Interview with Phil Rogers (ATI/AMD)

[INKster]

As promised, here's a new thread to discuss this interesting interview about AMD's (formerly ATI) take on Vista graphics driver development and hypothetical future directions.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2103630,00.asp

Phil Rogers, ATI Fellow.

 

[t0y]

Frankly we have seen very few games yet make full use of DX9 shader model 3.0. [...] I think you, ISVs and gamers are going to be amazed once ISVs really get DX10 fully utilized and showing its power and flexibility.

Is he disappointed, optimistic or both?

Cool details on Vista driver development issues, though.
Worth reading.

 

[Jawed]

One aspect that's portrayed by the interview is seemingly a leading role by ATI in the driver model of D3D10.

At the same time there's the "it should have always been like this" (user mode instead of kernel mode) aspect of the drivers which would imply that ATI was hardly breaking new ground there. Ultimately ATI wasn't alone on the IHV side, was it?...

Delayed surface deletion is an interesting subject. Mainly I suppose because it's a performance issue that's seemingly been well hidden for quite a while now, and that it hasn't been solved by Vista.

Shame that the CCC app requires the system reboot - the driver itself is fine without a reboot. Hopefully CCC should be a fairly static application in the future, not changing monthly as the driver does...

Jawed

 

[Geo]

Nice interview.

Interesting that he's more optimistic about getting to a "no reboot" Vista driver suite than Andrew was when we talked to him re Cat 7.1. Andrew didn't rule it out, certainly, but he didn't sound too optimistic it was going to be a near term thing.

And size-wise, theoretically they are moving to a dl model where you only download the changed elements. So if CCC stabilizes, theoretically you might not need to dl it every month. . . tho probably we need to wait to see how that works out in practice.