RadeonHD - Status Update and Thank You for Your Generosity

Posted by Hans de Ruiter

I would like to thank everyone who have donated generously to the RadeonHD driver for Amiga OS 4.x project over the last few weeks. All donations small and large were most appreciated, and shows the level of interest in this project. Some people even donated over $100 NZ ($50). Rest assured that I will work hard (time permitting) toward developing a releasable driver. A special thank you to the eXec magazine in Poland for their donation of a Radeon HD 4350 PCI card, and for their campaign to support this project.

The Current Status

Thanks to eXec, I now have a Radeon HD 4350 PCI card. I had hoped to have it up and running before posting a status update, but this is proving to be more difficult than anticipated. I had expected that the DVI output would require changes to the driver since the hardware and AtomBIOS calls have changed significantly. However, the VGA output also does not work. I have made some progress, though. The VGA output does output a signal, but the screen remains blanked. A very subtle endianness bug (stupid C bitfields) was also exposed by this card, and has been fixed. What remains to do is to discover why the screen remains blanked. DVI output for this card will be added later, most likely after compositing for R500 series chipsets has been completed.

Several people have taken on the role of beta testers, and have been providing me with valuable bug reports. Thus, development over the last several weeks has focused primarily on tracking down and fixing the various bugs. All major show-stoppers have been fixed (although I'm still waiting for confirmation of this regarding one particular card), and a compatibility list will be posted on this website in the near future. This will list both which motherboards can use these cards, and which cards have been tested.

Pegasos II owners are still out of luck. I have tried contacting Genesi regarding Openfirmware failing to cope with the on-board PCI-to-PCI bridge, but have had zero response. Micro-Amigaone users cannot use a second graphics card, and will therefore be unable to use these cards. I am still hopeful that ACube will fix the UBoot issue with the SAM 440 ep (the flex variant works fine).

With the major issues that beta testers experienced being fixed, focus can once again shift to compositing for R500 series chipsets. I will also be working on getting VGA output from the Radeon HD 4350 card, although that may be put aside temporarily if it takes too long.

Comments (0) | 17 August 2009