AMD Brings 3D GPU Documentation Up To Date 64
jones_supa writes "Things are starting to look even better for the status of open specifications for AMD Radeon HD hardware. AMD's Alex Deucher announced via his personal blog that programming guides and register specifications on the 3D engines for the Evergreen, Northern Islands, Southern Islands, and Sea Islands GPUs are now in the NDA-free public domain. These parts represent the 3D engines on the Radeon HD 5000 through Radeon HD 8000 series graphics processors."
Re:Bring it on NVidia (Score:3, Informative)
They aren't releasing their driver code. It's just documentation. nVidia can do that just as easily.
Re:licensed code (Score:4, Informative)
Irrelevant. We're not asking for their driver code, we're asking for documentation on the hardware that we buy from them, so that we can write our own driver code.
Re:X logo? (Score:4, Informative)
The main reason Open Source video drivers for newer nVidia and AMD GPUs have had such a checkered history is precisely the lack of public hardware specs. The driver teams have been forced to reverse-engineer some of the hardware features to develop the drivers, which is far from ideal.
Open Source drivers for Intel GPUs have historically been pretty good (well, at least until they started using the PowerVR-based junk...); the issue there has been slow hardware, not buggy drivers.