ATI Releases Drivers for XFree 4.3.0

Kyouryuu writes "ATI has finally released official drivers for XFree 4.3.0 and updated their Linux drivers to 3.7.0 for supported XFree versions, several months after the originally proposed release date of April last year. Although Schneider Digital has previously made available unofficial drivers, Linux users who have ATI Radeon cards can now benefit from an official release. Unfortunately, ATI still insists on using RPM exclusively and keeping the drivers closed source."

Comments

closed source != bad always

[grennis]

Unfortunately, ATI still insists on using RPM exclusively and keeping the drivers closed source

So what if the drivers are closed source? ATI cant and wont expose the low level details of their hardware's functionality to competitors. Whats the difference anyway? It is naive to think that you could even understand, let alone improve, what the engineers - who know the hardware intimately - have written? And by the way, Nvidia does not publish its source either...

Re:closed source != bad always

[xSauronx]

can someone comment on how these perform? im heavily considering putting linux back on my box, but ive gotta be able to game...are these new ATI drivers anywhere near as good as nVidias as far as performance is concerned in relation to the performance in windows?

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's really naive to think that someone else might be able to spot the deadlocks I seem to get from my ATI drivers. Especially since it's a software problem, not a hardware one.

Clearly software engineers would not be able to help this at all and you're definately not trolling. I mean, duh!

Re:closed source != bad always

[BoomerSooner]

Oh bullshit. You're telling me that nVidia cannot reverse engineer the binary?

It's about control, nothing more, nothing less.

Re:closed source != bad always

[lubricated]

> So what if the drivers are closed source?

No porting to ppc. No fixing minor bugs if they come up. No customizing the drivers to a particular application. No tinkering. No learning.

> ATI cant and wont expose the low level details of their hardware's functionality to competitors.

They can but they won't. Their competitors have competent engineers that can reverse engineer the stuff if needed. It's all in software anyway.

> Whats the difference anyway?

see above.

> It is naive to think that you could even understand, let alone improve, what the engineers - who know the hardware intimately - have written?

I think you are naive. There are plenty of smart people that do alot of linux work. Surely they know linux better than ATI, and thus they may be able to improve the drivers since it's not just the hardware that these drivers are specific too. Also they may be able to port the drivers to PPC or BSD.

> And by the way, Nvidia does not publish its source either...

What's your point? It would be better if they did.

Re:closed source != bad always

[fedork]

I doubt competitors can benefit by using info from driver sources. And you also seem to be contradicting yourself - on one hand can improve it but the engineers, on the other hand competitors can abuse it somehow... This really does not add up. I beleive the real reason is plain old beaurocracy.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Gyorg_Lavode]

I honestly don't know what about nvidia is open or closed, but I do ,now 90% of my installs of nvidia drivers they recompile at least a portion of it to match my kernel. There are a lot of kernels out there and if ATI's drivers can't be compiled to match them they are much less useful.

Re:closed source != bad always

[wehe]

So why are other companies able to provide their drivers as Open Source? Do you think the developers of for example XFree86 were not capable to do a good job?

Anyway I like Open Source drivers. BTW: Don't forget to sign the Intel Support of Centrino Under Linux Petition. See more details about Linux on Centrino laptops.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

So what if the drivers are closed source? ATI cant and wont expose the low level details of their hardware's functionality to competitors. Whats the difference anyway?

The difference is that this is Slashdot where the cranks di tutti cranks hang out. ATI could give away free video cards, open source all their drivers, and hire a bunch of strippers to come to your house and make you birthday cake... and the Slashdot crowd would still piss and moan.

Re:closed source != bad always

[wfberg]

So what if the drivers are closed source? ATI cant and wont expose the low level details of their hardware's functionality to competitors. Whats the difference anyway? It is naive to think that you could even understand, let alone improve, what the engineers - who know the hardware intimately - have written? And by the way, Nvidia does not publish its source either...

It's naive to think ATI's competitors don't have a much better understanding of their hardware than whatever can be gleaned from their drivers' sources, especially if you consider that they can already reverse-engineer the binaries better than any random Joe, seeing as they have actual money to sink into it. And there's the thing about them making the same sort of hardware.

Having the source would greatly benefit the little people though. These cards will sometime go End-Of-Live, and the manufacturer won't support them.

Perhaps the source won't be released to hide the fact these "engineers - who know the hardware intimately" make code that is in fact cruddy at times, and that it contains bugs than random Open Source jockeys can fix.

Though it's likelier that the drivers simply contain patented/copyrighted stuff they sublicensed from third-parties that are paranoid about anyone seeing it.

