Weather Channel Sponsors OSS ATI Radeon Drivers

jvmatthe writes "Jens Owen of Tungsten Graphics (mostly former VA Linux/Precision Insight employees) posted to the DRI developer's mailing list with some excellent news about the future of DRI drivers for the ATi Radeon 8500 video card: "The Weather Channel is funding TG to develop an open source 3D DRI driver for the ATI Radeon 8500 graphics card. The driver will be released to the XFree86 Project around Q4 of 2002, to be distributed to the public in future versions of the XFree86 X Server." Presumably this means that this Weather Channel is the one footing the bill for the development. Given that the current Linux support for the 8500 is limited to a binary-only driver that is intended for a related professional-level card, the delivery of an open driver is excellent news. This is also listed at the bottom of the TG project page."

Comments

Makes sense.

[pirodude]

They're probably intrested in new and interesting graphics for their channel and most of their software probably runs on a system that uses Xwindows. By funding the development they not only get the drivers they need but also get to help out the community.

Re:Makes sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

XwindowS? whats that? you know the X people will kill you for that uh? :)

Re:Makes sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

That shit is so lame. Its been called X-Windows before. I'm tired of you dweebs always correcting people over this like it matters.

Re:Makes sense.

[#undefined]

this is great to see as this has been touted (by others and myself) to be where open source makes the most sense to a company: non-business-core computer software.

the weather channel's primary business is grabbing eyeballs (to sell itself to cable companies or to sell air-time through commercials during its segments) and it does that through weather forecasting.

video drivers are not the mainstay of their business, but definitely help them in their business. the weather channel doesn't care about selling video drivers. that's not their business. they just need video drivers. and they can pay someone else to create those video drivers and then give the source code away without "selling the farm": giving away a business secret to a competitor.

this would be the same as a music production company paying someone to produce open source drivers for a sound card. the company gets drivers, free support from the community, and yet doesn't give away its secrets or the upper hand to competitors. it's a win-win situation for the company and the community.

this is how i expect to see open source prevail in the future: companies paying for open source development that aids their business (but is not their sole business), and the action being justified by knowing that the open source community (that has an interest in the developed software) will support (to some degree) the software.

in the weather channel's case, this made perfect sense.

Re:Makes sense.

[room101]

While I pretty much agree with this, my answer is: "well sorta".

There is a considerable fraction of the business managers in the world that would say that the Weather Channel just paid for driver development for all their competitors. That is, their competitors will now have the same drivers (some of which need them just as much as TWC), but they didn't have to spend the time or the money on it. Thus, they now have a competitve advantage.

I think that this is somewhat backwards thinking, but I can't totally disagree either. Also, most people's bosses wouldn't disagree, and that is a major issue.

Re:Makes sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

But what's the alternative? Either:

a) Don't develop the drivers, in which case TWC loses competitive advantage (clearly they need the driver for such a reason; else why sponsor it)?

or

b) DON'T release the source back to the community.

If you know the history of TWC's parent company, and particularly its current owner, their participation in the open source world begins to make more sense.

Shareholders first question

[tandoor]

Why?

How exactly is this little charity project going to benefit the Weather Channel?

Re:Shareholders first question

[ShadeARG]

Maybe weather.com owns stock in ATI, and since money isn't in software.. the hardware aspect may force the "not-so-spendy" *nix people into buying physical devices. Useful video drivers for *nix are comparable to gold, and the opensource variety more than doubles the value.

Re:Shareholders first question

[darkwiz]

The same way advertising does.

I think this may be a rather inventive way of advertising. Sponsorship. It has "worked" for decades in sports, why not in open source?

What would be cute is if they had a "Brought to you by..." message during the splash screen for the driver.

Re:Shareholders first question

[kpansky]

> What would be cute is if they had a "Brought to you by..." message
> during the splash screen for the driver.

Ah, but the X11 license would allow you to change the source quite easily. No more stupid splash screens (although, I have grown kind of fond of the NVidia splash). Thank God for Open Source.

Re:Shareholders first question

[linzeal]

When so many corporations have the ability to engage in philanthropy don't you think something is wrong?

Re:Shareholders first question

[Adrian Voinea]

It has already been done by Hans Reiser, and the OSS community didn't quite enjoy it...
The reiserfs sponsor banner shouted its sponsors at kernel startup, but it has been replaced by a discreet "Check www.reiserfs.org for sponsor information".
Here's the log:

Checking ReiserFS transaction log (device 03:02) ...
Replayed 1 transactions in 4 seconds
ReiserFS core development sponsored by SuSE Labs (suse.com)
Journaling sponsored by MP3.com
Item handlers sponsored by Ecila.com
ReiserFS version 3.5.18

Re:Shareholders first question

[lewp]

There are a couple reasons I can come up with that might make this worth The Weather Channel's while:

1) I have yet to see the binary Nvidia drivers ('nvidia', not 'nv') included in a distro (like actually on the CD, I know with Debian at least you can apt-get what you need to install them). I would think that needing to insert some binary-only code into a kernel could significantly decrease their vendor's ability to support their machines.

Then again, I've never written or even read an actual support contract, and I'm sure at least something could be worked out for the right price.

2) The Nvidia drivers only work on Linux. What if they feel like using one of the *BSD's? What if they're using Darwin on x86? :P

I'm pretty much just speculating because I haven't seen a press release or anything that has a statement from The Weather Channel on why they're doing it (anyone have a link to one or know some people working there?). Hell, some of their execs may just have stock in ATI or The Weather Channel may be absolutely packed with l33t h4x0rs.

It's good to see it, though. If and when they have XFree86 drivers equal to the potential of the Radeon 8500 I'll probably buy one. My understanding is that this card has a ton of potential and is fairly cheap but that the Windows drivers are a bit shaky. Sad, because I just spent way too much on a GeForce4 Ti440.

Re:Shareholders first question

[zootread]

I think you're right, I had the sudden urge to watch the Weather channel after reading this. I'll at least go to their web site and see if its going to rain in my area today.

Re:Shareholders first question

[Anonymous Coward]

in Section "Device" of XF86Config add a line:

Option "NoSplash" 1

Re:Shareholders first question

[fsdb]

> What if they feel like using one of the *BSD's?

The are using one of the BSD's. :-)
Look at all the FreeBSD commit emails with "Sponsored by: The Weather Channel".

Re:Shareholders first question

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, sounds like you are a moron...
obviously they are going to be using these cards for their business. 'Charity'? You probably WindowXp , you fuck nut.

Re:Shareholders first question

[unitron]

Philanthropy ain't got nothin' to do with it.

Plug "weather channel open source" into google, check a few articles, find out how heavily TWC has been relying on open source for at least the last 2 years (like replacing several NT boxes with one Linux box), realise what they're really doing is looking out for number 1.

Open source has saved them a bundle, so if doing this for their own benefit has the side effect of helping others, I'm sure they still feel that they're getting the best part of the deal.

Hmm, let's see. Weather Channel provides detailed advance information and education on severe weather, which contributes to increase in public safety. How about a new public discussion. "Which saves more lives, open source or the MS way of doing things?"

Re:Shareholders first question

[Anonymous Coward]

The Nvidia drivers only work on Linux.

While I don't personally have a Nvidia card, I'm prety sure the binary thing works in BSD as well.

You have to remember BSD has binary compatability with 99.9999999999999% of linux apps, the only things that seem broken are programs that rely on a certain layout in /dev. About 1/3 of the programs on my system are actually linux binaries (there is 0 performance hit, and in some cases the programs are actually faster for kernel reasons)

Re:Shareholders first question

[RustyTaco]

Uh, clueball. POSIX-ish apps have NOTHING to do with kernel guts. The Linux kernel(any version) bears no resembalence to any BSD kernel internally (where this binary crap needs to live).

- RustyTaco

Re:Shareholders first question

[Anonymous Coward]

This 'charity project' will permit them to use very cheap hardware and very cheap software. They will get a driver that is tested in the wild. They will get some free enhancements to it.

Compare this with a proprietary solution. They got one BTW, which is no longer being produced. The money they spend on the driver is probably less than the licence fees for software for one year.

So they save a pile of money by using software that has been developed and contributed by others. Maybe they feel they are the 'victims' of charity, and don't want that blemish on their name.

Derek

Re:Shareholders first question

[peter]

> I would think that needing to insert some binary-only code into a kernel could significantly decrease their vendor's ability to support their machines.

That's correct. If you report a kernel bug that happened while you had NVidia's drivers loaded, most kernel hackers will tell you to go away.

