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

[netdur (816698)]

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]

Perfect Storm Brewing?

[Xenographic (557057)]

Does anyone sense a "perfect storm" brewing? OOXML is delayed (but not quite derailed, yet) and many want to standardize on ODF. Vista adoption is crap--moving requires a rewrite of all your business apps, anyhow, and the hardware drivers aren't stable yet, so if you're going to transition to something else, now is the time. Ubuntu is proving itself usable by the computer illiterate. Now we have the potential for good graphics drivers, not to mention major retailers selling Linux machines. Microsoft is bogged down with anti-trust suits everywhere and they're chasing Google's advertising dollars now, because growth is nearly impossible for them to find.

Don't get me wrong: Microsoft won't just implode suddenly. But it's pretty amazing that their lock-ins are weaker now than they've ever been and that they're only getting weaker, not to mention that they're trying to compete on so many fronts at once while their two profitable divisions, Office & Windows, are suffering.

Anyone else suspect that we might possibly be seeing the start of the slow decline of Microsoft's empire?

Re:Perfect Storm Brewing?

[turing_m (1030530)]

"Anyone else suspect that we might possibly be seeing the start of the slow decline of Microsoft's empire?"

Yes. I can almost taste it. From the moment I got Ubuntu installed and working in ways that I didn't expect linux to from my previous experience (detecting stuff, opening any document I cared to throw at it, etc), I've been of the opinion that linux will take over a lot sooner than most people expect, and when it happens, it will eat into M$' market share in a flood. After that, there will be minority holdouts who have legacy apps etc. The jump from 10% or so to 80% I'd expect to take place in 5 years or less.

The reason I think it will happen that way is that the bigger the user base, the better the software, including apps written specifically for the purposes of migration. Enough users, you get the best games being written in linux, and M$ compatibility for legacy games becomes way more profitable. You get hardware drivers and specs opened immediately, with a working driver for linux/BSD the moment it hits the streets.

With free software, the switching costs are approaching zero, and the benefits are immense. No malware (for now), no vendor lock-in, no crappy default applications like notepad.exe unless you pay $$$, download any software you want legally, easily, for free, and with a minimum of fear for spyware.

You also have a much larger army of backyard enthusiasts doing installs on other people's old computers just to hear "Thanks! My computer runs so much better now! You've saved me hundreds of dollars! I can't believe it's free!?!". I mean, that was how the old Doom shareware spread. "Here, check out this free game!", "Wow! That's the coolest thing I've ever seen on a PC!".

I can remember reading a magazine article around the year 2000 that Bill Gates was hiring someone to manage his investments as he slowly divested himself from Microsoft. Bill Gates is many things, but fool is not one of them. His challenge has been to keep the stock value high enough, long enough, that he doesn't collapse the price.

Linux gaming arena?

[mattgreen (701203)]

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?

[Sneakernets (1026296)]

You mean, I might be able to play Chromium?

Re:Linux gaming arena?

[EveryNickIsTaken (1054794)]

But just imagine how awesome nethack will look!

Re:Linux gaming arena?

[A beautiful mind (821714)]

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:

[glpierce (731733)]

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.

To be more accurate, companies are interested in whether there are people who would ditch gaming (or at least that company's games) in order to ditch Windows.

Re:Linux gaming arena?

[jimstapleton (999106)]

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:

[Reapman (740286)]

Um... ever hear of a game called World of Warcraft? or how about a game called Doom or Quake? Transgaming, the makers of Cedega / Wine, have had deals with EA (you may have heard of them before) in the past, for their Mac software sure, but to say that Linux is still completely off the map is a bit short sighted. I still prefer Windows for gaming, sure, but Linux gaming has come a LOOOOOONG ways from even a few years ago.

Now if someone would find a way to get FFXI running under Linux, me and the other 3

Re:Linux gaming arena?

[SpeedyGonz (771424)]

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?

[MrNemesis (587188)]

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.

