Many people have been asking me for advice as to which Radeon HD graphics card they should buy for their Amiga. So, here are my recommendations. For the lazy, there is a quick summary at the end of the page. But first, a quick disclaimer:

The goal of this project is to write Amiga OS 4.x graphics drivers for R5xx and higher graphics cards, both 2D and 3D. One of the motivations for this is that, my computer vision research extensively uses shaders that are present in modern GPUs. None of the existing supported graphics cards for Amiga OS 4.x support shaders.  Shaders are rapidly becoming an essential component for running newer games. Rather than write 3D drivers from scratch, Gallium3D - the new driver system for MESA - will be used.

This page lists all hardware that has been tested with the RadeonHD.chip driver. A list of places to buy these cards can be found here.

There hasn't been much activity on this blog or website lately. In fact, this is the first post to this blog in almost six months! This is just a quick post to let you know that I'm still here, but just incredibly busy. 

Occasionally I see comments on AmigaOS related forums asking what advantage Radeon HD cards have right now (NOTE: When writing this, 3D drivers were still not available). While this question will soon be irrelevant when the Warp3D drivers arrive, it is a legitimate question. Well, today I was sent a link to a youtube video that gives a pretty clear answer to that question:

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.

Bitcoin is a digital currency that is designed to work like cash. I first heard about it in the June 2012 edition of the IEEE Spectrum magazine. The idea of a digital currency that was not centrally controlled and worked like cash intrigued me, and the fact that it appeared in the primary magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers added credibility. So, I decided to check it out.

Back in February, I announced that I had founded a company, and was looking for beta testers for its first product. I've been hard at work since then, I am pleased to say that this first product is now available. Called Relight, the software is designed to fix the lighting/colour issues in photos quickly and easily. It specialises in this one task, making the user interface easy to understand and learn (unlike heavyweight image processing applications with their myriads of controls). For example, the photo on the right was taken indoors, and ended up looking rather red. Using Relight, this was corrected to produce the enhanced photo below it, and it only took a few seconds to do. As you can see, the colours have been corrected, and now look the way that they should.

I'm pleased to announce (together with A-EON Technology) that the RadeonHD driver for AmigaOS 4.x now fully supports the Radeon HD 7000 series (Southern Islands chipsets). Full 2D acceleration including compositing has been implemented. This is another major milestone as the driver now supports the very latest graphics cards in the Radeon HD range. You can't get newer or more cutting edge than that. The RadeonHD_RM.resource also supports the 7000 series (a necessity for 2D acceleration too), which means that this latest series is also ready for its 3D drivers. This completes everything that was planned for version 1 of the driver.