Posted on Sunday, February 24 2008 @ 3:00 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
For the past several weeks we have been referencing AMD's "tcore"
in several of our articles, which is a user-space software suite that has
been developed and used internally at ATI by engineers to work on various
aspects of their binary drivers. Tcore is primarily used for testing prior
to the availability of the actual silicon for their forthcoming graphics
processors. John Bridgman and Alex Deucher have been working tediously to
get this tcore source-code sanitized and cleared for public release, and
finally they have reached this milestone. AMD has just published the first
bits of open-source 3D programming documentation for ATI GPUs. This 3D
programming documentation covers the R500 series and even goes back with
information on the R300/400 series as well. The R600 3D programming guide
will also be out soon. This information available today is what will
foster the growth of open-source R500/600 3D support for the Radeon and
RadeonHD drivers as well as R600 2D acceleration.
Check it out
at Phoronix.