Re:

[click2005 (921437)]

It seems ATI/AMD's new professional graphics cards are going to perform a lot better than Nvidia's current offerings.
They would need good Linux drivers for these cards to eat into NV's pro/workstation market share.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=42127 [theinquirer.net]
http://www.techpowerup.com/index.php?38812 [techpowerup.com]

Re:

[skeeto (1138903)]

Yes, there may not be a great need for 3D acceleration to play games on GNU/Linux, but 3D acceleration comes in handy elsewhere. It will be nice to have it next time I am looking at a surface plot of some scientific data. Or perhaps I want to visualize a model in real-time with OpenGL.

Here is a more concrete example, let's say I am an aerospace engineer and I am using FlightGear [flightgear.org] to model an airplane I am designing (my aerospace engineer friends actually do this). If I want to see and control this model

At last

[SpeedyGonz (771424)]

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

Re:

[MrNemesis (587188)]

If, at the end of the day, nVidia up the ante even more, then it's all good for us Linux users.

I've been crying out for HD XvMC acceleration for my Intel and nVidia cards for at least a year now, be interesting to see if ATI manage to beat them to the punch...

well let's start then

[howlingmadhowie (943150)]

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?)

Re:

[pato101 (851725)]

You are Mr. Wolf [imdb.com], aren't you?

Whaddaya mean "let's start"?

[WebCowboy (196209)]

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.

Why show good will now?

[bo0ork (698470)]

Could this be becuase ATI might be falling behind nVIDIA technologically, rather than the AMD purchase of ATI? They might feel they don't have so much IP to protect any more. Just guessing.

Re:Why show good will now?

[Aladrin (926209)]

While I think that's a good guess, I don't see any actual statistics to back it up.

I think instead that they are seeing a huge outcry at Vista's problems, a large swelling of (K|X|Ed)Ubuntu followers, Dell -and- HP selling Linux-based machines, and general non-MS market/mind-share changes.

ATI knows that nVidia can't legally copy anything from their specs, and their current drivers for all platforms are a joke.

It costs nothing for a home user to switch to (K|X|Ed)Ubuntu and if the user can know their graphics card will actually work BETTER that way, they might actually switch permanently. If the other graphics cards don't work on that system after the user has switched, they'll buy ATI from then out.

Yes, some of those are big IFs... But there's a lot more where that came from, and this move just costs them some engineer/programmer time to write the documentation up, which they should have anyway! What have they got to lose?

lets get ALL the info...

[scharkalvin (72228)]

I hope they release info on the video capture and TV out features of all of the ATI chipsets. It would be great to be able to support all of the features in the "all in one" chipsets. Especially the new HDTV tuner / capture cards.

Can't wait!

[Orange Crush (934731)]

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

[4D6963 (933028)]

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.

oh yes!

[phrostie (121428)]

very sweet!

i know it won't happen over night, but it will still be nice to apt-get my ATI updates.

More than just Gaming

[downix (84795)]

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.

To develop???

[SolitaryMan (538416)]

FTA:

To develop of a fully functional 2D and 3D driver that supports all of their newer radeon chipsets.

Does this mean they don't have them yet?..

Re:To develop???

[Rycross (836649)]

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.

h264 acceleration then?

[Manic Miner (81246)]

You can currently only use ATI and NVidia drivers on windows to off-load decoding of h264 video, this makes playback under linux of HD DVB streams almost impossible (you get frames dropped even with top of the line CPU's).

Hopefully this will mean we can get XVmC support for ATI cards to do h264 decoding, this would be awsome, and a big boost to the media centre community. I look forward to seeing the developments, maybe soon I can put an ATI card in my Freevo Media Centre and actually be able to view HD content - woot!