Re:closed source != bad always

[zzabur]

Whats the difference anyway?

Even if we don't count idiological issues, closed source drivers mean numerous annoyances to the users.

For example:

• Drivers can be buggy, and there is no way to fix it. (NVidia drivers are hang my system all the time.)
• Closed source drivers need additional EULAs and thus often cannot easily be distiributed with Linux distributions.
• Drivers need to be installed separately, which is annying, sometimes difficult and may break your system. (this is also true for Windows)
• When some new soft/hardware appears (like AMD64, 2.6 kernel), one has usually wait for months for drivers to be updated.
• Source-based distributions like Gentoo cannot compile new, performance optimized version, if driver is distributed as a binary.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you are saying if it is possible to reverse engineer ati's hardware then they should make it easy to reverse engineer their hardware. What is the reasoning behind this statement?

Re:closed source != bad always

[y0bhgu0d]

ati just released an XF86 driver, not a kernel driver. only part of nvidia's kernel driver is compiled, and the xf86 driver most definantly isnt compiled.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Endive4Ever]

These cards will sometime go End-Of-Live, and the manufacturer won't support them.


Graphics cards that have gone 'end-of-life' in the past have been dropped by the XFree86 team themselves. An example is the S3 Trio chipset cards. Sure, an ambitious hacker could forward-port support themselves. However, this points out that 'free software' people abandon hardware as well, rendering it worthless to anybody but the most diligent.

Re:closed source != bad always

[damballah]

What's worse is that RPM is NOT the only binary package availabe for linux. Hence Debian, Gentoo, and Slack users are missing on it. At least NVIDIA's binaries are written in sh, something any linux distro has...

Re:closed source != bad always

[Paleomacus]

Because when nVidia wants to know something about ATI drivers it's only slightly less trivial to get the information when the driver source is closed than open.

Re:closed source != bad always

[bl8n8r]

> It is naive to think that you could even
> understand, let alone improve,

I get to stare at "professional" code every day. It is nothing like what was in the textbooks. There is acres of room for improvement. silly little things like something called a buffer overflow are present in many of the implementations. I cannont believe my eyes somedays, and it's a wonder that the product that this certain company puts out, functions at all. It is under the cover of closed-source that these things are allowed to persist, and will probably never change. The company just keeps issuing patches and revisions and fixes what is terminally broken. Futhermore, the only reason these "bugs" exist is simply do to human laziness; something that could be overcome by another simple human, with the right principles, without an "intimate knowlege" of the hardware.

Re:closed source != bad always

[pe1rxq]

PPC is more than just Apple....
But you could replace PPC with any non ati supported platform: AMD64, MIPS, ALPHA, SPARC, whatever-commes-next-week.

Jeroen

Re:closed source != bad always

[Jeffrey Baker]

The 3.7.0 drivers (which, btw, have been out for over a month before this Slashdot headline) are absolutely terrible. I was getting 10-15fps in UT2004 at any resolution on a Radeon 9700. I reverted to the previous release.

Re:closed source != bad always

[HiThere]

One effect of the drivers being closed source is that new kernels must wait on the convenience of the manufacturer for support. Another effect of the drivers being closed source is that when a model is discontinued, support can go away, and your card becomes worthless. (The second argument is really a part of the first argument.)

There may be others, but those are sufficient for me. I won't be paying for high end cards. I've had too much experience with closed source applications breaking with system patches & upgrades. If that's likely to happen, I'm no longer willing to fork out a wad of cash.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Nurf]

So what if the drivers are closed source? ATI cant and wont expose the low level details of their hardware's functionality to competitors. Whats the difference anyway? It is naive to think that you could even understand, let alone improve, what the engineers - who know the hardware intimately - have written? And by the way, Nvidia does not publish its source either...

I design hardware for a living, and you are wrong. There is no real benefit to hiding your hardware internals from the rest of the world. It's a knee-jerk PHB thing. It has no bearing on reality.

If you are scared of your competitors, then hiding your hardware internals costs them maybe a week, because:

1) They know how to do everything you do, anyway.
2) What they don't know they can figure out in under a week, if they put an engineer or two on it. The delta between what they do and what you do is minimal, and anything they want to know is trivial to reverse engineer.

There might be "IP" issues, which usually means there is stuff in there protected by a stupidly restrictive license with another company. In my experience, the IP usually isn't worth the bother, or if it is, the license is only restrictive because lawyers simply assume it has to be. They come from a zero sum world, and never think of any other possibilities unless you start witholding cookies.