Re:Shareholders first question

[Anonymous Coward]

the drivers ATI have put out have been shakey for YEARS. I bought a solid Number 9 card a few years ago. My friend bought a ATI card at the same time. Mine worked his locked up every few hours. The drivers from 9 worked, and when they didnt they fixed them. ATI spends months and months of nothing then you get a driver that MIGHT work a bit better or a bit worse. You take your chances. The funny thing is they even know they have a problem but dont do much to fix it. Now that is some lazy ass managment over there that is not willing to go over and give the dev making the drivers a good kick in the ass or hire someone who can. But more than likely its a old boys club. And we will continue to get the crummy ass drivers they have been burping out for years. NVidia has not had to have a really new set of drivers for years as they figured out how to work the kinks out in the TNT series, then they tweaked the hardware/drivers to extend the TNT series. If they had to come up with new drivers for their next cards we would all be calling them crummy cards as well...
Im almost willing to bet NVidia drivers are split into two parts. The highlevel 'put a triangle here'. Then the lowlevel lists which decide 'oh im a gf2 with ddr. thats a function 38'. They then call that function. They probley put some sort of indirection into the bios of the cards so you wouldnt need to know how the thing worked too much. You just need to know where to stick the lists of things to do and then call the indrector function to make it work. Probably could figure it out if I knew the patents.

Re:Shareholders first question

[Anonymous Coward]

If memory serves, the folks that own the Weather Channel also put up the bulk of the money behind Red Hat prior to their IPO. I don't know if they still own their Red Hat stock or not, though.

Re:Shareholders first question

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like this?

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/usr.sbin / ysinstall/dispatch.c

==== ==== ====
Revision 1.41, Mon Jun 3 19:39:28 2002 UTC (6 days, 16 hours ago) by jhb
Branch: MAIN
Changes since 1.40: +9 -0 lines
Diff to previous 1.40 (colored)

Add a 'mediaClose' script command to close the open media. An example use
would be to unmount the CD you installed from and prompt the user to
eject it before rebooting the machine.

Sponsored by: The Weather Channel

==== ==== ====

Re:Shareholders first question

[jmertic]

>> What if they feel like using one of the *BSD's?

>The are using one of the BSD's. :-)
>Look at all the FreeBSD commit emails with "Sponsored by: The Weather Channel".

Hey, I thought *BSD was dying ;->

Re:Shareholders first question

[Tripp Lilley]

There's another dimension to this that's harder to see without either already knowing it, or digging around to find connections.

The Weather Channel is a Landmark Communications property. Landmark Communications owns other media properties (The Virginian-Pilot and Ledger Star, the hometown newspaper of my youth, the Insider's Guide guidebook series) and online outgrowths of the same (pilotonline.com, insidersguide.com, etc.), and so on.

Landmark Communications is primarily the work of the Batten family, and Frank Batten (Jr., I think) is the current head of their armada.

That same Frank Batten is the "early investor" Frank Batten of Red Hat fame. Great Bridge Software, the (now defunct) folks behind the PostgreSQL commercialization attempt, are also an outgrowth of the Landmark / Batten nexus.

Basically, for whatever reasons, Frank Batten seems to either "get" open source, or see financial advantage in it, or both. I think he understands that investing in these companies helps him build infrastructure that his many companies can rely on without lock-in. Since one trait that all of his "properties" share is an extremely heavy dependance on technological infrastructure, he's in a position to see how investing in open source development at the lowest level will give him better returns than investing in proprietary software at the purchasing level.

Huh?

[tunah]

This is great news and all, but it makes no sense.

What do graphics drivers have to do with the weather?

Re:Huh?

[littlerubberfeet]

You are ignorant. What do graphics cards have to do with weather? Well, weather prediction involves complex 3-Dimensional modeling. Thus requires fast polygon rendering. And perhaps this mean that instead of 2D overheads, we will be able to 'zoom' through a storm. This would benefit pilots, who fly at different altitudes depending on weather.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

"You are ignorant."

Not a good enough answer. Why is the weather channel paying to driver developement for gaming cards.

Re:Huh?

[linzeal]

Gaming card costs 100 dollars on a 1000 dolllar machine and runs opengl 1.2 hardware accelerated at 60%-70% of the speed of a 10,000 machine. Why wouldn't they that's a cost savings of 90%.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for an airline I won't mention hence anon.

We use "gaming cards" in some of our development machines for writing our mapping / flight tracking software which uses OpenGL. The client runs on PC hardware.

We have weather overlays - satellite, radar which are large bitmaps. You want to draw them fast - on a 3D globe say? Think texture mapping, and OpenGL.

I do a lot of development on Linux as well as NT, our weather suppliers are looking at Linux for simple reason a PC is a lot cheaper, and with a decent "gaming card", an effective platform.

They want the cheaper hardware, and OS of their (or their customers) choice, so they need the driver.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, that's complete and utter bullshit. Weather prediction does NOT require complex 3-D modeling, at least not in the sense that it requires a high-end graphics card to pull off. That's complete crap. Weather prediction is math, pure and simple, not lens flares and pretty polygons. 99% of all weather prediction operations end up giving you 2-D maps of a certain area, which are sometimes stacked to give the meteorologists a 3-D type view, but NONE of this stuff requires fast polygon rendering. It requires extremely large hard drives (64-bit images with a size of 7000 x 7000 pixels have a tendency to start taking up space), and massive amounts of CPU power, NOT fast graphics cards.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

You could be a little nicer, he seriously didn't know.

Re:Huh?

[RustyTaco]

Of course, all the pretty calucation and massive data sets might want to get VISUALIZED at some point. I donno, maybe the viewers who you're supposed to be attracting to keep the advertisers happy might want to see what the weather will look like tomarrow.
That's just me though.

- RustyTaco

Ok, the real question is...

[Anonymous Coward]

...can anyone tell us what this means? Seriously?

Ooh..."powered by The Weather Channel"...

...they'd be better off saying powered by The Food Network or something... =P

Doesn't make sense

[tandoor]

Why support ATI only?

Why not use existing drivers for other video cards instead? (like NVIDIA)

Did they buy a stack of these ATI 8500 cards only to discover they won't do what they need to do?

Re:Doesn't make sense

[Captain Pedantic]

Because Nvidia cards have got crap 2d output. Still, they should probably have waited for the new Matrox card, unless as you say they bought a job lot of Radeons.

Re:Doesn't make sense

[ianezz]

Why support ATI only?

ATI releases specifications of its hardware to developers.

An open DRI driver for Radeon 8500 (which seems to be completely different from Radeon 8800 wrt 3D) based on specs given by ATI has been in the work for some months, but development has been somewhat slow, and it's not ready yet (2D works fine, though).

In the meantime, ATI also released a (proprietary) driver for Radeon 8800 that seems also to provide 3D acceleration for Radeon 8500.

NVIDIA, OTOH, does not release specs, but only proprietary drivers, so there's little if no hope of seeing open drivers for that hardware no matter how much money is thrown at it.

Personally, when I'm asked what video cards are best supported by XFree86, I usually reply "buy an ATI or a Matrox: both have a long tradition of releasing specifications to developers".

Re:Doesn't make sense

[shepd]

>Why not use existing drivers for other video cards instead? (like NVIDIA)

Because the broadcast studio will expect this hardware to be in use for at least half a decade. They aren't like PC users -- I wouldn't expect them to be throwing out their hardware every couple of years.

So, what happens when NVidia does a 3dfx? It took less than that amount of time for 3dfx to go from hero to zero, so it certainly can happen again.

You guessed it, they have to buy all new hardware from a vendor that is intelligent enough to provide open source drivers if they expect to ever update X, had they gone with NVidia.

For a broadcast studio, this could mean millions, not to mention that the downtime will cost even more dearly.

With open source, and open hardware specs The Weather Channel can expect a smooth ride should they find new software incompatible with their existing drivers. All they have to do is update them themselves. They don't have to wait days or weeks for another company to fix it for them (assming they are still in business).

Re:Doesn't make sense

[groman]

I might be wrong, but I remember recompiling the NVidia drivers from source. I don't remember looking at the source though, so it might just be a wrapper.

Re:Doesn't make sense

[naasking]

I might be wrong, but I remember recompiling the NVidia drivers from source. I don't remember looking at the source though, so it might just be a wrapper.

Kernels and modules have version numbers, and a module with the different version no. than the kernel will not load. Thus, to ensure that their binary-only drivers worked in any kernel 2.4.x (or whatever) NVidia probably gave you the object files and one source file to compile and link against your particular kernel. That's my theory anyway. :-)

Re:Doesn't make sense

[Anonymous Coward]

> I might be wrong, but I remember recompiling the NVidia drivers from source. I don't remember looking at the source though, so it might just be a wrapper.

It is; the _real_ driver bits that control the video hardware are in a blob o' bytes. The rest is a kernel-compatible source wrapper that knows how to make calls to the b.o.b. It's the closed nature of that _real_ video driver blob that causes all the noise against NVidia.

Re:Doesn't make sense

[peter]

The NVidia driver source is a few C source files, an object file called something.o (compiled binary), and some shared libraries (libGL.so, or something). The source files have some wrapper functions. They provide a consistent interface for the already-compiled code; They are the interface between NVidia's driver and the Linux kernel.

Weather Channel

[jackh1]

Hi The Weather channel bought about 5000 rackmount SGI O2's a few years ago and now they need replacing Jack.

