDIA on 22 December 2015 at 10:00 AM EST. 14 Comments
NVIDIA
It seems a few days ago NVIDIA quietly released some documentation to help open-source driver developers working on Nouveau.

Last week was this GitHub pull request from a NVIDIA developer for providing documentation on Maxwell's texture header format and additions to the existing Fermi/Kepler/older documentation.

The Maxwell "GM2" texture headers are now documented courtesy of NVIDIA and it's great they even went back to complete the information available for older generations of graphics hardware. The result can be seen here. The commit was against Envytools, which is the open-source project providing various tools and information to assist the Nouveau driver developers.

It looks like this documentation is already what led to the ETC2/ASTC texture compression support for Nouveau.

This isn't the biggest documentation drop nor does it compare to some of the huge documentation releases done by AMD and Intel in the past, but it's a step in the right direction and hopefully we'll see the green company be more open-source friendly in 2016.
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