Radeon 5000 Open Source 2D-3D

Today I read that AMD released their 5000 series drivers as open source:

"AMD continues to abide by their commitment to provide open-source support for their graphics cards and as proof of that this afternoon they have released their initial hardware acceleration code that supports the ATI Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" family of consumer grade graphics processors. While this Evergreen support isn't yet finished and for the time being is targeted towards Linux developers and enthusiasts, you can now play around with your ATI Radeon HD 5000 graphics processor on an open-source driver while having 2D EXA, X-Video, and OpenGL acceleration."

Would this be a step forward in getting hardware acceration? From what I can tell if it is supporting OpenGL, then MiniGL should be able to be supported somewhat. Anyways, I'll leave the decisions to the people in the know, but the 5000 series has some nice cards.

Here is the article that goes into it in depth:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page ... em=amd_evergreen_3d&num=1

I am sure the links off that article, or AMDs home page has the source code for it.

@Arcane5150

Probably unusable for us. As it seems to require Pci-E 2.0. I think the X1000 only has V1.x.. The Sam460 will have pci-e V1.1

@Antique

2.0/2.1 cards will work in a 1.1 slot no problem. The big jump from 1.x to 2.x is the doubling of bandwidth.

@Arcane5150

Quote:

In short, having a chunk of Linux code doesn't really help. It doesn't make good documentation, and it can't just be recompiled for Amiga OS. The Linux graphics system is very different from Amiga's, and so it's still necessary to write Amiga OS 4.x specific drivers.

Supporting Evergreen cards is not a priority at the moment. I have 2D acceleration done for R500 series chipsets, and am working on 2D acceleration for R600/R700 chipsets (i.e., Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 cards). Getting 3D support for these cards is more important than trying to keep up with the very latest generation.

Currently there are no Radeon HD 5000 series cards that I could plug into my A1, even if I did want to chase the latest and greatest. Added to that, the Evergreen MESA drivers, are DRI style drivers (i.e., using the old, deprecated API) not Gallium ones, and so that's not very helpful. Gallium 3D drivers are available for the cards currently supported by my RadeonHD driver, and that will make getting 3D working a lot easier.

I will get to the Radeon HD 5000 series eventually, but it's important that support for the R500-R700 series is finished off first.

Hans



P.S. I briefly had the latest Radeon HD card series supported when I got the Radeon 4350 framebuffer working. AMD released the Radeon HD 5000 series a few weeks later.

@Antique and all

I don't think that should be much of a problem working on the 5000-series (R800-chipsets) support to use in X1000...

Once the final X1000 is ready for the end-users, a couple of changes to the hardware spesifications could have been made, so i guess we are into a great surprise here..

@Hans

You're really doing an amazing job with these drivers! Take good time, and support for R800-chipset will come when the other drivers are done, like you say.

I have faith

@Hans
Not to mention there is nothing avaialble nor possible in the near future (such as a potential port of Return to Castle Wolfenstein and the likes) that would need the power of the Evergreen cards (nor the power of an R700 card for that matter) so if you work on them later on, nobody will notice