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An Open-Source Radeon HD 4670? Sort Of.

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  • An Open-Source Radeon HD 4670? Sort Of.

    Phoronix: An Open-Source Radeon HD 4670? Sort Of.

    When the Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870 were introduced earlier this year, it was wonderful. These latest high-end graphics cards from ATI had same-day Linux support through their Catalyst driver and the open-source ATI drivers had "just worked" with the RV770 series. The mode-setting support with the xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-radeonhd drivers just required adding in the PCI IDs for these new PCI Express graphics cards and then the rest of the magic was provided by AtomBIOS. However, with the introduction of the Radeon HD 4600 series, not everything is working instantly with the open-source drivers.

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    I'm looking at the budget HD4000 card, 4350. Any hints on when it'll be out, or how it'll run?

    Edit: also a typo, instead of 4670 there is 4780 mentioned

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    • #3
      Small mistake I think:

      "The xf86-video-ati driver has been using AtomBIOS since last year when they decided to add support for the R500/600 series, while it wasn't until July when they finally adopted AtomBIOS under pressure from AMD."

      Shouldn't that read "...while it wasn't until July when the RadeonHD driver finally adopted AtomBIOS..."?

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      • #4
        Originally posted by zombiepig View Post
        Small mistake I think:

        "The xf86-video-ati driver has been using AtomBIOS since last year when they decided to add support for the R500/600 series, while it wasn't until July when they finally adopted AtomBIOS under pressure from AMD."

        Shouldn't that read "...while it wasn't until July when the RadeonHD driver finally adopted AtomBIOS..."?
        RadeonHD had been using AtomBIOS from before r6xx support was added to -ati at all. We just limited our usage of AtomBIOS to what we saw as appropriate. We now are using much more of AtomBIOS for the newer chips, but still don't use all of it as some of AtomBIOSes available functions are plain useless.

        An example of that is the support for I2C. Even -ati doesn't use that functionality. And there radeonHD uses the HW i2c engines directly instead of banging io lines directly.

        With the introduction of RV770, we just needed new code for the MC subsystem, and then the lesser-AtomBIOS code magically all worked. Later on we adopted a more intrusive use of AtomBIOS for rv770.

        I have no idea what needs to happen for rv730, we have received no news from our partner about this yet.

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        • #5
          Things are slowing down aren't they?
          No real updates for either video-ati or radonhd.
          Same situation on the ati spec front. What's going on? The summer break should be over...

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          • #6
            Same situation on the ati spec front. What's going on? The summer break should be over...
            they way i see it - they are probably waiting for dri2,gem and gallium.

            most likely people are now waiting for airlied who was porting radeon driver to gem in his branch, till it gets ready. just a speculation on my side, though.

            some developers are hacking and experimenting with new technologies on their private branches.

            also, radeonhd devs are known to sit quiet for a while and then drop ~100 commits on their driver at once, once their accomplish something fairly significant.

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            • #7
              Actually yesterday was "first day back" for a lot of the developers. Between vacations, XDS, and a week-long SuSE offsite event it's been pretty quiet around here. Should start to pick up again soon.

              On the spec front, 6xx/7xx 3D is by far the most difficult phase of the project so far, both in terms of IP review and getting the drivers working on the hardware. Normally we can "release the easy stuff" and let developers start working while we finish working on the more sensitive bits, but with the 6xx/7xx we couldn't find a useful way to subdivide the information so we're working in an NDA repository for now.

              I haven't seen HD46xx boards locally yet but libv emailed this morning to say that he had seen listings for them in Germany.

              I should probably mention again that we don't expect AtomBIOS to completely hide the changes (the digital outputs on HD46xx are "more different from rv770/HD48xx" than the rv770 was from previous chips) but we do expect it to reduce the time and effort required to get new GPUs running with the open drivers.
              Last edited by bridgman; 16 September 2008, 08:19 AM.
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              • #8
                Originally posted by yoshi314 View Post
                ...and gallium.
                I hope you are wrong on this one!

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                • #9
                  yeah ,me too :]

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                  • #10
                    I hope you are wrong on this one!
                    Why? What's bad about integrating Gallium?

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