AMD: It's time to open up the GPU

Posted Feb 12, 2016 1:05 UTC (Fri) by bridgman (guest, #50408)
In reply to: AMD: It's time to open up the GPU by flussence
Parent article: AMD: It's time to open up the GPU

>>(Somewhat depressingly, AMD's penchant for binary blobs extends *beyond* the scope of their own hardware — I bought an AGP Radeon a dozen years ago which mysteriously sprouted a firmware dependency only after ATI ceased to be...)

IIRC the early drivers managed the acceleration hardware by writing directly to registers then waiting for completion, but later versions used PM4 packets (processed by the microcoded CP block) which allowed the driver to run ahead of the hardware for higher performance.