AMD Launches World's First Mobile DirectX 11 GPUs 169
J. Dzhugashvili writes "Less than 4 months after releasing the first DX11 desktop graphics card, AMD has followed up with a whole lineup of mobile graphics processors based on the same architecture. The new Mobility Radeon HD 5000 lineup includes four different series of GPUs designed to serve everything from high-end gaming notebooks to mainstream thin-and-light systems. AMD has based these processors on the same silicon chips as its desktop Radeon HD 5000-series graphics cards, so performance shouldn't disappoint. The company also intends to follow Nvidia's lead by offering notebook graphics drivers directly from its website, as opposed to relying on laptop vendors to provide updates."
People Still Use DirectX??? (Score:2, Interesting)
Who the hell other than the poor sods still doing x86 Windows only game/graphics development still uses that turd of an API DirectX?
Let's just go over the platforms I work on:
PC graphics development - OpenGL
Linux graphics development - OpenGL
Mac graphics development - OpenGL
Android graphics development - OpenGL ES
iPhone graphics development - OpenGL ES
Embedded ARM based system development - OpenGL ES
even some OpenGL for console development.
Re:Driver Quality? (Score:5, Interesting)
I have three in my system. :3
Re:I would rather eat a bag of computer screws... (Score:1, Interesting)
Most of the game world (Score:4, Interesting)
As well as a good deal of other Windows graphic programs. You can stick your head in the sand and pretend that Microsoft Windows isn't a major player, but you are fooling only yourself. Windows development matters a whole lot, and DX is the native API and thus many use it.
However, in this case the reference is to features of the card. See OpenGL is really bad about staying up to date with hardware. They are always playing catchup and often their "support" is just to have the vendors implement their own extensions. So when a new card comes out, talking about it in terms of OpenGL features isn't useful.
Well, new versions of DirectX neatly map to new hardware features. Reason is MS works with the card vendors. They tell the vendors what they'd like to see, the vendors tell them what they are working on for their next gen chips and so on. So a "DX11" card means "A card that supports the full DirectX 11 feature set." This implies many things, like 64-bit FP support, support for new shader models, and so on. IT can be conveniently summed up as DX11. This sets it apart to a DX10 card like the 8800. While that can run with DX11 APIs, it doesn't support the features. Calling it DX10 means it supports the full DX10 feature set.
So that's the reason. If you want to yell and scream how OpenGL should rule the world, you can go right ahead, however the simple fact of the matter is DirectX is a major, major player in the graphics market.
Re:Linux support is coming, we promise! (Score:3, Interesting)
How many years was it again that they promised to produce open source graphic drivers for Linux? I've lost count and have ordered a new motherboard with a silent Nvidia based graphics card because I just *HAD* it with ATI on Linux. My AMD chipset motherboard also had a lot of SATA instability under Linux and I had all kinds of problems letting the system know how to read any of the CPU's censors (X2 Phenom based CPU). So I have just ordered an Intel based CPU/chipset as well.
I've no doubt that AMD is slowly working with the community to get better support, but their current binary offering sucks balls, there is no other way to describe it. Having a discrete graphics chip with video decoding capabilities should not mean you can use either one, but not both at the same time. Turning my monitor 90 degrees? Forget it, greyed out. And that's just the start of things.
And don't tell me how to do things, I've been running Linux since my first slackware CD's and even now I have not a single good idea on how to fix these issues, even after googling for hours on end. If I can't get this right, then only very hard core Linux programmers can.
Re:Linux support is coming, we promise! (Score:4, Interesting)
How many years was it again that they promised to produce open source graphic drivers for Linux?
Announced: September 7th, 2007: press release [amd.com]
Since then they've been catching up more and more, the HD5xxx/Evergreen/R800 instruction set was posted before Christmas so the docs are almost up to date, minus a few things like UVD2. Also AMD promised to help the open source community, not write the whole thing themselves and it's making big strides but there's also a lot of rework going on in xorg to support a modern desktop.
Re:People Still Use DirectX??? (Score:4, Interesting)
I read your post and it occurred to me that it illustrates perfectly a key problem with software development today: short sightedness.
In an age of fast multiprocessing, it only makes sense to do everything you can to create abstraction layers that will ensure:
1. My software will have the widest possible audience regardless of platform. $$$
2. I will be able to extend the application, or create a new one with minimal effort by reusing modules I've already created to do hard things well/fast. $$$ (in form of turn-around time/effort)
3. If a vendor decides to break something in their firmware/hardware - I only have to fix one module that drives the given hardware - *NOT* the application itself. $$$ (ditto)
Flexibility, resiliency, more cash in your pocket...I don't see a down side to taking this approach. On modern gaming rigs in particular, there is no reason NOT to use OpenGL - for all it's perceived limitations compared to a tweaked out directX X86 app.
As a gamer myself, I look at it from another angle: I have Linux, Mac machines as well as a high-end Windows game rig - to host games (I like to create and share my own maps/scenarios in some games) cost efficiently I prefer to use the Linux server, and play on my Windows box....using and tweaking WINE in order to run the game (I'm not made of money and can't cost-justify a full compliment of windows servers - which also would waste resources since I am a *nix developer too). Getting WINE to work with some of the niche games I play is a royal pain. If the developers of said games took my advice, I would be running their games natively under linux with minimal headaches.
Flexibility and choice is good for the widest audience. Vendor lock-in is bad - and only serves a few types of people (the corporation$$$ and simple gamer-$$$). The funny thing is, these companies stand to make more money than they would under their lock-n strategy if they would think long term and build flexible extensible applications that benefit the largest audience. Lucky for me most of the titles I currently enjoy have taken this approach; I will continue to gravitate to those that do, and deny $$$ to those that won't.
Re:ATI at it again... (Score:2, Interesting)
I applaud their efforts and overall my experience with ATI on linux has been great but there IS still a huge problem with them dropping support for some cards. For ones like mine there's only a few options.
1. Stop playing 3d games.
2. work on the radeonhd driver to help support my card. (a LOT is still not implemented, or incompatible with my specific card, I'd love to help but this would be very time consuming)
3. get a new video card. (I'm actually happy with my hardware though..just the drivers lately are the issue)
4. (what I actually do) Patch the proprietary driver for new kernel/xorg-server versions, the changes between a few versions are relatively minor, and easy to debug and track down. It only takes a few hours to get it working on an unsupported kernel version or xorg version, though tbh i haven't tried to get it working >=1.7 yet, I'm running the proprietary driver 9.3 currently on 2.6.31.6-rt19 with xorg-server-1.6.5-r1
I use ATI myself and won't bash them for doing a good thing, but he does have a point, ATI DOES still drop cards from driver support very quickly, and well before many of the cards are adequately supported by the OS driver (which means your system effectively can't update X, mesa, etc, and that latest ubuntu ISO has no option for 3d acceleration for his card without painful downgrades or modifying the driver himself).