A Moving Target - AMD Releases the Radeon HD 5800 Series

Posted by Hans de Ruiter

I had hoped that AMD would hold off with producing a new generation graphics card but, a few days ago, they released two new cards, the Radeon HD 5850 and 5870. This is based on the next generation RV880 chipset. The Radeon HD 4000 series was based on R7xx chipsets. The 5800 series of cards pushes graphics performance and computational possibilites yet another step forward. AMD have listed OpenCL support as coming in 2010 (for platforms that they write drivers for themselves), which is good news for people like me who do non-3D computationally intensive work.

So, how does this affect the RadeonHD.chip driver for Amiga OS 4.x? Right now, it just means that the newest card that I have - a Radeon HD 4350 - is one generation behind the newest cards. There is no PCI version of any of the Radeon HD 5800, so there is no possibility of me working on support for now. If there were, the AtomBIOS should ensure that the mode-setting would work. I have yet to find out how different the RV880 is from previous chipsets, but I hope that the changes are incremental rather than a radically new design. The R6xx chipset was dramatically different from any of the previous chipsets, whilst the R7xx series was a more incremental improvement. If the RV880 is an incremental improvement, then implementing hardware acceleration for these cards will be relatively easy.

This latest development does make the Radeon X1000 series of cards seem less important. Given that Amiga OS 4.x users will have to buy new cards when the RadeonHD.chip driver is released, most will be buying one of the newer generation cards. Nevertheless, I will be completing compositing support for R5xx chipsets (as soon as possible) before moving on to the newer cards.

Comments (0) | 23 September 2009