Re:Weather Channel

[scottgfx]

TWC uses a system called WSI for their weather graphics. They have been almost exclusively SGI based, except for some systems based on Solaris. (just systems to ingest data) They are starting to use some systems from Dell but I'm not sure of their purpose. (rendering I think) WSI support hasn't been the best. Oh who am I kidding, they suck! Perhaps TWC is going to start building their own systems?

Re:Weather Channel

[linzeal]

Exactly how powerfull do you think an o2 is compared to an 8500 and a 2 ghz x86 chip for what the weather channel is doing? I mean if it was a full blown onyx 2000 setup with 512 procs I would understand.

Re:Weather Channel

[green pizza]

Exactly how powerfull do you think an o2 is compared to an 8500 and a 2 ghz x86 chip for what the weather channel is doing?

On-air weather graphics don't take too much horsepower to produce... especially when "your local weather" is only show about once every eight minutes... much of which is repeat data.

The Weather Channel buys a great deal of model data from various providers and also grinds its own data with several gigantic SGI Origin servers and a big HP box. The rackmount headend machines simply display the data that's been sent to them. Sure, there's some rendering work done before display, but it's pretty basic.

SGI recently announced the end of production of the O2 and O2+.... and there really is no replacement. It only makes sense that The Weather Channel is seeking alternatives, especially cheaper alternatives. Their current system works quite well and they're still upgrading much older machines (the old white text on blue background and low-res non-animated map displays) and constantly tweaking software.

Re:Weather Channel

[Anonymous Coward]

The TWC "Weather Star" at cable headends applies localized still stores and a bit of MPEG video for localization.

I have been told that TWC is now looking at FreeBSD on Intel PCs to replace the O2 Weather Stars.

Re:Weather Channel

[Anonymous Coward]

dont underestemate those computers. They are extreemly powerfull. My 733mhz can just barley beat the 33mhz 4 way that my school used to have. They are tight little comptuers with excelent crossbar memory and decent bw between processors. Most pc's have a SERIOUS problem with processor stall in relation to memory. a 2ghz processor is running at about TWENTY times the speed of the memory. That means on average every 20 instructions will stall unless you hit the cache. Then your talking about 4 times. Then every 4 instructions will stall. Also once you fault you have to wait for the whole cacheline fill usually. Keeping that 2ghz computer fed will be the real trick.
The only real reason we see awsome graphics today is because there is a graphics processor involved. They have their own little world of memory. They are basicly a mini computer. The host cpu then shouts out instructions once and awhile for it to do. The faster the host can send commands usually means better throughput on the slave cpu. But if the slave is slower than the host in doing something it will not matter how fast your cpu is it will only work so fast. If things are shared between the host and the slave then you will see certian ops that work faster, while others top out.
I say a 2ghz mips chip will kick the shit out of a x86 chip in the same operations most of the time also. Most x86 chips spend their resistor count in translating the non orthagonal instruction set into an orthagonal one. While mips designers use that same resistor count to put in more banks of registers and cache, and let the compiler designer worry about getting it right. As software is easy to change. Hardware is not.

Re:Weather Channel

[Anonymous Coward]

Geez, the misinformation here is so bad as to make me question the authenticity of all the other threads. WSI -- Weather Systems International -- now a TWC sister company, provides weather data and services to a wide number of customers, including TWC. It's what happens to it that data which is unique to TWC.

Re:Weather Channel

[Anonymous Coward]

And this one demonstrates a clear lack of thinking the problem through. There are many, many frames which one sees on-the-air at TWC which must be generated somewhere. In fact, the local weather segment is the *least* demanding portion of the broadcast. When you see moving radar clips on the air, for example, where do you think they originated?

And your assessment of TWC's current hardware is still *way* off base.

Or even better...

[tandoor]

Powered by Iron Chef... for the best in quality open source Video Drivers look to Iron Chef.

Makes just as much sense.

Re:Or even better...

[kpansky]

Would those drivers come with Ohta commentary? Fukui-san! You've got mail! STFU Ohta! Fukui-san! Argh!

Re:Or even better...

[Anonymous Coward]

hahahahhahah

damnit too funny

ahahhahahahhahahahahha

I can't stop laughing

hahhaha

great post

thank you

my day is funnier now

Very good news

[daserver]

This is great news and I really hope this will be the start for more open source drivers. The graphics acceleraters marked moves very fast, what was fast 1 year ago won't run the latest games today. We need drivers before the card is released or when it's released like they have in windows (the latest radeon drivers has support for rv300). Not something like 1 year after it's released.

Re:Very good news

[=weezer=]

Well, nvidia's move towards a common architecture on most of their graphics cards solves the problem of developing a driver for one videocard and having that videocard immediatly outdated...unfortunately, their Linux drivers are binary-only, and ATI seem to be making no moves (as far as I know) to implement a similar strategy on their graphics cards.

Re:Very good news

[kpansky]

IIRC, ATI has moved to a unified driver similar to NVidia's. There is one driver for each platform (Radeon, Rage) for each OS. This isnt as "unified" as NVidia's strategy, but still a great improvement and a demonstration that there can be further unification in the future.

This is part of the reason that they have been able to release new cards so quickly with drivers that dont suck.

Re:Very good news

[daserver]

Ati has done the same with Radeon and Radeon8500. Their newest drivers even work with rv300

NVIDIA no longer has CRAP 2D output

[tandoor]

You are looking at old Nvidia cards.

Look at a GeForce4 MX, the matrox having better 2D quality is now a myth.

Re:NVIDIA no longer has CRAP 2D output

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

The Nvidia still lacks 10-bit precision in the video overlay which is probably very important for broadcast video work. The ATI 8500 (and 7500) and the new Matrox all support at least that level of precision.

Re:NVIDIA no longer has CRAP 2D output

[foonf]

Look at a GeForce4 MX, the matrox having better 2D quality is now a myth.

I know of no such card. That is, in fact, a chipset. Nvidia does not manufacture any cards themselves. And the problems with 2d quality have never had to do with the chipsets themselves, but with the post-DAC filtering. And this is highly dependent on the board maker. So, there have always been some people whose nvidia-based cards have looked just fine, and others who have gotten crap. It may be that the standards on the reference cards have gotten higher, so that there are more in the first category now than in the past, but it still sounds like it is highly variable depending on board manufacturer.

Meanwhile, get a Matrox card, and you are *guaranteed* top-class 2d output. This is why they are still business, considering the poor performance of their recent parts, and an area in which they still have yet to be bested.

Re:NVIDIA no longer has CRAP 2D output

[HeUnique]

Myth? hardly...

You are more then welcome to check with a percise measurement equipment the output of Matrox VGA out connector and NVidia's one..

Matrox leads on that, even compared to GeForce4

Re:NVIDIA no longer has CRAP 2D output

[linzeal]

Check out this it's vividness is blinding.

Re:NVIDIA no longer has CRAP 2D output

[Aqua OS X]

But what about things such as mpeg decoding? Is that not still in the world of "2d"? If your a film buff or a DVD freak you sure as heck do not want an nvidia based card.

Re:NVIDIA no longer has CRAP 2D output

[tandoor]

You are more then welcome to check with a percise measurement equipment the output of Matrox VGA out connector and NVidia's one..

Matrox leads on that, even compared to GeForce4


If it's not a myth, please provide proof.

Something besides the typical subjective web review (and even those are admiting Nvidia has caught up).

How about a review that uses "precise measurement equipment" as you describe.

(and as someone else said, please test against a quality card, not the cheapest clone card you can find).

Oh wait, you mean there isn't any such review? ... I thought so.

Re:NVIDIA no longer has CRAP 2D output

[popular]

I'm sorry, I guess I just have aniecdotal evidence from my personal experiences with the atrox and NVIDIA hardware that I have personally purchased.

Re:NVIDIA no longer has CRAP 2D output

[naasking]

As another poster has already mentioned, the video quality has nothing to do with the chipset (as you are saying), and everything to do with the quality of the RAMDAC. All GeForce boards have crappy RAMDAC's compared to ATI and Matrox (with Matrox still the best). Please do some research.

Re:NVIDIA no longer has CRAP 2D output

[MemRaven]

Anandtech providing Matrox's results using an oscilloscope on the Parhelia-512 (the new board, dunno how this applies to existing ones), against ATI and NVidia here. Top of the article here.

Sorry to get involved in a big video card flamefest (and have no fears of my continued involvement as I won't be viewing this thread again), but I happened to remember seeing something just like this. And sorry that this is coming out of the mouths of Matrox indirectly through Anandtech, but this is the one I remembered.

Re:NVIDIA no longer has CRAP 2D output

[delus10n0]

ATi, Matrox, and nVidia chipsets do not do MPEG2 decoding. They have MPEG2 "acceleration" (which is really just a term used to say the card supports DirectDraw, and maybe some automatic pulldown/iDCT functions), but by no means are any of their cards out there fully decoding the video and audio with on-board hardware.

This is a myth that I wish people would stop spreading.

