The announcement of Warp3D Nova in late March 2016 caused quite a bit of excitement. It's a new and modern shader-based 3D graphics API, and it opens up new possibilities. However, those possibilities only matter if people (software developers) turn them into reality.

The Warp3D driver for Southern Islands GPUs has been in the hands of users for months now, so this blog post is well overdue. I always intended to give you a glimpse into the development process for this driver, and even saved screenshots regularly during the development process. I just never managed to find the time to publish it. So, I've stolen some time out of my schedule to finally get it online.

Version 2.4 of the driver was announced and released a while ago, so this post is on the late side. In fact, I almost forgot to write it (I did the work for this release a while ago). However, adding composited video is a major milestone so this development log wouldn't be complete without at least mentioning it.

Yes, it's official; the AmigaOS 4.x Radeon HD driver is no longer in beta. As announced in A-EON Technology's press release, version 1.0 has been released. This milestone marks the end of years of hard work and extensive testing.

Occasionally I see comments on AmigaOS related forums asking what advantage Radeon HD cards have right now (NOTE: When writing this, 3D drivers were still not available). While this question will soon be irrelevant when the Warp3D drivers arrive, it is a legitimate question. Well, today I was sent a link to a youtube video that gives a pretty clear answer to that question:

I'm pleased to announce (together with A-EON Technology) that the RadeonHD driver for AmigaOS 4.x now fully supports the Radeon HD 7000 series (Southern Islands chipsets). Full 2D acceleration including compositing has been implemented. This is another major milestone as the driver now supports the very latest graphics cards in the Radeon HD range. You can't get newer or more cutting edge than that. The RadeonHD_RM.resource also supports the 7000 series (a necessity for 2D acceleration too), which means that this latest series is also ready for its 3D drivers. This completes everything that was planned for version 1 of the driver.

A-EON Technology has just released version 0.53 of the RadeonHD driver for AmigaOS 4.x to registered users. This version adds the following:

I hope that people are enjoying the updated RadeonHD driver with Radeon HD 5000 and 6000 series support. While most of the feedback has been good, there have been a few reports of problems with a few specific graphics card models. Given that the driver supports such a wide range of cards (from the Radeon X1000 series through to the Radeon HD 6000 series), it is inevitable that some specific models will have trouble.

The news is already all over the AmigaOS community; with funding from A-Eon Technology, I'm pleased to deliver 2D support for Radeon HD 5000 and 6000 series cards. Support for the Radeon HD 7000 series is also in the works. This is probably the biggest milestone yet in the RadeonHD driver project.

Thanks to accelerated development, Vertical Blanking (VBlank) interrupt support for Radeon HD 2000-4000 cards (R600/R700 chipsets) is now done. If development pace had continued at the old "spare-time project" rate, then this would still be a work-in-progress. VBlank interrupts are used to achieve smooth double-buffered animation. According to one beta tester, "the 3DCompositeDemo runs a lot more smoothly now with interrupts enabled."