When pigs fly

[ArwynH (883499)]

"Hello? Is this the Daily Gazette? I'd like to report a story!"
"There were five of them! Pink! Well, one was kinda yellow. I think it was a pot-bellied one."
"What? No! Pigs! Outside my window!"
"Maybe in a farm it ain't, but I live on the 10th floor in the City."
"Yes, that's right! Flying pigs!"
"The wings? White."
"Yes, like an angels I guess."
"What? No, I haven't been drinking..."
"..or taking drugs."
"Look I'm not kidding! There were 5 flying pigs outside my window Oinking at me!"
"Hello? Hello? ... A**hole!"

SVGATextMode enhancement

[Skapare (16644)]

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 ...

[Random BedHead Ed (602081)]

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

[evilviper (135110)]

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?

[BlowHole666 (1152399)]

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:

[ajs (35943)]

GTA:SA [sweetleafstudios.com] is reported to work under Cedega when you use nocd to get around their copy-protection (I love "copy-protection" that only serves to support Windows PC gaming monopoly... grr).

GNU/Linux and Mac OS X gaming using xawtv

[tepples (727027)]

I spent ages trying to get GTA:San Andreas to run on WINE

To play proprietary video games from major publishers on a Mac running Mac OS X or on a PC running GNU/Linux, try using an external gaming accelerator. This comes in two pieces sold separately: a "TV tuner" that you put in an internal slot, and an external "PlayStation 2" unit that you connect to the TV tuner and your sound card. Then you use xawtv [wikipedia.org] to connect to the gaming accelerator. I did something similar a decade ago, by running a "Nintendo 64" unit through the TV tuner of a Macintosh Performa 6230.

You can continue to play Free video games using the hardware already in your PC.

Re:What GNU/Linux gaming area?

[by Anonymous Coward]

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?

[protomala (551662)]

I was going to ask the same thing, what gaming?? More than open-source drivers, we need a good replacement for DirectX.

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

We got one. There's a new open G/L spec that could very well compete with direct x.

Re:What GNU/Linux gaming area?

[Constantine XVI (880691)]

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?

[lordtoran (1063300)]

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?

[Mprx (82435)]

In the case of DirectX you don't have that choice at all - you're stuck with what Microsoft gives you. This hasn't harmed its popularity, so the LGPL shouldn't be a problem for those making non-Free software with SDL.

Re:What GNU/Linux gaming area?

[Hatta (162192)]

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?

[jZnat (793348)]

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?

[PitaBred (632671)]

Frat boys don't play Doom on the PC, they play Halo 3 and Madden on their XBox 360's. PC is a niche when it comes to the general gaming public. Maybe not to "gamers", but to the public, it is, at least when you discount things like Pop Cap games. If you don't, then PC gaming wins, hands down.

Re:

[Rip!ey (599235)]

What fraction of those are actually gamers?

Enough to sell a few more cards. It's all market share. I buy Nvidia cards bcause of their superior Linux driver support. This will tip the balance considerably. And if they work with the OS community in developement, it should bring about a better product at a lower cost.

Re:

[AvitarX (172628)]

If they convince people to submit code BSD style, than they can even possibly end up with better windows/BSD/Solaris drivers too.

Re:What GNU/Linux gaming area?

[Lisandro (799651)]

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:What GNU/Linux gaming area?

[lordtoran (1063300)]

They are not only giving out their specifications for free (not under an NDA like it was with the R200 OSS driver), but according to Michael Larabel from Phoronix they will release complete 2D driver code with the new driver early next week, and a 3D skeleton driver will follow later. From that moment on, the complete Radeon lineup from the 7xxx to the HD 2xxx will be supported out-of-the-box by Linux.

This will put a lot of pressure on Nvidia. They will have to open up too or become the new stepchild of the Linux community.

Re:

[anagama (611277)]

At the moment, if you're not doing gaming, the best video card on Linux is actually an Intel one.

Ain't that the truth. My macbook running fusion wipes the floor with an ATI based system that by all accounts ought to be able kick the macbook to the moon. The ATI output is glitchy and choppy while the Intel chipset w/ its under-awesome shared memory set up totally rocks.

The only reason I have that ATI card is because I needed a low profile card quickly and it was my only option locally. I avoid ATI lik