Re:NVIDIA no longer has CRAP 2D output

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is meaingless because it's coming from Matrox. If nVidia did that, or one of the actual card makers, you wouldn't find any value in that. Neither would I.

When the part ships we can see how it responds.

Re:NVIDIA no longer has CRAP 2D output

[Anonymous Coward]

Plug that superb $400 Matrox video card into your cheap-as-shit monitor or even worse, a LCD (even worse color).

Mmmm RAMDAC so important on bad monitor....

durrrrrrrrr

I notice more of a difference between my Radeon 8500 on my $300 19" and $500 19" monitor than between my Gainward GeForce4 Ti4600 and Radeon 8500 on my $500 monitor.
Same from my $500 19" to my $2000 21" monitor.

Re:NVIDIA no longer has CRAP 2D output

[inburito]

MPEG2 acceleration really just means that the hardware can scale the picture and convert from yuv to rgb in realtime. Directdraw has interfaces for these functions and they're utilised accordingly..

Re:NVIDIA no longer has CRAP 2D output

[peter]

> Plug that superb $400 Matrox video card into your cheap-as-shit monitor or even worse, a LCD (even worse color).

If you have a digital-input (DVI) LCD screen, it sees only digital signals. No analog components on the vid card come into play. The analog circuitry in the LCD is all that matters. I haven't used an LCD screen long enough to comment on quality.

Re:NVIDIA no longer has CRAP 2D output

[tandoor]

Not only are Anandtech's results coming from Matrox, the results are for a board no one has even had for testing yet! So not only is it impossible to verify, it's for a board no one can buy!

We are talking about existing products here.

Re:NVIDIA no longer has CRAP 2D output

[tandoor]

the video quality has nothing to do with the chipset (as you are saying), and everything to do with the quality of the RAMDAC.

Ummm, you did realize the RAMDAC is built into these newer chipsets like the GEForce4 MX I mentioned. Right?

Re:NVIDIA no longer has CRAP 2D output

[Anonymous Coward]

Ehm, the ATi all in wonder has a full MPEG 2
encoder&decoder chip...

Re:NVIDIA no longer has CRAP 2D output

[Anonymous Coward]

LCDs have bad color fidelity which was his point, stupid.

Good work with the juvenile knowledge of digital inputs. Really, real quick cookie!

Where do they find you people, trailer parks?

Gift horse... mouth...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the Weather Channel's sponsorship doesn't make sense, but as long as the drivers remain open and we get what we want, should we really look a gift horse in the mouth?

After all - it's open-source. If the Weather Channel is pulling a fast one, we'll be able to see what they're trying to do...

I just don't get it.

[jrwillis]

Is it just me or is the world getting more surreal every day? I mean we now have everything from Russia joining NATO to The Weather Channel supporting drivers for my video card. Things are just getting to weird for me.

Re:I just don't get it.

[drDugan]

just wait until people wake up to the fact their lives suck and could be so much better.

that's when the shit'll really hit it.

Re:I just don't get it.

[Hieronymus Howard]

Not just that, but last week we had Ozzy Osbourne and Tony Iommi from Black Sabbath playing their classic metal anthem 'Paranoid' at Buckingham Palace for the Queen. And Brian May (guitarist from Queen) playing 'God Save the Queen' on Buckingham Palace roof. Truely weird.

HH
--

Re:I just don't get it.

[Scurrilous Knave]

I guess Hunter S. Thompson was right after all: When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

Re:I just don't get it.

[archen]

I don't think things will get really weird until the communists come up with their own linux distribution.

wait a minute...

Re:I just don't get it.

[Knightmare]

This actually makes a bit of sense to me. I was at a IBM DeveloperWorld conference where the CTO of the weather channel was a pannel speaker. And he was very greatful to IBM and the Apache foundation and all the other people out there who had worked on the software that runs their platform. He seemed like a really decent guy and this might just be their way of saying thanks.

Re:I just don't get it.

[Syberghost]

I don't think things will get really weird until the communists come up with their own linux distribution.

What, Debian's been out for years... :-)

Linux games status

[daserver]

The linux games status is in a bad circle: users won't run linux for games because there is none and big game companies won't released games for linux because there is no marked for it.

And tell you what DirectX surely doesn't help this, lets hope more drivers will.

Re:Linux games status

[dcstimm]

what are you talking about? winex is a huge project and ID software loves Linux, they are making Doom III a native game like they did for Q3a and RTCW, I was playing max payne like 5 min ago in winex. and tomshardware has proved that the nvidia drivers are faster in linux than windows. Currently Nvidia makes the best 3d Opengl drivers to bad they are binary! Gotta love opensource

Re:Linux games status

[Emil Brink]

Interesting you should mention Doom III... If you go read the actual announcement post (why wasn't this linked in the story itself, btw?), you'll soon see the follow-up from a certain Timothee Besset... With a very, shall we say, relevant company name in his e-mail address. Heh. There's hope, at least.

I wonder how big the chances are that a driver for the 8500 generation of hardware is any use on the upcoming "R300" chip, though. It would be so annoying if, once there is a driver, it's one generation behind. *Sigh*.

Re:Linux games status

[kpansky]

Hey, I just pre-ordered my copy of Neverwinter Nights from TuxGames, which coincidentally was $5 USD cheaper (even after shipping) than any other e-tailer. I dont know about you, but most games worth playing that have come out recently have had Linux support.

There is still a long way to go (Jedi Knight 2, etc.) but no platform wins out of the starting gate, and gaming on Linux is relatively young. I will keep buying the games that support Linux (and browse my campus net for the ones that dont!).

Re:Linux games status

[_Ender]

Actually, if you go to TransGaming's website, you can get the proper WineX files to run many Windows games under Linux - Including Jedi Knight 2, Max Payne, and others.

You're probably sceptical - I was too, at first - that recent 3D games will even be playable since they aren't native Linux versions. In fact, they are very playable. I played RTCW under WineX before the native Linux version was released - was very playable; and since I've played through JK2 and MaxPayne without any hiccups =)

Anyway, they offer two means of getting the WineX files. Firstly, you can grab the code from their CVS servers - it's the most up to date, but does not include certain proprietary / protected code (like stuff for accessing copy-protected CDs). The other option is to become a subscriber (for $5 / month) and then you can download pre-compiled versions that are much easier to install. Other subscriber benefits include the ability to vote on what TransGaming should work to support next, get help from others in their game-specific forums, and other useful stuff.

Anyway, just thought you might like to know =) With TransGaming's WineX and Ogle's DVD player, I was finally able to completely knock Windows off my box forever without any regrets =)

Next Week...

[testuser58]

Tonight, The Weather Channel pays for open-source Radeon drivers. Next week...

• McDonald's foots the bill for the development of an open-source DVD player
• Disney sponsors open-source DRM
• Microsoft buys Disney and turns open-source DRM into a .NET service

Re:Next Week...

[littlerubberfeet]

MS buys McDonalds and 'undocumented features' show up in our food

Re:Next Week...

[dangermouse]

This would not be new.

Re:Next Week...

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see McD's line of reasoning though.

1. Stupid religious bullshit about not eating meat

2. Lard is not meat

3. Fuck em.

Works for me.

I am going to watch the Weather Channel now ...

[Taco Cowboy]

As a support to the Open Source community, I am gonna do my part, by watching the Weather Channel now.

Yeah, call me a brown-nose, but that's the least I can do, right ? :)

Re:I am going to watch the Weather Channel now ...

[blowhole]

It doesn't matter unless you're in a Nielsen family.

Re:I am going to watch the Weather Channel now ...

[shepd]

>It doesn't matter unless you're in a Nielsen family.

What if he has to subscribe to it?

Re:I am going to watch the Weather Channel now ...

[Anonymous Coward]

be sure to make sure that that hot blonde broad is on their ... get something out of it at least

Re:I am going to watch the Weather Channel now ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Better yet, donate some fundage (as in public television) to TWC to get them to cut down on the number of commercials.

Re:I am going to watch the Weather Channel now ...

[Anonymous Coward]

...watching the Weather Channel now.
Yeah, call me a brown-nose, but that's the least I can do, right ? :)

Ya know, I think you just may have found the least that you can do. Amazing!

Re:I am going to watch the Weather Channel now ...

[adolf]

It matters, because if he doesn't watch The Weather Channel's commercials, he'll be stealing drivers for his video card!

Linux over cheap hardware SAVES THEM MONEY

[Anonymous Coward]

Like any other company, they probably weighed the cost of replacing their 5000 SGI boxes with something else. Found that this video card produced a very good benefit at low cost (especially compared to the SGI) but had poor support.

Think about them now buying 5000 cheap AMD rackmounts to put in cabletv headends around the country. Shareholders are saving a fortune - I bet they save a mint compared to the cost of taking the proprietary route.

The fact that they're willing to release the fruits of their labour is just an added plus. They 'get it'.

On a related microsoft-bashing note - imagine deploying 5000 lights-out, 'rock solid' NT boxes around the country in cable-tv headends all over the country. This is actually a great case study in the reliability and manageability requirements that these guys have and how linux beat out nt and other unix-like environments.

