AMD Releases R600/700 Programming Guide

[Kjella]

The hard part is that you still end up comparing apples and oranges when trying to determine the overall cost/benefit.

Not to mention, do you have the benefits yet? I'm currently running nVidia with the proprietary drivers, and I see absolutely no reason to buy an AMD card in order to run Catalyst. Not unless you're really trashing nVidia in Windows game performance, but there you're usually competitively priced anyway (margins are another matter). I want to choose open source, but I'm fairly pragmatist.

That means, what can I get out of the box on mainstream distros using open source? I don't expect them to be default but compiling git trees is pretty much out. I don't expect it to win FPS shootouts but I want a 50% unoptimized acceleration not a 1% software rendering solution. You're not at the point where I want to buy it yet, but you're getting closer.

I'll probably be ready for another purchase once the Radeon R800 generation arrives. The question is if your open source drivers will be ready to reap the benefits, or at least give me credible faith they will soon. Yes, I know you can't talk about unreleased products and certainly not product lines but as a general advice, try to be on top of new releases. They're often the ones that cause purchase decisions, which is when you have to be there.

[nanonyme]

Oh my gosh so I could finally get my 4870X2 working 3d in Fedora 11???

I doubt it. I'd already consider it lucky if 3D got from experimental to basic (as in, could maybe even handle *gasp* glxgears or Compiz) by Fedora 12. Chill out, you'll likely have upgraded your distro version at least once or even more times if you expect to get it without installing it yourself from git. (just to clarify: I did not just say that current git would be usable for any real use case, still locks up on eg glxgears)

[ap90033]

Oh my gosh so I could finally get my 4870X2 working 3d in Fedora 11???

[Louise]

So far only AMD CPU's have nested page tables, which improves the speed of para-virtualization a lot.

So I am thinking, which these specs, would it be possible to implement virtual page tables for AMD GPU's, so you can swap out an entire page table?

[bridgman]

It's probably about break-even in terms of direct costs; there are some extremely capable developers working on the open source drivers who are not on AMD's payroll, but the planning and execution of the IP review process eats up time from our most senior technical people, the ones who would otherwise be working on the GPUs and drivers we'll be selling 2-4 years from now.

The same goes for intangibles (risk, market benefits, "halo" effect, indirect benefit for other markets like embedded etc..) only the numbers are even harder to quantify.

What I think it boils down to is that if we were still a pure GPU company it would be hard to justify doing this, but as a GPU/CPU/platform company it does make sense. The hard part is that you still end up comparing apples and oranges when trying to determine the overall cost/benefit.

[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....)?

[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.

[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

[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...

[Craig73]

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