AMD Releases Register Specs For R5xx And R6xx

ianare writes "AMD has recently released register specifications for the ATI Radeon R5xx and R6xx graphic devices. This will (theoretically) allow the OSS community to develop drivers, given time. In fact, engineers from Novell have released a first alpha quality Open Source driver which currently supports initial mode settings. Although current work is focused on 2D, rather than 3D acceleration, this type of information sharing could conceivably lead to an OSS 3D driver."

glxGears needs to be updated!

[siDDis (961791)]

With shader 4.0 benchmarking!

Re:

[moosesocks (264553)]

He's exactly correct.

Isn't it written into the GL Spec that all OpenGL benchmarks must include some sort of tea kettle?

Re:glxGears needs to be updated!

[Ahruman (806510)]

I's not the OpenGL teapot, it's the Utah Teapot or teapotahedron [sjbaker.org].

Old files?

[caluml (551744)]

These files are 12 days old. Aren't these the same files that were released sometime last week?

Zonk doesn't post dupes!

[by Anonymous Coward]

He just doesn't want us to forget important news like this! You prick!

Novell's engineer started earlier

[renoX (11677)]

Note that the reason why Novell's engineer were able to deliver an alpha driver this week is because they had access to the ATI's specification under NDA since two month.

So the driver isn't the result of only one week of work, even if it's still in an alpha state.

About time!

[Opportunist (166417)]

Given the quality of their *nix drivers...

But I think ATI made a smart move. Outsourcing driver development to the OSS community certainly cuts costs.

These documents are not as exciting as you think

[Tom Womack (8005)]

That the words 'texture', 'instruction pointer' or 'blitter' appear nowhere in either PDF file is a bit of a giveaway.

Whilst the registers are essential for getting any kind of driver to work, the documents don't describe the exciting features of the graphics processor. They give you enough control over the memory-controller timings to convert any Radeon card into a smoking brick with a small kernel-mode driver, but they don't give instructions which actually make the graphics silicon do things. There's no indication of what the machine-code for the vector processors looks like.

If you compare this to the documentation that Intel has for its (obsolete) 845 graphics controller, you notice that the whole block of registers for controlling even something as basic as the blitter, let alone the 'set instruction pointer for processing unit N' registers which actually let you set the high-performance processing units in the card to work, are missing.

These documents let you use an R500 or R600 card as a frame buffer. Not worth making a song and dance about that one.

Myself, I'd be fascinated to see documentation for the Intel G965 like the documentation for the G845; it clearly exists, there's a paper in the most recent Intel Technical Journal about low-level programming on the 965, it's just not available to mortals unless by attempting to reverse-engineer the x.org 965 driver.

Re:These documents are not as exciting as you thin

[AntiDragon (930097)]

If I remember correctly, AMD have stated that there is more to come - the specs and documentation covering the 3D functions has been promised for the "near future". The reason for the delay is due to patents and third party code in those areas and have had to take greater care to make sure the specs and docs aren't encumbered. I hope they follow through on this.

Absolutley _Spot On_

[burnttoy (754394)]

I develop drivers for a living (actually for the last year I haven't). I went through the docs a few weeks ago - I spent about 2 hours having a "good" read.

These docs will let one do the following

1 - Setup you own video mode
2 - Setup up a video overlay (not video acceleration)
3 - Setup a full colour mouse cursor

That's all. These do not explain how to blit, alpha blend, scale, ROP2, ROP3 or ROP4 or perform any other transform.

This is useful, but not _that_ useful!

Hopefully there will be more to come specifically more on the memory/cache controller (essential to get performance up), more on the PCI/AGP bus control, more on the 2D source/dest blit registers, pitch, loop counters and I'd like to know how much of the 2D guts is programmable. TBH I thought we'd have moved on to the point of (somewhat) programmable shaders for 2D these days with loops etc built into the HW (0 clock loops and addressing etc).

Re:

[amigabill (146897)]

I'd also love to see some documentation for the terms and concepts you've mentioned. What are ROP2/3/4, why do we want them around, etc. Not just the registers for them, because not all of us know what those are for or why we care. How does one go from knowing little if anything about graphics to knowing what to do with registers defined in these and other Radeon documents?

Eating my words

[MrNemesis (587188)]

When ATI were making their first murmurings of releasing specs a few weeks ago, I have to say I wasn't convinced - I've been burned by ATI's shoddy Linux support in the past, and it was going to take alot of convincing that AMD (traditionally very friendly to FOSS) was trying to steer the ship in a different direction.

