Milestone One - A Working Frame-Buffer RadeonHD Graphics Driver for Amiga OS 4.x

Posted by Hans de Ruiter

Today (13 October 2008) I have successfully opened a screen using the Picasso96 RadeonHD driver. There are still a few issues to sort out. For example, the colour look-up tables are not set, resulting in some funny colours. Also, the 16-bit screen-modes do not display correctly. Nevertheless, this is an important milestone. It is now possible to open screens (including workbench) via this driver. Being just a frame-buffer driver, there is no hardware acceleration for graphics, meaning that all rendering must be performed by the CPU. As a result, dragging windows can be sluggish. Interestingly, compositing does work, but switching it off speeds up the system.

After fixing the issues with the frame-buffer driver, the next step will be to get the hardware sprite for the mouse pointer working.  Hardware acceleration will follow afterward. Since AMD have not yet released all the GPU documentation for R6xx cards, I have switched back to the Radeon X1300, for which full documentation is available.

Workbench being displayed by a Radeon X1300 graphics card.

Comments (3) | 13 October 2008