Oh, sorry, I mean GNU/Linux haha

Re:Linux over cheap hardware SAVES THEM MONEY

[fsck!]

To be fair to Microsoft (shudder), a big selling point for The Weather Channel is that their SGI admins already have most of the right instincts for taking care of 5,000 GNU/Linux installations.

Even in situations were people say "don't bother me with politics," I'm sure most would choose to make the jump to another unix-workalike rather than the jump to Windows.

I guess this means...

[loucura!]

that Reality is not ficticious. After all, Fiction has to make sense...

Re:Breaking News Story

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not very creative. Try reading The Onion for a while.

Weather Channel headend rackmounts

[green pizza]

A few points to add to this excellent post...

The Weather Channel's current headend rackmount machines are based on the Silicon Graphics O2. SGI has announced the End Of Production of the O2 and O2+, they will no longer be made as of November 2002. There is no similar replacement. The O2 was/is one hell of a video box... it's performance and capabilites were great for NTSC/PAL resolution video... that's what the box was designed for. But alas, there really is no replacement... The closest thing is the Octane2, but it's almost 3x the size... 2-4x the cost, uses about 3x the power.... and the only video option available for Octane is very expensive as it does mutliple channels of HD and SD video. There really is no O2 replacement.

I'm sure the Weather Channel has bought a few extras (they've already bought thousands) but is seeking some newer/better/cheaper alternative. Because the station, it's workstations, headends, and its network is mostly Unix based (mostly SGI IRIX, some HP-UX), Linux makes sense... especially with some of SGI's opensource offerings (XFS, Failsafe, and others).

What's interesting is that The Weather Channel continues to buy big SGI Origin servers and wiz-bang workstations (Octane2, Fuel) for internal use. It's also interesting to note that they are still in the process of upgrading many of the older headends to the latest (O2 based) hardware and newer software revisions.

I don't think they'll be switching really soon... but it is very cool to see that it's going to be a friendly community effort.

Re:Weather Channel headend rackmounts

[SmittyTheBold]

My question is...why go ATi? I would think using the perfectly functional (though, admittedly, closed) NVidia drivers should suffice, at a much lower cost. I didn't read the article (yeah, bad, sue me) so maybe they answer this question, but another nagging issue gets to me.

I would hope they are looking at the long-term position this will put them in. The 8500 is getting close to a year old now. It will be an out of production before the O2s are finally killed.

Why spend the resources to develop drivers for a card that will be gone in relatively short order? It will no doubt be a rather expensive venture no matter what.

Something just doesn't quite make sense here.

Re:Weather Channel headend rackmounts

[Heretik]

So you're saying that they should go with a proprietary solution to be sure they're safe in the "long run"? That's back asswards.

If they have open drivers for their Radeons, they will be able to have them work.. well, forever. If they have some proprietary Nvidia drivers, who's to say they will work in the future? You have no guarantee that Nvidia will continue to 'support' their current cards under Linux 2.6, 2.8, or Xfree 4.4, 5.0(!), etc. From a business standpoint, that's a Bad Thing(TM).

Re:Weather Channel headend rackmounts

[phoxix]

They chose ATI because it has better 2d performance

What most people forget is that Nvidia doesn't make any cards themselves, but rather others do. And those 'others' have shown that they pretty much such at 2d.

Sunny

Re:Weather Channel headend rackmounts

[Anonymous Coward]

The Radeon line won't continue forever. Their driver investment is essentialy an investment into a one-time platform. One ATi diverges into a radically different hardware shift, they would need to go through the effort of paying for support for that as well.

This would be moot except for that fact that they aren't going to upgrade frequently. They aren't going to buy every revision of the Radeon core, they probably won't even use the Radeon line in the near future, if ever.

Let's say that they do, though, switch to Linux right now and aren't going to buy new hardware for five years, maybe more. This isn't a very radical position, since they will be buying large volumes to meet needs as they occur; not very frequently.

A binary lock-in isn't any different for them, if the binary actual works properly. nVidia's drivers work now, and well. With the exception of some possible growing pains in the future (because of changes in binutils and assumptions by GCC pre 3.1), being tied to nVidia for free is no worse an investment. Probably better.

This isn't their motivation, anyway. Their motivation is mindshare. Recently (if you actually use TWC and read the news) they have been fearing the encroachment the Internet is making on their business. People don't want to sit around several minutes to find out what the weather will be like, when websites will do it instantly. Instantly doesn't pay the bills with advertising, though.

So the plan.
Step one was their feeling of the waters as far as turning their website into a time-spending interactive site, that injects a theme onto your web client for further advertising.
Step two is the transformation of the channel itself from a "geek" channel to a channel with watchers that spend 30+ minutes at a time watching. By switching from people with actual knowledge of weather to those with charisma, by adding programs that stress the excitement of weather (chase that twister, toothless man!), and otherwise turning themselves into Animal Planet for the weather.

This is just advertisement. It's conceivable they're covering their basis for an exit strategy as well, but the real impetus is creating positive mindshare. Paying to develop these drivers will cost very little compared to the possible return (solely in their minds) in Zealot Viewership. Many linux users are mentally disturbed (you can view it as bad or good, I don't care, but they're still ill), and suddenly TWC == good for them.

This probably won't work, though. Unless you already care about the weather, even giving the zealots a bone isn't going to cause them to watch. It may cause them to think well of TWC, but that doesn't pay too many salaries.

Re:Weather Channel headend rackmounts

[SmittyTheBold]

I evidently didn't mak emy point clear enough.

Basically, by committing to makin drivers for the Radeon 8500, they are committing to a specific revision of ATi's hardware platform. By the time TWC is ready to put such systems into production, ATi won't even make that card any more. Are they supposed to buy all their equipment from closeout stores?

In other words, my point is that the're abandoning one dead platform and leaping towards a platform that will be dead by the time anything worthwhile comes out of this driver development. What issue is that solving for them? Nothing, as far as I can see.

Re:Weather Channel headend rackmounts

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would ATI stop shipping the Radeon 8500 this year? They haven't even announced its successor yet, have they?

Re:Weather Channel headend rackmounts

[PurpleFloyd]

They may already have the cards installed and running the ATI official drivers. What they're probably doing here is a future insurance thing: once the Radeon 8500 hits end-of-life, drivers for the latest Linux kernel/XFree combo won't come out. However, if they have an in-house driver, they can make it current again without too much work. This is more an internal program to ensure that they don't get stuck with a bunch of useless legacy hardware.

The bonus for the Open Source community is cool: open source Radeon drivers! Still, though, that isn't the only reason TWC is putting out Open Source drivers. In fact, it probably was a minor consideration: they may have just thought they could increase their reputation among computer geek-types at essentially no cost. From what I see, it seems to have worked!

Re:Weather Channel headend rackmounts

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd have to question the source of your information, to be honest, particularly as regards purchasing trends. From an obsolete source, would be my guess....

already 2D support for 8500

[unsinged int]

Given that the current Linux support for the 8500 is limited to a binary-only driver that is intended for a related professional-level card, the delivery of an open driver is excellent news.

I think this part is a bit misleading. XFree86 4.2 has support for several ATI 8500 chips, and there are and have been Radeon drivers in the Linux kernel that work with it. From what I remember reading when I got my card working (yes, I'm running an ATI 8500 under Linux with no problems) all of the 2D support is there, and some limited 3D support.

I agree more open source work for this card is good news, but that sentence almost makes it sound like you can't use the 8500 well with Linux at this point.

Re:already 2D support for 8500

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes - but this article is talking about DRI support
which is for 3D - not 2D. The current 3D drivers
for Radion under Linux are *unusable*.

weather modeling vs weather display

[green pizza]

There are two very different sides to modern weather modeling and display...

1) The acutal hardcore computation (done on huge, non-graphical SGI, HP, and Cray boxes with more GB of ram than I have harddrive space).

2) The on-air graphics boxes that make pretty pictures for television and website weather.

The first requires insane amounts of CPU, large caches, lots of ram, and gobs of thruput between CPUs. The second requires graphics hardware capable of generating television-resolution static images or a few frame of animation from pre-processed data.

Both areas are constantly growing, especially the back-end number crunching. On air graphics continue to become more complex, especially with 3D cloud displays that some weather reports show. But even the SGI O2, introduced in 1996 and ending production in 2002, is more than powerful enough for this task. The Weather Channel is working on putting together a solution to eventually replace their 5000 rackmount O2s located across the country in cable headends generating on-air graphics ("and now your local forecast"). They're also getting ready for HD televison resolutions... something the O2 cannot handle (the Octane can, but that'll cost ya $40K). As a side note, there really is no O2 replacement.... the O2 was a really nifty box for rendering OpenGL direct to NTSC/PAL video out without having to go thru hoops or do any software/hardware hackery.

Re:weather modeling vs weather display

[GigsVT]

...or maybe they just think an open source driver is a good way to spam a million ads on your screen every time you go onto the web.

