Amd/Ati is about to release the specs for its olde gpu's.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... &px=NjA0Ng

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... =826&num=1

Or have they already?
http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/

source of info: http://forum.pc-active.nl/viewtopic.php?t=18845

OMG!

About time! YAYAYAYAYAYAAY

None of those cards work on Pegasos or Efika.

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Matt Sealey

The info provided in the document is not enough by itself and although they are for the newer chipsets i wonder how much the addressing is changed for the 2D registers e.g. between 5 and 6 the 2D register addresses are the same. I do not have comparison to say they are the same in the 2 series for efika. But i wonder how much they have changed. Also ati/amd seem to have promised to release more info.

Maybe genesi can ask for documentation on the 2 series (r200/r280) now info for newer models is released.

ATI/AMD don't even support those cards with the Linux driver (never have..) and dropped Windows support for them in Catalyst in 2005.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... =743&num=1

One of the problems with the missing things they talk about in this article is that some of the features are covered by patents; and quite possibly these patents are NOT licensable by ATI to the Open Source community. Implementing support for them in software may in fact be part of the patent along with any hardware methods.

The easiest two that apply here are TV-out support - every commercialised ATI card has Macrovision enabled, and to 'support' Macrovision even in a commercial driver by a 3rd party driver provider, requires a license from Macrovision. Genesi has had to deal with this issue before.

The other one is MPEG support. Using MPEG-2 requires a license from the MPEG-LA. Genesi has this license.

While both examples would probably not incur AMD/ATI any issues, if any patent holder or software licensor decides that the open source driver infringes, and the documentation to implement it came from them, then AMD/ATI may be liable for it as much as the software developer who wrote the code. In this sense they are being kind to Linux and X.org - by not giving them the docs, they protect them from being sued by evil corporations like Macrovision or perhaps one of the more unscrupulous patentsitting companies (remember the "JPEG patent" fiasco? Or even SCO vs. IBM..)

As an ATI-Certified ISV Genesi is actually in a good position to request documentation from them to improve our product support. I wonder actually how much documentation we could get. This is something to look into; however from OUR point of view, it is quite pointless. We no longer support ATI cards because they are practically unavailable in stores these days. We have discussed this with large OEMs (PowerColor, Asus, etc.) and their stock of compatible 3.3V AGP cards is either zero or near approaching it.

So, there is nothing exciting for Power or Genesi in the release of these documentation and specifications. The Open Source drivers for r200 both 2D and 3D are already fairly comprehensive and up to par with Windows and other operating systems where relevant benchmarks can be performed. A few missing features for cards you cannot buy, does not matter.

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Matt Sealey

thanks for the clarification Matt

If ATI/AMD think a R300 is a very old GPU, then what could we say about a R200 one ?

I think it's time to put our Pegasos and their AGPx1 in our toybox :/ It's really outdated now :-(

I was not refering to useage for Pegasos but for the Efika that also has AGPx1. But it is still a nice device to experiment with. Drawing pixels wihout an os :o That is a thing i never thougt i would be able todo.

R200 documentation is in the hands of open source developers. It was released as part of the Weather Channel project. That's why there are good drivers for R200 based board. But R200 is from about 1995 so no one is making the hardware anymore. You can get it on ebay for $25 or so.

R300 is fairly similar to the R200 so it has been reverse engineered.

Nothing after that has worked very well with open source drivers. AMD/ATI is releasing documentation for their current chips and new chips moving forward.

It is questionable if the R300-R500 docs will ever be made public since some of the technology in those chips was purchased from third parties.

The r200 drivers are not that good either at least not for 3d.

The linux opensource reference driver is released with source code: http://news.opensuse.org/?p=265