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:

If you've been keeping up-to-date with AmigaOS news, you have no doubt heard that AmigaONE X1000 First Contact machines are now shipping to customers, and that Sam460ex owners (including people with AmigaOne 500s) have received an updated RadeonHD driver. Both groups are using version 0.32 of the RadeonHD.chip driver. This marks another milestone; one that I like to call, fully working 2D.

A while ago I mentioned the RadeonHD_RM.resource, and said that I'd give more details later. Several posts to this development log have come since, without a mention about this resource. Today, I'm going to deliver those details, and provide a glimpse of what is still to come.

I am pleased to announce that the RadeonHD driver for AmigaOS 4.x can now also output to DVI on Radeon HD 4000 series cards. Apart from being another item ticked off the driver development to-do list, from a personal perspective this means that I can now use my 4-port DVI KVM switch fully. Previously, switching to my Sam460ex would mean the monitor switching to the VGA output, and then manually switching to DVI again when switching back to another machine. The button on my monitor for switching inputs has already lost its "click" sensation due to the large amount of switching, so I am glad to hand that task over to the KVM.

The title of this post says it all; compositing for Radeon HD 2000-4000 graphics cards (R6xx-R7xx chipsets) is done. This is another milestone for the RadeonHD driver AmigaOS 4.x. Completion of this major feature puts the support for Radeon HD cards (R6xx-R7xx chipsets) almost on par with the support for the Radeon X1000 series (R5xx chipsets). I say almost because a few of the minor blitter acceleration functions,and DVI and VBlank interrupts are are still to do. As always, there is more work to do. Nevertheless, a composited Workbench performs well with these cards.

With the Sam460ex recently going on sale and including the RadeonHD driver, the driver has inevitably been tested on a wider range of hardware. While most hardware is working just fine, two people with a Sapphire Radeon HD 4350 reported (see here and here) that it didn't work with their cards. Most of their screens were filled with garbage. This surprised me as all Radeon HD 4350s tested previously worked just fine. So, suppressing my desire to grumble about people ignoring my recommendations (hey, it wouldn't have happened if you had got a Radeon HD 4650/4670 like I suggested ;-) ), I got to work tracking down the problem.

It has been almost a year since I last posted an update to this driver development log. This was never intended, and my apologies to anyone who was hoping for more regular updates. Things have been rather hectic, and I had decided early on to only post updates when there is something concrete to show. Updates about how many lines of code have been written are boring. That's not to say that there have not been any milestones reached along the way; just that they have been "internal" milestones, which are less interesting to users. Anyway, an update is long overdue, so here it is.

I am pleased to announce that compositing for R5xx based cards (Radeon X1000 series) is now done. This marks a major milestone in the development of the RadeonHD.chip driver. Namely, full 2D graphics acceleration is implemented for an entire series of graphics cards. The screenshot below shows  Workbench with compositing effects enabled being displayed by a Radeon X1550 graphics card. As you can see, the errors that were present in the previous screenshot are now gone (the development log entry containing the previous screenshot is included in the image below for comparison).

It has been a while since I posted an update about this RadeonHD driver for Amiga OS 4.x project. At present I am still working on implementing compositing for R5xx chipsets (Radeon X1000 series cards) but, there is progress. The screenshot shown below (and the thumbnail image to the left) was captured from a Radeon X1550 PCI card when running Amiga OS 4.1 with compositing enabled. As you can see, basic compositing is operational.

This morning ACube Systems released UBoot updates for their SAM 440ep and SAM 440-flex motherboards. These updates include fixes that allow Radeon X1000 series and higher (e.g., Radeon HD 2400) cards to work with the SAM 440ep. Previously, the SAM 440ep's UBoot failed to detect the card properly, meaning that SAM 440ep owners could not use the RadeonHD graphics card driver for Amiga OS 4.x that I am developing.