Have you been to weather.com lately? :)

Re:weather modeling vs weather display

[green pizza]

Have you been to weather.com lately? :)

Oh dear lord!

I haven't been there in ages (I use www.nws.noaa.gov and Kavouras via DTN)....

It's almost as bad as Netscape.com!

Re:weather modeling vs weather display

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you looked at weather.unisys.com? I know they bought it from Purdue U, but what kind of hardware powers it?

The satellite surface map is great, and the pilot and aviation stuff is popular.

Re:weather modeling vs weather display

[mark_lybarger]

the open source model makes it quite easy to get around those million spam adds.

Re:weather modeling vs weather display

[foobar104]

As a side note, there really is no O2 replacement.... the O2 was a really nifty box for rendering OpenGL direct to NTSC/PAL video out without having to go thru hoops or do any software/hardware hackery.

Yes, that's true, but Fuel also has a lot going for it in this department. Since Fuel has built-in V12 graphics-- I think there's a V10 option as well-- you can use the DVI output on the graphics card, and then convert to any kind of video signal you need with an external device. It's not as elegant a broadcast graphics solution as O2 with the built-in composite video out, but it will output HD resolutions, so it's a trade-off.

An entry-level Fuel comes in at around the same price that a top-of-the-line O2 did.

Re:weather modeling vs weather display

[sporktoast]

I've already seen about a half dozen posts talking about The Weather Channel's fleet of O2s and how they are going to be headed for the sunset now that SGI is ending production. I guess that must have come from stats at their website or something. (I use Weather Underground, myself.)

That's all well and good. No complaints from me about redundant posts or anything.
What I'd like to know is if anyone has an inside lead on exactly when TWC is going to fire-sale these babies, and how to get dibs!

Re:weather modeling vs weather display

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, your TWC-related knowledge is *REALLY* outdated, and in some cases, just plain wrong. Cray servers? What an inside joke THAT is....

Weather Channel works with the Navy?

[green pizza]

Check this out, it's very interesting.

http://www.sgi.com/features/2001/dec/fleet_numeric al/index.html

http://www.sgi.com/features/2001/jun/weather/

http://www.sgi.com/newsroom/press_releases/2001/ju ne/navy_weather.html

oh YEA!

[sudog]

Go weather channel! My heros!

That SO rocks. Soon as the drivers are released, I'm buying the card. :) Screw this TNT/geForce crap.

Re:Shareholders first answer

[Anonymous Coward]

If you've followed TWC website, you'll know that it was almost unusable, completely crapped up with Javascrap/ASP pages, web bugs, counters, frames, CSS, and other bullshit. It may have been IE friendly, but you could hardly load a map for all the extraneous junk.

After they fired a bunch of payroll, the web site was overhauled and simplified. I can now download maps and forecasts. It seems they fired all the Windows Monkeys, and now most everything can be loaded in Netscape on Linux.

Maybe top mgt is just thankful for all the bucks they saved, and they just want to return the favor. That, and they use the Radeon internally, it may be cheaper to write the software than to replace all that hardware.

for gaming though?

[2ms]

There are drivers, and then there are drivers that you actually want to play games with.

On account of ATI's generally/traditionally superior image quality, I'd get a Radeon over a Geforce if it weren't for that nvidia linux drivers actually take advantage of all the card's hardware features. My experience with owning an older Radeon has been that even the most concerted DRI efforts haven't put half of the Radeon's features into effect. Thus, I do not want to play games in linux with my radeon.

Is it possible that The Weather Channel will get the Radeon's gaming features working in full? If not, then this doesn't really change anything for Radeons in linux.

If you don't care about gaming, then this news isn't very notable because the 2D is already good. Otherwise, any incompleteness of 3D features will just perpetuate the Radeon's status as pointless for linux when geforce available.

On the other hand, it's true that nothing comes close to radeons in the mobile department (considering things like their low energy consumption on dvd accel). So I guess there definately are people compelled to buy a radeon despite superiority of geforce drivers, who must we welcoming of any and everything they can get in radeon support.

Re:for gaming though?

[Anonymous Coward]

"On account of ATI's generally/traditionally superior image quality, I'd get a Radeon over a Geforce if it weren't for that nvidia linux drivers actually take advantage of all the card's hardware features. My experience with owning an older Radeon has been that even the most concerted DRI efforts haven't put half of the Radeon's features into effect. Thus, I do not want to play games in linux with my radeon."

If you are willing to shell out a few bucks, you can get XIG's Summit Stealth/Accelerated-X drivers which provide awesome performance in both Linux/Solaris x86. Lookie here.

Bad place.

[eddy]

That was the wrong place to put it, the bootlog is for important information related to the boot process.

A better place would be to put it in a GUI application, such as a 'control panel applet', either in a splash or maybe an 'about'-like tab. This should work out much better for everyone.

Re:Bad place.

[SmittyTheBold]

So what GUI component is there to the filesystem, really? I can see having a config applet for the graphics, but really having a control panel for ReiserFS seems to me less than pointless. I know I don't perticularly want an applet whose only purpose is to be an "about" window.

Re:Bad place.

[mvdwege]

It was put in a rather long message that gets displayed when mkreiserfs is done creating a filesystem.

Sounds like exactly the right place to put it. First time I saw it I got a bit of a start, as I usually suspect an error message when I see such amounts of text scrolling by, but it makes sense to put it there.

Mart

Re: Nah, the best reason to watch is...

[Luxury P. Yacht]

...Christina Abernathy. Grrrrr! When she's on the weather is the last thing on my mind. Tornado warnings be damned!

Ditto

[Anonymous Coward]

And I might add, if you are running an 8500 on Linux, make SURE you get the latest GATOS enhancements from: http://gatos.sourceforge.net.

At the least, these enhancements will fix up Xvideo display, amongst other things.

ATI does not have 10bit overlay.

[tandoor]

What? ATI 8500 (and 7500) do not have 10-bit alpha/overlay. Where would the extra bit's come from? 32bits per pixel, 24 bits for RGB, 8 bits for Alpha/overlay.

Perhaps what you mean is they are using a 10bit DAC for output (a claim going back to the Rage128 cards from ATI).

How about providing some proof. A link or something, I find nothing on a search on Google that mentions 10bit overlay, only the 10bit DAC.

On Maxtrox they've actually gone to 2bit Alpha/Overlay, and 10-bits for each R G B for more color depth.

Re:ATI does not have 10bit overlay.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

You are right. The 10-bits of precision refer to the ability to modify the overlay output, like fiddle with the gamma and such, without clipping as easily as you would on the nvidia part.

Re:ATI does not have 10bit overlay.

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you're saying is that you have no idea what you're talking about?

Re:ATI does not have 10bit overlay.

[tandoor]

GeForce4 has 10bit DAC as well. So ho-hum, pity you got moderated up so fast for a completely baseless statement.

Here is confirmation:

http://www.cvs.rochester.edu/people/b_singer/Rad eo n10BitGamma/

Also as for the comments about Matrox having better 2D, why is no one saying ATI has better 2D display?

Because ATI now sells chips to OEMs, so whatever arguments anyone had about many NVIDIA cards being cheap clone crap (cutting corners) now apply to ATI.

Re:ATI does not have 10bit overlay.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

The thing is that Radeon's still have objectively better video overlay quality than Nvidia parts. This may be due to drivers rather than hardware - perhaps the Nvidia drivers don't (or can't) use the 10-bits of precision in the overlay (the windows drivers have no gamma adjustment for the overlay, only for the regular desktop) or that the iDCT acceleration on the GF4 is only 8-bit while the Radeon has 10 bits, but whatever the case, so far the quality of video on the Radeon visibly outclasses that of the the GF4.

If you poke around on avsforum.com you'll see plenty of people who are happy with the GF4, but for the ones who have done head-to-head comparisons between the cards on CRT (analog) projectors, the Radeon is the clear favorite. On digital projectors the difference is not so obvious because most digital projectors only have 8-bit ADCs anyway.

FireGL 8800 binary driver compatible with radeon

[Anonymous Coward]

I submitted a story yesterday, related to this, but it seems it wasn't important.
The Linux/XFree86 binary drivers from ATI for their proffesional workstation-class card, the FireGL 8800, are compatible with Radeon 8500, since it's based on the same core. Extension-wise, everything that's there in windows is also present on the Radeon 8500 with this driver, and performance is said to be excellent.
This driver is just as good as NVIDIA's drivers.
However, I'm not very fond of non-free binary drivers like this and NVIDIA's, but this is a good temporary solution for all of you who have had to live without 3d acceleration in GNU/Linux until the free DRI drivers have matured a bit.
Hopefully, when the DRI drivers are fully featured, the binary drivers will most likely only work on FireGL.
Cheers.

TV and Video Capture too?

[scharkalvin]

According the the link to ATI on this product it also supports TV and Video capture. I hope these features end up supported by any open source drivers as well. I am looking for a good TV IN/OUT video capture card, I'd like to build my own digital tv recorder.

