AMD to open up graphics specs

[ubikdood]

http://lwn.net/Articles/248227/

[obra]

I've only bought nvidia-cards since the tnt2 was released. Looks like my next one will be from ATI.

Best news i've had all year :)

[macemoneta]

Excellent! Two of the top three video vendors (Intel and AMD/ATI) are now open source. It's good to have competition in the market.

[kriko]

Are they really going to open all specs? Or are there some aditional tricks I didn't understand?

[macemoneta]

No tricks. From here (http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=302) (note Christopher Blizzard is a software developer at Red Hat):

OK, to the meat of the story. AMD is making the commitment to do two major things:

* To develop of a fully functional 2D and 3D driver that supports all of their newer radeon chipsets. This will be done in full collaboration with the open source community and will have the direct participation of hackers from companies like Red Hat and Novell.
* To release documentation that anyone can use to build and support drivers for their chips.

[grey_1]

I haven't had an ATI card for years, but huge Kudos to AMD for this.

[macemoneta]

OK, this is hitting the press big time (http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&scoring=n&q=amd+ati++open+source&btnG=Search).

[kriko]

Clearly ATI/AMD users will benefit a lot from this. Maybe I should swap off dust from my radeon and put it into second computer (instead gf2mx) :) .

[hvengel]

AMD has officially conformed this see:

http://www.linux.com/feature/119049

It appears that the first version of the open source driver will be released in about a week but will be 2D only at that point. I would expect it to be 3 to 6 months before the open driver has OK 3D.

It appears that the most recent closed driver from AMD is a big improvement over older versions as well. So on every front this is good news for X11 users.

[Rakeesh]

I am not terribly interested in this for linux sake (I don't use linux as a desktop OS) but it would be interesting to see where this could go on windows as well.

The main beef I have with ATI is that their drivers just suck royal balls. If third party drivers can be interesting enough, or if they open source their windows drivers, that could change things.

[macemoneta]

Absolutely correct, AlphaWolf_HK. Open source does not mean Linux. By opening the specification for 2D/3D driver development, everyone benefits. Windows XP/Vista, Mac OS X, *BSD and Linux will all benefit from open source ATI drivers, making ATI that much more attractive.

[lloeki]

I see your point, but let me ask a stupid question: are intel windows drivers opensource?

Personnally instead of switching to ATi, I just wish nVidia would at least release some specs to nouveau...

[macemoneta]

They could be. If people were unhappy with Intel's binary driver, they could use the open source driver to build a Windows driver.

For example, let's say Intel drops support (no more binary driver updates) for GMA950 and earlier hardware, but adds a sets of new features to the open source driver. Do you honestly think that the functionality wouldn't be back-ported?

If it isn't, does that say something about open source, or the Windows development community?

I agree on Nouveau - Nvidia has the opportunity to get out of the driver business (a cost center for their line of business), and reallocate resources to hardware, where their revenue stream comes from. The only reason not to, is if they believe they can't compete on hardware alone. I would find that hard to believe.

[macemoneta]

The official announcement (http://www.amd.com//us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoom/0,,51_104_543~119372,00.html) from AMD/ATI is out this morning.

[macemoneta]

From Phoronix: NVIDIA: Got Specifications? (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=831&num=1).

[macemoneta]

From Phoronix: AMD: GPU Specifications Without NDAs! (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NjA0Ng)

It just gets better and better. I wonder what's going on inside Nvidia these days?