AMD Continues Updating Its R500 Documentation

It was over two years ago that AMD first released its R500 3D programming documentation to the general public without any NDAs, which was followed by the R600/700 3D documentation along with older R300-class documents as well. While we have yet to see proper 3D programming documentation for the ATI Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" GPUs that were released last year, the R500 3D documentation continues to be revised.

There's been a few revisions to the R500 3D documentation since the original February 2008 release and the most recent one has just come over the night.

Version 1.5 of the R500 3D programming documentation is this newest revision and it provides expanded coverage of AA resolve and fast clears. This newest document, which is titled R5xx_Acceleration_v1.5.pdf, now puts the page count up to 288 pages. Of course, there is already good OpenGL/3D acceleration support within the classic Mesa driver stack and what's becoming superb in terms of both features and performance within the Radeon Gallium3D driver up through the R500 series, but this expanded documentation may prove to still be of use in some areas or for those new graphics driver developers wishing to learn about the ATI R500 GPU acceleration architecture.

The newly-revised document can be found at X.Org.