Too bad the new stuff won't be supported, again

[hirschma]

Great, so when ATI ships their new stuffs, the R250 and R300 chips, later this summer, Linux users will still be waiting for this corporate handout driver for the "old" 8500.

I think that I could get used to Nvidia's way of doing things...

Re:Too bad the new stuff won't be supported, again

[phoxix]

and use binary only drivers?? huh??

wasn't the entire point of linux to have a bunch of open source drivers?? (mind you, the thing we keep calling linux is actually only the kernel itself.)

Lets see now, on one hand we have a bunch of binary only drivers that are unstable as crap supporting the next-generation GPU. And on the other hand we have community created open source drivers that are pretty damn stable supporting the 2nd generation chipset??

Sunny Dubey

PS: ask any linux laptop user who has an nvidia video card, on how badly nvidia has fucked them over

Re:Too bad the new stuff won't be supported, again

[Anonymous Coward]

ATI put out a proprietary driver, and the source will be available later. Nvidia put out a proprietary driver, and the source will never be available. They're an improvement?

Re:NVIDIA no longer has crap 2D output, crap?!

[darekana]

It looks like nVidia is trying to get the manufacturati in line... for what an Inquirer link is worth.

ACCELERATED-X

[Anonymous Coward]

XIG makes great binary only drivers for the ATI Radeon 8500. They have awesome performance in both Linux and Solaris x86.

Re:ESR?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla runs in XP.

What does Redhat do?

[Offwhite98]

And why does Redhat and all the other Linux companies not offer to produce useful drivers like this one? I have yet to see a substantial contribution by the Linux distributors. People suggest RPMs as a big contribution, but really? How come there is no Redhat web browser based on Mozilla with several advanced features? What type of research has Redhat funded for the sake of Linux?

I have seen Sun get closely involved with the usability and improvement of the Gnome systems but it seems every other Linux company just wants to bundle all the latest Beta distributions of some open source software and charge $100 for a box with 2 CDs and a useless book about configuring it.

It is news like this that makes me really wonder what all these IPO rich Linux companies did when they had all that money 3 years back. Not one of them made a bold move to make a drastic change to create something for the vision of what Linux should be. I think they simply lack any vision at all.

Re:What does Redhat do?

[dyslexia]

Redhat pays Alan Cox's salary. He's the only person that comes to mind, but they do pay for other people to work on free software projects.

Re:What does Redhat do?

[Wdomburg]

>What type of research has Redhat funded for the
>sake of Linux?

Well, they employ:

Owen Taylor - one of the maintainers of GTK+
and the author of Pango

Havoc Pennington - author of GConf, Metacity

Jonathon Blandford - maintains the Gnome Control
Center, contributed to GTK+

Elliot Lee - wrote ORBit, works on embedded
GTK+

Dave Mason (until a couple days ago) - GNOME
documentation

Steve Tweedie - ext3

Alan Cox - kernel hacker extrodinaire

Not to mention the projects they contribute to:

GCC - remember Cygnus? remember who bought them?

CygWin - see above

eCos - see above

EL/IX - see above

newlib

tux

insight

mauve

source-navigator

pirahna

Aside from that they do a *lot* of testing and bug fixing on everything in the distribution.

Matt

Re:What does Redhat do?

[Anonymous Coward]

And why does Redhat and all the other Linux companies not offer to produce useful drivers like this one? I have yet to see a substantial contribution by the Linux distributors

So where have you been all this time? Redhat has made enormous contributions to Linux, you probably couldn't have picked a worse example to make your point with.

And SuSE has done excellent work in the past with the Xfree86 team and continues working on projects such as ReiserFS and 64 bit versions of Linux.

Just out of curiousity, do you download your Linux for free, or do you pay for the boxed set?

Simple cost equation

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing that one developer's time to produce the driver is going to cost the Weather Channel no more than $250K.
Compared to their hardware budget that's nothing.
They just want to keep their options open.
Perhaps NVidia lacks some key feature they require and wants to charge many times more the price that Tungsten would.

The most exciting thing about this

[evilpenguin]

To me, the most exciting thing about this is that it may be the first example of what I believe is a coming shift in the economics of software. Right now, software is treated as a product like almost any other manufactured product. Programmers are laborers and they produce product for consumption.

Free Software turns this around. Programmers become professionals more like engineers, architects, and doctors. They are paid for the quality of their practice, not as units of production in a manufacturing enterprise. One of the most common complaints about Open Source and Free Software is that it is anti-capital and that it will put programmers out of work (or at least out of pay). I think that is just plain wrong. Most programmers working today do not work for software companies. Most work in MIS making systems of hardware and software fit the needs of specific businesses.

This is the first case I know of where a company that is not at all in the software industry is paying programmers to develop software that they need that will directly benefit them AND anyone else who wants to use it. (Several companies like RedHat and Mandrake have done the same over the last few years, but they are, at least in some hybrid sense, in the software industry).

I think this will happen more and more. This is happening right now only because Free Software and Open Source software must be being used at the Weather Channel widely enough that they need these drivers. Once Free Software reaches critical mass (I know: It's an abused term and I'm abusing it right now) this will happen more and more. Eventually it will make almost all kinds of software available for "free" (and Free) and programmers will be paid well for doing it. Instead of 21st century robber barons amassing gigantic fortunes for herding programmers together, thousands of programmers around the world will make more money than they do now developing software for "Free."

Why? Bcause computers and software have no inherent value. Their value comes only in how they improve the efficiency of other processes, or enable processes that could not be done without them. They are tools. They are used to make and do other things. It is this economic "amplification" effect that makes them valuable. Sure, there is some value in the software economy, but the efficiency boom that gave us the longest post-war economic expansion without substantial inflation wasn't entirely based on Microsoft's profits (or even slightly based on them. As rich as Microsoft is, they are just a drop in the bucket of the economy). No, it was the way the technology tools improved productitivty throughout the economy. They whole software industry (and by that I mean people who develop code industrially and keep it closed, raising the price by creating an artificial shortage) could vanish and be replaced by free software and programmers and the economy as a whole would get richer.

How will programmers get paid? Like this case.

So a company has to pay $150,000 to get something developed. If all the other software they use is both Free and free (libre and free? Free speech and Free beer?), they may well end up spending less on software while programmers get that reduced amount of money with little or no corporate overhead.

It becomes a profession, not an industrial enterprise.

My bit of pie-in-the-sky thinking for today...

Extensions.

[Anonymous Coward]

The big question here is whether TWC are paying
for just the basic OpenGL implementation, or for
OpenGL plus just the extensions they need, or for
the full implementation with all the Radion's
bells and whistles being accessible.

I use GeForce all the time and the nVidia drivers
for Linux support every single little feature that
the Windoze drivers support. It's frustrating that
they are closed source - but if you absolutely
have to choose between: Windoze+Closed-source-drivers
versus Linux+Closed-source-drivers versus
not being in the 3D graphics business at all,
then I choose Linux.

My hope:

[MsGeek]

ATI finally releases specs for their hardware DVD acceleration, if not out in the open, at least to this project. Their hardware DVD acceleration is GREAT in Windows. You can actually run a DVD-ROM on a Pentium 233MMX if you want to using one of their video cards if you don't mind not using the computer for anything else while the DVD plays.

ATI is to be commended for their relative openness compared to NVidia and Matrox. I think they have a ways to go on being cooperative, however since there are only a finite number of video card manufacturers they should be encouraged.

ATI should also be encouraged to find better coders for their Windows driver products, but that's another story for another place and time entirely.

Matrox

[Fourier]

ATI is to be commended for their relative openness compared to NVidia and Matrox.

While I agree that ATi's willingness to release specs is heartening, I don't think you give Matrox enough credit. They have a pretty good history of cooperating with open source developers. I think they keep some portions of their linux drivers closed (DualHead maybe?), but by and large they have been quite supportive of OSS.

NVIDIA's binary drivers...

[GameMaster]

OSS zealots will most likely mod me down for saying this, but most of it is the truth mixed with a little bit of my own opinion. ;-)

It always bothers me a little when I hear people say stuff like this. The truth is, as has been stated by NVIDIA many times, that there are patents shared by NVIDIA with other companies that have been used in the development of they video cards. One of these companies is, most likely, SGI. They can't open source their drivers without violating confidentiality agreements and opening themselves to, justified, lawsuits.

Yes they only release binary drivers, and it would be much nicer if they would release the source as well but when it comes right down to it their drivers are vastly better than any other 3D drivers out there. Unlike all other Linux drivers for 3D cards NVIDIA's drivers are about equivalent in performance with their windows counterparts (this is as of the last time I saw a benchmark, I've heard rumors that they may be faster now). Granted, this doesn't help people on non-x86 Linux or on a *BSD (and no, I don't believe *BSD is dying. :-p ) but you are being slightly less than honest when you give out a blanket statement to people that ATI or Matrox is best supported. That person is asking you for information and, instead, you are giving them your opinion dressed up to look like fact. A more truthful way to answer that question would be to ask them what kind or hardware/OS they plan on using and then to tell them that NVIDIA is best supported for x86 Linux and that ATI Matrox are best supported for all other platforms. If you must push your own OSS agenda, then follow up the statement with an explanation of why you think people should support ATI and Matrox because of the way in which they support the OSS community.

