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Hi after a long pause , I'm interrested into accellerated primitives drawing in my OS, so I could use video card's CPU (not general CPU).
So I ask you, maybe someone knows, where to find nVidia and ATI video card driver documentation? I've searched trought their sites, but I couldn't find any resources how to write drivers for their video cards in my OS. Maybe this information is not free...?
it's more that "not for free" ... it's almost top-secret!
btw, there are a few information available, mainly in the form of device drivers for Open Source OSes. I suggest you get a look at "freebe", the open-source implementation of VBE/AF functions for a collection of cards (including nvidia cards, radeon, etc)
Pype.Clicker wrote:
it's more that "not for free" ... it's almost top-secret!
Can confirm that. I can more easily access defense, justice and police information than Nvidia or ati programming information. I'm not actively working in any of these locations .
i have them... ( only nvidia tnt, geforce and geforcefx series )
give me your email addresses, ( you can get my email address from my profile ) and i can post them to you...
i had downloaded the specifications from there, actually i'm really surprised now because you think they are "confidential" but they are not, this site has all of them, from the main site, click "Documentations", from there, click on "Architecture" and you have much of them... plus if you join ( register ) the developers forum, you can even share information with advanced developers.
let me tell how those GPU's work shortly... in the card, you have a memory, and a gpu, within the card, there is a complete system... you load code and data into your graphics card memory and actually RUN this code within "graphics card system"... the gpu assembly is different, basically RISC, but you have compound statements like in intel64, that is one gpu assembly instruction has upto 16 ( according to the pipelines the gpu has ) actual gpu-asm "microinstructions" to be executed in different pipelines ( you can find this nvidia-gpu assembly details in nvidia developers forum ) the architecture is very same to the Intel IA64 EPIC code... ( I'm not talking about x86 architecture, EPIC is completely different )
the assembly is based on "Explicit Parallel Instuction Set" architecture, this is why it is so fast, and the graphics memory is working the same speed with gpu, anyway... the basic architecture is this... may be confusing a little, sorry for that...
PS: you have to be familiar with "graphics programming" to be able to use this assembly efficiently ( guys not the way you think, programming a 3D game is NOT what i call "graphics programming" ), and MUST know multicpu or multithreaded programming, because you have upto 16 pipelines in the gpu... ( plus SLI, multigpu in the card )
PPS: I'm NOT a pro at 3D programming, once before i had downloaded them,
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the site has the same files i have... you can basically download them from developers.nvidia.com
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PPPS: EPIC stands for "Explicit Parallel Instuction Set"
yup. I remind those papers, but they mostly present how a game programmer could use Nvidia extensions to OpenGL standards to use transform & lightning, bump mapping, and the newly introduced "pixel shaders".
As far as i remember, they do not contain anything that could help someone to send a list of vertices to the card and have triangles rendered
there is no official doc open to public, but there is some API documentation (as Pype said).
I think there is also some drivers whitch are "parcially" open, but the open part is useless
so to all those who want to have graphc stuff in their OSes, start using VBE, then if your OS is anougth powerful and interesting, nvidia will develop a driver for you one day :p
if not, then there is no need to have nvidia support ....
For 2D support one could look at X.org sources, or something like that. A word of warning though: X sources are not the easiest possible source tree to make any sense from.
To save you some trouble, the interesting stuff is mostly in xc/programs/Xserver/hw/xfree86/drivers and there is also some 3d drivers in xc/extras/Mesa/src/mesa/drivers/dri for older Radeon's (and other cards) but unfortunately not for any Nvidia cards.
No idea though if any of the above is of practical use, since I haven't tried writing any graphics drivers yet. My own project isn't that far...
, I'm interrested into accellerated primitives drawing in my OS, so I could use video card's CPU (not general CPU).
