ATI Radeon™ SDK Introduction

Welcome to the ATI Radeon™ Software Developer's Kit (SDK). This kit is intended to provide 2D, 3D and video application developers with the inside scoop on getting the most out of the ATI Radeon™. You can always get the latest version at the AMD Developer Relations Web Site.

• Be sure to bookmark the ATI Radeon™ SDK.
• Install the Radeon SDK and sample applets (with source code) on your local hard drive.
• The RAGE 128™ SDK is also available online.

As always, send any feedback to Radeon SDK Support.

» What's New
» Highlights
» Requirements
» References

What's New in the ATI Radeon™

The biggest API-visible advances in the ATI Radeon™ center around the addition of hardware transformation and lighting (T&L) capabilities. Transformation and lighting capabilties include:

• Four-Matrix Skinning (for skeletal character animation)
• Two-stream vertex blending (for character key-framing and facial animation using Pairwise Expression Interpolation)
• Texture Coordinate Generation for Spherical, Dual-Paraboloid and Cubic Environment Mapping
• Texture Coordinate Transformation
• Support for 8 lights
• View Frustum clipping as well as 6 user-defined clip planes
• Range-based fog

The ATI Radeon™ also supersets the RAGE™ family of accelerators by adding raster-level features including:

• Fully orthogonal three-texture Multitexturing
• DOTPRODUCT3 and Environment Mapped Bump Mapping
• Anisotropic filtering
• DirectX® Texture Compression
• Cubic Environment Mapping
• 3D (Volume) texturing and Volume Texture compression

ATI Radeon™ SDK Highlights

• New/Updated Docs

  • Radeon 8000 Series OpenGL extensions
  • ATI_fragment_shader
  • ATI_pn_triangles
  • ATI_vertex_array_object
  • EXT_vertex_shader

• Chip Specs and API Usage

  • ATI Radeon™ T&L Pipeline
  • ATI Radeon™ 3D Pixel Pipeline
  • Samples and Demos!
  • The Direct3D® SetTextureStageState() and OpenGL®EXT_texture_env_combine documents illustrate the fully orthogonal three-texture capability of the ATI Radeon™.

• Advanced Tutorials

  • Bump Mapping Tutorial
  • Projective Texture Mapping Tutorial
  • 3D Texture Mapping
  • Gamma Correction Tutorial

End User Requirements

OpenGL®
The OpenGL® samples use GLUT, which requires that you have the glut32.dll in your /Windows/System or /WINNT/System32 directory.

Direct3D®
The newer Direct3D® samples require you to have DirectX® 8 installed on your system. If you just want to run the samples without downloading the entire DirectX® Developer SDK, you can install the end-user version of DirectX® 8

Developer Requirements In order to make this SDK the most useful to the professional developer, we cut right to the important features of the ATI Radeon™. In doing so, however, we assume that you already have access to the following:

• The Microsoft® DirectX® 8SDK - For DirectX® developers
• The Apple® OpenGL® Developer's Kit - For Mac®OS OpenGL® developers
• An OpenGL® Developer Guide at OpenGL.org - For all OpenGL® Developers

References, Recommended Reading and Online Mailing Lists

For additional recommended materials, links and mailing list details, see the References section.

» Install the Radeon SDK and sample applets (with source code) on your local hard drive.