AMD Documentation Drop Next Week

[Mithrandir]

Out of interest what is involved in pushing out these docs? Are you reworking existing internal docs? or making up new documentation from a wide variety of internal sources?

As I've understood fglrx developers use the same specs, but they need to be sanitized.

[Ze..]

There was a question on IRC about whether "we would wait until 2d docs were out for all chips before releasing 3d info". Quick answer is no -- a better way to describe it would be that our top priority now is enabling 3d development but we are continuing to push 2d docs out while we are working on 3d.

Out of interest what is involved in pushing out these docs? Are you reworking existing internal docs? or making up new documentation from a wide variety of internal sources?

[korpenkraxar]

Gr8

Fantastic to get so much details directly from the AMD/ATi team! Thanx!

I've been fairly grumpy on this forum myself, but fglrx on the Mobile X1400 has really been problematic too. With AMD developers taking part of the discussions around here, I am sure some of the heated arguments (mostly stemming from disappointment and desperation due to lack of information where things are going) will cool down a bit.

Anyways, great news dudes!

[Kano]

The news is good, but maybe 1 year too late for buying current cards. Today the only hotfix for ppl with ATI problems is buying another card or lose too many features which would work fine with Win.

[puntarenas]

Thanks, really good news

[bridgman]

Does 2d on the R500 fall into this category or does it fall into the R300/400 category? (or into its own category)

The 5xx family and the RS600/RS690 have the same 2d engine as the R300/400 family, so the 2d acceleration code in the "radeon" driver should work with only minor changes. I believe that 2d acceleration is already running on 5xx parts in the current "radeon" driver, so porting that over to radeonhd shouldn't be a lot of work.

However other reviews tell things still work driver dependent, so if changing power states is still a driver job, does it work with fglrx and will those specifications also become availiable for the RadeonHD team or are these processes completely transparent to the software now?

My understanding is that there is still some driver involvement, but the new HW capabilities on 6xx parts allow faster and more fine-grained power-down than the driver can do on its own so overall power savings can be improved. We will be making this information available to open source developers. In parallel, support is being added (or has been added) to fglrx although I'm not sure of the exact status.

[koolmanoncampus]

The fourth piece of documentation (which may not be ready in time) is info about 2d acceleration on 6xx. As I have mentioned earlier, the 6xx doesn't include dedicated 2d acceleration hardware but the command processor (cp) emulates most of the 2d commands using precompiled shaders on the 3d engine. The fourth info package will describe how this works and which commands are emulated, along with sample code for setting up the canned shaders and a precompiled shader blob. I expect that we will replace the shader blob with source code when we start pushing out more 3d info.

Does 2d on the R500 fall into this category or does it fall into the R300/400 category? (or into its own category)

[puntarenas]

Thanks bridgman, having an AMD employee here on Phronix besides RadeonHD and the effort AMD puts now into fglrx development turned the scales for me.

Although I already ordered a HD3870, there is still one open question about Power Play and maybe you can give me a clue. On techPowerUp I read the following about power management of the RV670:

AMD uses a new form of power management on their RV6xx ASICs called DPM. The GPU independently senses the GPU load and will pick from a set of predefined clocks according to load. Also clock gating is used which turns off unused parts of the silicon and quickly turns them on when they are needed. Unlike the 2D/3D switching on previous ATI cards where the driver manually switched clocks as soon as a 3D fullscreen application is started this process is completely transparent to the software and the driver. This also means that windowed 3D applications will run at the intended performance.

However other reviews tell things still work driver dependent, so if changing power states is still a driver job, does it work with fglrx and will those specifications also become availiable for the RadeonHD team or are these processes completely transparent to the software now?

Thanks in advance
puntarenas

[mlau]

The third doc is actually a source release with header files and some embedded documentation. It's a simplified version of the "tcore" driver we use for testing new chips before the silicon is available.

Totally OT, but I'm curious as how you test that "driver". I assume you have an array of FPGA's where you load the Verilog model of a particular chip, connected to a windows box, so the driver devs can
have something to play with, although slow?

[teroedni]

Wow thanks for the update Bridgman

2008 will be a good Year for Amd and linux thats for sure