AMD To Open ATI Specs

Several readers tipped us the followup of yesterday's AMD/ATI news, the new development hinted at by Phoronix: AMD has announced they are releasing the specs for all new Radeon chipsets, and will be working with the open source community to develop a fully functional 2D and 3D graphics driver. An anonymous reader opines: "AMD appears to be following in Intel's footsteps with upcoming releases. If AMD is successful NVidia will have real competition in the GNU/Linux gaming arena. While past support by ATI was unsatisfactory the new AMD buyout appears to be having some effect."

Red Hat

Has something to do with this news, read Red Hat and GNOME developer blog post for more information http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=302 [0xdeadbeef.com]

Linux gaming arena?

That GNU/Linux gaming arena is *super* cut-throat, I'm not sure what NVidia is going to do after hearing about this! Those Tux Racer benchmarks are going to totally blow everyone out of the water! And I don't even want to mention how fast Life and KAsteroids...totally ridiculous!

Re:Linux gaming arena?

You mean, I might be able to play Chromium?

Re:Linux gaming arena?

But just imagine how awesome nethack will look!

Re:Linux gaming arena?

You can joke all you want, but based on my own sample of Linux gaming, it is actually doing quite well.

For example in the case of Eve Online with a few hundred thousand subscribers, an officially supported Cider (Transgaming) client is in works and under beta testing. That is from an all out Microsoft shop.

The fact is, companies are reacting to demand. There are a lot of people who would ditch Windows in a heartbeat if only for windows-only games.

Re:Linux gaming arena?

How about Blizzard explicitly altering their anti-cheating stuff so that Linux users can play WoW? That's probably indicitive of at least a few hundred users.

Heck, I've played both WoW and EVE in Wine under FreeBSD. Only problem I had with either is that the galaxy map doesn't work properly in some modes in EVE.

Re:Linux gaming arena?

You might have missed these ones:

Unreal Tournament 2004? Check

The upcoming UT 3? Check (Even the level editor will run on linux, yay!)

Doom up to Doom 3? Check

the Quakes? Check

Re:Linux gaming arena?

I know you're joking, but bear in mind that nVidia has a huge chunk of the Linux workstation/rendering market which is a highly profitable and competitive - better graphics drivers for ATI cards could be a blow to nVidia here and it'll be interestng to see how they react.

Just cos there's comparitively few games for Linux doesn't mean that decent 3D/OGL isn't important.

At last

I guess this development will have an effect on my fanboyness towards nvidia . . .

well let's start then

okey-dokey. time to put our money where our mouth has been the whole time. let's get coding :)

(do i want to know what sort of NDA the specs are going to be under?)

Whaddaya mean "let's start"?

Work has been underway for quite a long time. R200 specs were released quite awhile ago and R200-based cards are somewhat workable with #D-accelerated desktops. R300 specs until now were not released and a substantial effort was underway to reverse-engineer the platform. The same goes with NVidia--the Nouveau project has been very active in the past year adding Free 3-d acceleration support to their drivers and has collected a lot of data for reverse engineering purposes.

The money's ALWAYS been where our mouths are, it's just that reverse-engineering these cards is a pretty monumental task (many orders of magnitude more work involved than what was involved in reverse-engineering the entire IBM PC platform in the 1980s). For reasons completely unrelated to technical issues or even market demand, we end up having to settle for using previous-generation hardware on Linux systems because of the time it takes to wade through "trade secrets".

This news from ATI is great news for the entire community. Perhaps with NVidia being the last holdout of the big graphics hardware players they'll finally succumb to "peer pressure" and drop their unreasonable stance regarding the release of specs. I've seen the remarkable progress made by the Nouveau team despite NVidia's stonewalling. With ATI actually showing signs of cooperation I think Free ATI driver development will advance extremely quickly. Furthermore, this may have implications beyond the Linux community--in everything from embedded uses to the Windows community. If the interface spec for ATI hardware is public it means that the quality of open AND closed drivers for all platforms has the opportunity to improve, as those outside ATI will be able to give more constructive input on found bugs.

Hopefully this is an early sign of an overall trend towards opening hardware. I've been worrying lately that as open software gains traction that big companies will try to cling to their old business models by making hardware more closed.

Can't wait!

If quality Linux drivers actually materialize and they have a fully open spec, I'll jump ship from nVidia in a heartbeat. An open spec will help a lot with gpgpu projects. I'd love to be able to take full advantage of my otherwise idle GPU while say . . . transcoding video . . .

Different implications

I think these news might have different implications than we might suspect. While we may think "that's cool, although so few gamers are running Linux", I think this move might have other repercussions than just help the Linux PC game market.

In this day and age, we've got Open Source Anything, handheld consoles, cell phones, toasters, anything. Now if we imagine that some people somewhere decide to make a gaming console to rivalize with the Xbox 360 and the Wii, an Open Source Console, running Linux, or even some Open Source AppleTV-like box, which GPU will the makers choose? Obviously the most FOSS/Unix friendly, and that would be AMD/ATI.

They might be feeling that a large market might open up soon, and that's why I think they chose to do this move, while they can easily become the first ones there.

