RadeonHD useless?

[bridgman]

More than two years

[b15hop]

Wow so you get to see a glimpse of hardware, two years ahead of the final product! My guess is fully programmable gpu with physics acceleration and api. Mmm

I guess also that game designers have a huge say in what they want out of cards. Or is this finalized with future releases of DirectX and OpenGL ?

[bridgman]

We typically start work on drivers for a new ASIC generation 1-2 years in advance. The HW and SW teams are co-located so they work out designs together, and so SW and HW can push back on each other to get the best overall product.

We try to have the driver work completed and tested on emulators before the first silicon tapes out -- but having real silicon sure makes the rest of the testing go a lot faster

[b15hop]

A lot of this information makes me curious about how long it would take to develop a driver. I'm curious as to how hardware is released with drivers in parallel. This would mean that future products must already be produced somehow and drivers tested before release. I can't see any other way how?

[some-guy]

Yes, radeonhd uses the hardware registers most of the time, and it has minimal use of atombios

[d2kx]

Radeon uses AtomBIOS, RadeonHD tries to avoid it.

[NeoBrain]

The difference is that radeon will give support to new cards faster than radeonhd, but radeonhd might be more stable since it directly accesses the hardware, also radeonhd might give you a few extra glxgears frames once 3d stabilizes (but compared to the thousands that are already there, it's nothing )

Uhm.. So just that I get that right, do you mean "directly accesses the hardware" like NOT using AtomBIOS? (i.e. using the hardware registers)
I always thought radeonHD was using AtomBIOS so this is a bit confusing for me at the moment, could you please clarify that for me?

[some-guy]

The difference is that radeon will give support to new cards faster than radeonhd, but radeonhd might be more stable since it directly accesses the hardware, also radeonhd might give you a few extra glxgears frames once 3d stabilizes (but compared to the thousands that are already there, it's nothing )

[Vighy]

Radeonhd and radeon are X drivers, which don't really have much to do with 3D other than initializing the drm and providing window information. The 3d code is primarily in the mesa and drm components. Remember that 3D support for 5xx was only added over the last few months, and work is starting on 6xx right now, so in a sense it's all "new code" anyways.

so, where exactlly is the difference? what could make one or the other better?
i think the subject is getting confusing

[edit]
i read the article on AtomBIOS, and i have to clarify my question:
i meant: "what will be the difference?"

[bridgman]

I always imagined RadeonHD would have new 3D code.

Radeonhd and radeon are X drivers, which don't really have much to do with 3D other than initializing the drm and providing window information. The 3d code is primarily in the mesa and drm components. Remember that 3D support for 5xx was only added over the last few months, and work is starting on 6xx right now, so in a sense it's all "new code" anyways.