AMD Releases R600/700 Programming Guide

[Pfanne]

BIG THANKS!
im really excited about all this and cant wait for the drivers to available!

[MaestroMaus]

+1 kuddo for the AMD guys.

[nanonyme]

Great work from the AMD guys. Wasn't this kinda the last doc even semi-required after which the ball completely moved to the opensource community? As in, if the drivers still will take a long time, we only have ourselves to blame.

[mirv]

Thankyou AMD!

[bugmenot]

Thank you Alex and John!

[Craig73]

And thank-you as well... exciting times.

[Duskao]

Ok, so then my question since I'm new to linux and all is... should I stick it out with Ati or should I jump boat to Nvidia? I'm trying to play a few games here in linux and one of my all time favorites is HL2 and varients, but none of these work very well. I have a Radeon 4850 and I'm lucky if I get 30 fps with the lowest settings possible (through wine of course) Not I'm totally confused...

[89c51]

@bridgman or anybody else that can answer


how many people, outside the ones that are getting paid by companies, have contributed code to the drivers since the specs released??


there is no need for specific numbers (few, alot, none is ok)

thanks

[bridgman]

Including radeon, radeonhd, drm and mesa, something like :

- 4 or 5 quite active
- another half dozen contributing a few changes each
- maybe another dozen contributing single fixes (guessing here)

Most of the sustained work has come from company-funded developers, but there have been some pretty significant contributions from independent developers as well.

[ssmaxss]

Are there positive economical effect from opensourcing drivers? Approximat cost of the work of non-amd-payed contributors overweight cost of opening specifications (IP cleaning, lawyers....)?