Well, that's just my $0.02. I personally believe in OSS, though I don't really believe in the extremism of people like RMS. I also believe that there is a place in the world for non-OSS in certain places as well as understanding for companies that simply are incapable of supporting OSS for external reasons beyond their control (such as legal reasons). I don't mean for this to come off as a flame so much as a friendly rebuttal. :-)

-GameMaster

Re:NVIDIA's binary drivers...

[inburito]

I don't really buy the patent thing since patents are "open source" by default. March into the patent office and ask to see a patent. Or check patents from one of the websites that have them archived. With a patent you're actually disclosing the method..

Re:NVIDIA's binary drivers...

[Anonymous Coward]

That person is asking you for information and, instead, you are giving them your opinion dressed up to look like fact.

NVIDIA does not document their hardware. They have never shipped complete driver source for GeForce or future hardware and give no indication they ever will. Patents are non-confidential by definition, so their alleged reason for this is self-contradictory. These are facts.

Whether a proprietary driver supports or undermines a free system is opinion.

Re:NVIDIA's binary drivers...

[Anonymous Coward]

How about you think for five minutes before you post? Yes, patents are not confidential. However, you are NOT free to use them. Therefore, they can not opensource their drivers, because you would not have a license to their patents (when you download the drivers). Besides, what license would they release them under? Do you think releasing a driver under the GPL with patents in it would go over well? Besides, what makes you think that it's just patents? Nvidia spent a LOT of money developing good drivers. Why the hell should they give them away to their competitors?

Re:NVIDIA's binary drivers...

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps there are parts of NVidia's cards protected by patents / copyrights and they may not be able to release info on those parts.

They can still open everything else and provide binary object files for all the non-releaseable parts.

Doing this they can help, to a certain degree, make their driver open.

The more that's available open source, the more that can be fixed if Nvidia goes bust.

Re:NVIDIA's binary drivers...

[GameMaster]

You are right, patents are "open source" in that they are a matter of public record. However, as has been stated in a reply to this post which for some reason has been moded down to 0, this doesn't mean that NVIDIA has the right to give out a product making use of those patents for anyone to freely modify. I'm sure there would be serious issues if they tried to license it with something like the GPL or even the BSD license. Whatever agreements NVIDIA entered into to get the use of those patents certainly doesn't give them the right to tell a whole community that it can use those patents in a derivative work such as improved drivers. This all ignores the possibility that trade secrets are also included in the technology.

-GameMaster

Re:NVIDIA's binary drivers...

[GameMaster]

It is very possibly that these patents are threaded throughout the code or that there are a few patents that encompass a vast portion of the code. Either way, it would make releasing source code that made any kind of sense almost impossible. Also, assuming they could release something that made some sense why would they? Think about what this would accomplish. All it would do is provide driver writers with hints on how to recreate the patented portions of the code. This would be NVIDIA supporting the subversion of a business partner's intellectual property. Even if they weren't directly breaking their patent agreements, I can easily see them being sued over it. To top it all off, is this a good thing for the OSS community? To have driver writers for Linux committing patent theft? The OSS community is made up of talented programmers. This would make any of those talented programmers that took part in NVIDIA video card driver writing into pirates. Its really wouldn't be that much different from Microsoft using a piece of GPL code in one of their products without acknowledging it. Besides, if they did release limited source code as a token gesture to the OSS community they'd get called on it the same way they got derided for releasing obfuscated source code of the first generation of Linux 3D drivers they released.

-Daedalus

Re:NVIDIA's binary drivers...

[GameMaster]

Yes, NVIDIA does not document their hardware.

Yes, they have never shipped complete drivers for the GeForce or future hardware and they give no indication that they ever will.

I have never claimed otherwise on either of these counts.

As for the non-confidential nature of patents, I believe I covered that satisfactorily in my rebuttal to one of the other responses to my post.

If you re-read the original post I was responding to, you will notice that the question that is being discussed is which hardware is best supported by the software, not which software best supports a free system. In fact that was the crux of my point. When asked a simple technical question about which software works best; personal agendas, such as supporting free software, have no place in an honest answer except as an addendum. Saying that ATI and Matrox cards are better isn't true as far as performance is concerned on x86 Linux systems. To say differently simply because you want to manipulate someone into avoiding a company you dislike for personal reasons is dishonest. Wouldn't it be more satisfying to convince someone to do the "right thing" even after they know the straight facts about performance?

-Daedalus

Re:NVIDIA's binary drivers...

[inburito]

How about you think for few minutes before ranting. Nvidia is already giving you a license to use the patents by providing the binary drivers. If you weren't allowed to use their patented processes all those cards would be rather worthless.

I believe that GPL'd software must be patent free or the patents must be automatically licensed to all the recipients of the software.. There are other open-source licenses, however.

The nice things with patents is that you can say: Look, this is our method and we have exclusive access to it. We spent a lot of money developing this and now you can look but can't touch/use it or we'll sue you to oblivion..

And did I with even one word suggest that their closed sourceness could not have resulted from something else than patents. The point of my whole post was that using patents as an excuse is pretty lame for the reasons I mentioned before. Sure, they can have confidentiality agreements, trade secrets and whatnot included in their source code..

Re:NVIDIA's binary drivers...

[Anonymous Coward]

For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.

Even if you GPL your code, I can't redistribute it if it infringes patents.

If the card relies on patented algorithms, the vendor must have provided you a license to use those algorithms along with the card. If the driver uses patented algorithms, obviously the free driver should avoid them (in a dream world where we actually know what is and isn't patented). If the driver must use patented algorithms to deal with the card's input or output, the question is whether the vendor provided you a license to use those algorithms for any uses of the card or merely for using their drivers (for them to choose the latter instead of the former is unconscionable).

Re:NVIDIA's binary drivers...

[codeguy007]

The problem with Nvidia drivers is that when you use them for high end open gl rendering (like that the weather channel will be doing) they tend to leak memory and crash. Interestingly enough when using the driver for games, this doesn't happen.

University of Toronto was using GeForce 3's with the Nvidia drivers for their open gl modelling and the memory leak is so bad that they had to reboot every 2 hours. How do I know this? Well I took the support calls from UofT complaining about the problem.

Now image if you were the weather channel using a rendering cluster to do weather mapping. Would you be happy with rebooting your cluster nodes every 2 hours?

I want one

[Anonymous Coward]

I want one, rack!!!!!!

Genlock / SDI

[sgidude]

The big question is does the 8500 Genlock to incoming video, if it does, then that is the reason the weather channel want it, Nvidia chips don't ( it's a right royal pain, we've spent a fair bit covering for it ). Another posibility is they have worked out how to get SDI out ( Serial digital CCIR601 ), which even if you can't genlock would be a major win & with 5k + O2's to replace, no doubt they can convince a manufacturer to do that for them. But maybe they just decided ATI's video output was better, either way, this is great news, broadcast video has been hamstrung by only having SGI video for years ( yeah I love the company & have spent my fair share with them, but it's frustrating watching gamers play with performance I can't ). Nigel

ATI has great DVD decoding

[RayChuang]

Despite what people think about the other parts of an ATI graphics card chipset, you have to admit that ATI almost single-handedly killed off the need for a dedicated decoder card in terms of DVD playback for computers with AGP ports. Their support for both hardware motion compensation (HWMC) and Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform (iDCT) starting with the Rage 128 chipset meant you saved some 35-40% of CPU cycles decoding DVD's compared to an all-software solution using WinDVD or PowerDVD.

And everyone else is jumping on the bandwagon, too. Note that the nVidia's GeForce4 MX and GeForce4 Ti chipsets and the new Matrox Parhelia chipset have at least HWMC and iDCT support for DVD decoding.

Rushed post?

[fdisk3hs]

'jvmatthe' doesn't seem to have read his own post:
'Presumably this means that this Weather Channel is the one footing the bill for the development.'

Yes, one could presume this by reading it from the TG Website THAT YOU LINKED TO or YOUR OWN POST. Doh.

'Given that the current Linux support for the 8500 is limited to a binary-only driver that is intended for a related professional-level card...'

XFree86 runs on lots of operating systems and hardware platforms, also as mentioned on YOUR POST and the WEB SITES that you linked to. Also doh.

Why is this post biased toward Linux? Many readers seemed to have picked up this thread, while FreeBSD'ers have to check the source to find out if it applies to us...

Par for the course, I guess, checking the source ...

Alas O2....

[fm6]

I don't know the hardware well enough to say what's "comparable" to the O2, but there's a good reason it's the last of its type -- it's a money loser. Like all of SGIs desktop systems, the O2 just couldn't compete with comodity systems. It makes sense for SGI to concentrate on massively-parallel systems, where there's less competition.