More than just Gaming

I read this, then the comments, and realized that a lot of people see vid cards as just gaming accessories. This couldn't be further from the truth. Look at industrial graphics and video workstations! nVidia is dominating there, and AMD is hungry for a piece of that pie. Open up docs, get the geek that the office keeps in the closet to get excited, he sends the list of the part upgrade to the boss for the graphics workstations, bada-boom AMD market share of ATI video cards grow.

The help for gaming is just incidental, AMD is keeping its eyes on the real prize, the industrial market.

SVGATextMode enhancement

I have a different interest in this. With documentation, even SVGATextMode [freshmeat.net] can be enhanced to run at higher geometries, and adjust modelines to better fit various displays ... on the new ATI hardware. But someone will have to hack it, given the many years that SVGATextMode has been stagnant, and that may end up being me.

Tomorrow on Slashdot ...

Wow, a hardware producer is opening up the specs of their graphics chips. There's a longtime gripe solved. Tomorrow on Slashdot ...

... same thing, but for NVidia.
... same thing, but for all wireless chipsets.
... the RIAA will give up on lawsuits and DRM, realizing that both are ultimately ineffective and bad for their business, and promote a prepaid, peer-to-peer approach to music distribution. They will also rename themselves the Recording Industry Cartel of America.
... President Bush will sign the Software Patent Invalidation Act, which will have cruised through the House, Senate, and Ways and Means Committee overnight, effectively ending patent protection for software ideas. A small town in Texas will immediately go bankrupt.
... Having signed the act and finding nothing else important to do, the president will resign.
... Microsoft will cave in and adopt ODF for Word. Features in OOXML that they want to keep will be carefully documented and formally submitted for inclusion in the ODF 2.0 standard.

Power management

Screw 3D and gamers... I just glad ACPI developers will finally have the docs they need to get ATI video cards to come out of S3/Suspend successfully.

Re:What GNU/Linux gaming area?

I am a gamer and the only reason I run windows now days is because most of the games use DirectX. Perhaps with driver support from ATI and Nvidia more people will start writing in openGL because they will realize there is a market for gamers on Mac, Linux, and Windows. Just because people use Linux does not mean they do not play video games. Thats why we all have windows boxes so we can play the games (or run wine).

Re:What GNU/Linux gaming area?

The tide might just be changing. Have you looked at the ubuntu forums how many "normal people" has started using ubuntu after they found out they can actually run WoW in it?

I say a serious commitment from one of the two large gfx-chipset suppliers is extremely huge and will probably force the other one to do the same in time.

Re:What GNU/Linux gaming area?

In other words, someone needs to make a convincing (read: easier than DX) interface to OpenGL+SDL, and put it under a commercial-friendly license, and convince people to use it to build X-platform games. Both OpenGL and SDL are very X-platform (outside of OGL, SDL actually uses DX on Windows, Quartz on Mac, and straight Xlib on *nix)

Re:What GNU/Linux gaming area?

In other words, someone needs to make a convincing (read: easier than DX) interface to OpenGL+SDL, and put it under a commercial-friendly license, and convince people to use it to build X-platform games.

SDL is a compact and less complex than DirectX interface to OpenGL/Direct3D/framebuffer, audio, input devices and event handling. Countless games and top-notch engines are written around it. Plus it is under the (commercial-friendly) LGPL. The people behind all this try very hard to offer an easy yet powerful cross-platform development framework. Yet developers seem to prefer complaining about the cost and complexity of porting games.

I ask what thousands others have asked: Why not use cross-platform technology in the first place? DirectX is limited to XBox and PCs running Windows. Everything else is OpenGL. Things like SDL handle both just fine.

Re:What GNU/Linux gaming area?

Why the hell would you want to reboot your computer just to play a game? That means your torrents go down, your network shares go down, you can't multitask email/irc with gaming, all the terminals you had open get closed and you lose your place. If you can justify shutting everything down and dedicating your hardware solely to playing games, you should have just bought a console in the first place.

Re:What GNU/Linux gaming area?

Game developers (especially EA) are already targetting multiple platforms: PC, Mac (sometimes), Xbox 360, Wii, PS3, PS2, DS, and PSP to name the main platforms of the present. Only a grand total of two (which combined make up a small percentage of the market) use DirectX APIs while the rest use OpenGL or OpenGL-like APIs. Hell, combine the PS2, Wii, and DS, and you've already covered an enormous amount of the market, and none of them use DirectX at all.

By the way, PC gaming is practically a niche when it comes to gaming, especially now that Nintendo released the Wii which appeals to many non-gamers as well. Of course, that might be why Linux rarely gets PC game ports due to being a niche of a niche so to say.

Re:What GNU/Linux gaming area?

Even if that doesn't happen, they're promising open specifications. This should be a boon for every single open source OS out there.

Re:To develop???

Chances are the source code to their existing drivers have a lot of 3rd party licensed libraries, and may be covered by NDA. They'd probably have to pull a move like what Sun did with Java: release whats not covered, and let the open source developers fill in the missing (encumbered) pieces with a clean-room implementation.

So in short, no, they probably don't have driver code that they can just give out.