And now they've released scads of docs - kudos. This was probably the only way to make a FOSS driver a reality without violating reams of licensed IP. On top of that, I believe their latest set of Linux drivers fix a number of long standing issues, as well as vastly increasing 3D performance (although obviously there are still are QA problems).

Granted, it's almost all 2D stuff at the moment, but being able to ship a functional, fast and non-crash-prone driver for ATI cards with every modern distro will be another win for Linux in general.

I'm quite interested to hear about advanced features though - will implementing things like iDCT in XvMC for MPEG2, MPEG4 ASP and H.264 be a reality? Can these things be implemented with 2D registers or do these things need to be run through the 3D shaders nowadays? The low end ATI cards, including the IGP's, would be ideal for HTPC boxes, espcially with Intel dragging their feet on similar support/documentation for their (admittedly otherwise excellent) GMA X3xxx series.

Re:Hurrah

[whichpaul (733708)]

OSS 3D driver, great! Now we just need some games play.

Re:Hurrah

[TeknoHog (164938)]

Games, schmames. If we have complete specs of the hardware, there are plenty of things [gpgpu.org] besides graphics we can do with it.

Re:drivers

[ettlz (639203)]

No, let's hope not. Just release the specs for the benefit of the entire free software community, and let people who know what they're doing write the drivers.

Re:drivers

[ameoba (173803)]

It's entirely possible that they don't -have- specs written in a way that's suitable for public consumption.

Re:

[evanbd (210358)]

Very true. There are lots of projects out there where the best (or only) way to find out is to wander down the hall and ask someone.

Re:

[thegnu (557446)]

"Release the specs and we'll write the drivers" has been the mantra of the open source community for years, but I think we're all in for a disappointment if we're expecting feature-complete, high-performance open-source drivers for these cards any time soon.

I think that if you have a community making a decent driver, there will be enough 3D driver writers available who know the hardware well enough to delegate simple responsibilities, make good decisions, and code the hard stuff themselves. Probably. I ho

Re:Bad move?

[ettlz (639203)]

Doesn't this just encourgage the hardware developers to leave it to "the community"?

This is precisely what we want. Leave driver development to those who know best how the operating system works.

Re:

[cheater512 (783349)]

Which is why releasing the specs is a great thing.

Hardware makers do their thing and then they should pass the necessary info to the community so we can write the drivers.

Re:Bad move?

[Ihlosi (895663)]

Doesn't this just encourgage the hardware developers to leave it to "the community"?

Professional customers might still want a HW-developer-written driver.

Regardless of that, it's a better move than keeping the specs secret. Because in the latter case, you're totally at the mercy of the HW developer as far as driver availability and quality goes.

Re:

[644bd346996 (1012333)]

In the long run, I think you'll find that the kind of customer who won't trust a community-written open source driver to be very high quality won't be using Linux (or BSD or any other Unix) at all.

Re:Bad move?

[644bd346996 (1012333)]

So, you think the "give us the specs and we'll do the rest" bit is a fantasy? Has it occured to you that all those reverse-engineered drivers would have been done 100 times faster with specs, resulting in working drivers while the products were still fairly new?

Look at the resources the r300 and nouveau projects have. If the manufacturers simply dumped the specs on them, they would be able to produce high quality drivers quickly. Even without the specs, they've proven their abilities to make decent drivers the hard way. Or do you have some reason to believe that they wouldn't be significantly more productive with specs? Is there something magic about ATI's programmers that makes them vastly more productive with the same specs to work from?

What's wrong with that?

[babbling (952366)]

Cheaper for the companies. Better for the community.

The only losers are the companies (eg. nvidia) that compete with companies clever enough to do this, and companies (eg. microsoft) who have a vested interest in there not being any Free Software drivers.

R300 opensource drivers

[DrYak (748999)]

Note that the opensource drivers are only available in the recent releases on most distros. Some not so-recent releases did disable the R300 driver because it wasn't deemed stable enough (opensuse 10.0 come to mind).

So either the GP poster will have to update to a more recent release of his favorite distro (latest Ubuntu FF and openSUSE 10.2 have it enabled by default. I don't know about the others distro).

Or if he wants to keep his current installation for some reasons, he has to get the latest DRM (kernel [freedesktop.org]