RadeonHD: Accelerated Development

Posted by Hans de Ruiter

I am pleased to announce that Trevor Dickinson (A-EON Technology) and I have concluded an agreement for continued development of the RadeonHD driver for AmigaOS. I am currently working to get the driver fully ready for 3D, and to release quality (i.e., to version 1). Thanks to the support of Trevor Dickinson (A-EON Technology), I will be able to devote more time to RadeonHD driver development over the next few months, and achieve this goal much sooner than would otherwise have been the case.

The features being worked on are:

• Vertical blanking interrupt support for Radeon HD cards (no more wasting CPU cycles when double-buffering); and
• Video RAM (VRAM) management for the RadeonHD_RM.resource (intelligent VRAM buffer paging).

The last feature is essential for stable 3D operation. At present, if a 3D application were to run out of VRAM, bad things might happen. By paging out textures/buffers that are least likely to be needed soon, the drivers will be able to handle "out of VRAM" situations with ease.

I look forward to delivering RadeonHD.chip version 1.x and, of course, to be able to run modern 3D applications using Radeon HD cards and AmigaOS.

View the press release on amigans.net.

Comments (0) | 25 February 2012