Usually, being closed will cost your partners much more than a week - they don't just want to learn what you did, they need to interface to it, and that is _hard_. It requires much better information than simply figuring out a trick your competitor used.

I will say it again: It is very rare and unlikely that closing your software helps in a situation like this.

Re:closed source != bad always

[dinivin]

That's ood, I'm happily using the drivers on two Debian systems.

OF course, I would be happier if they drivers were open source, but not because they're simply packaged as RPMs.

Dinivin

Re:closed source != bad always

[timeOday]

So what if the drivers are closed source? ATI cant and wont expose the low level details of their hardware's functionality to competitors. Whats the difference anyway?

In my case it makes the drivers unusable.

I wanted to plug my laptop into a 1600x1200 LCD using DVI. If you select "linux laptop driver download" at the ATI site, it says "go ask the manufacturer." Oh, goody, corporate marketing BS fingerpointing.

But IBM doesn't support 1600x1200 over DVI on my laptop. Why? Who knows. Supposedly under Windows you can get it by hacking the registry. But IBM doesn't feel like supporting it. More corporate BS.

So you go back to the ATI site and download the Mobile FireGL driver, if you're persistent enough to think of trying it on the M9 Radeon chip. Turns out it does work, but they won't tell you that due to even more corporate marketing BS.

You find that it almost works, but makes a sparkling or shimmering effect from random bit errors at 1600x1200. From the open source radeon driver mailing list, it appears that the fix is very simple. But ATI got it wrong and of course a closed source driver can't be fixed. Of course you could try to contact the ATI engineers, tell them the solution, and maybe they'll send you a fix. In your dreams.

Meanwhile the open source radeon driver runs 1600x1200 over DVI just fine. Some versions did create the shimmering effect, so somebody posted to a mailing list and helped the developer figure out what was wrong and it got fixed.

So yeah, closed source is different.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

What is it with you? As good as the "Open Source" or "Free Software" ideals are, there are other concerns.

Just because the competition can reverse engineer ATI's stuff doesn't mean that ATI should hand it to them. Would you like for ATI to gift wrap it too?

It is naive to think that you could improve on what ATI design engineers came up with. They designed the product, you didn't. Get over it.

So, to summarize, the parent post is right. Closed source is not nesscessarily bad. Not everything is going to be open source, and that's not always a bad thing.

Re:closed source != bad always

[perlchild]

But nvidia's drivers can be installed on j random debian kernel and debian-built kernel, well all that I've tried anyways(nvidia's module includes a dri interface that links to the kernel). Source is a preferred medium for many things which have to hook with kernels(which are source-built for many people).
Will ATI help other distros incorporate their "gift" or will they just tout redhat's horn?

Re:closed source != bad always

[tjrw]

I'm not sure I see your point. Of course people aren't going to continue to work on an support a driver for hardware that no longer exists except in a museum. That would be crazy. The point is that if the source to an older driver is available, and it is somehow vitally important to you that you keep your ancient hardware yet need to update Xfree (not clear why this would be anyway), you always have that option. You can hack on it yourself if you're sufficiently talented or you can pay someone if you're not.

Or you can continue to use the older driver and software. People who are using a machine in production as opposed to a toy have few compelling reasons to "upgrade" bugfixes notwithstanding, if their current platform is doing its job.

So, yes, open-source developers "abandon hardware" too, but that doesn't leave the hardware owner stranded which is not the case for hardware that only has closed source drivers.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree.

First of all, the ideas and low level details of the hardware's functionality should be available to those who pay money for the card. If those ideas are advances in human knowledge, they can be patented and then the competitors can't copy them. If they aren't, then why should we give up access to them ? We aren't getting new research in return. Keeping these things secrete is giving up something (access and control) with out getting anything (investment in new research and technology) in return. I find it saddening that someone can post a knee-jerk defence of secrecy, invoking only "competitors" as a reason, and get modded up. Slashdot should have moved beyond this by now.

I stopped buying NVidia chips precisely because of their closed source drivers. You see, the reason why NVidia and now ATI go closed source is that much of their work is actually software, not hardware, work. The implementation of the functionality which is NOT on the card, but in the driver, matters a lot. NVidia was well known far having good cards simply because the software implementation of certain OpenGL fucntions was excellent. If they released the source, those would be copied by all other graphics drivers -- and then NVidia would have to compete on the quality of their hardware, which is exactly what they don't want to have to do and what is in our best interest for them to do.

By allowing more and more functionality in secrete non-Free drivers, you are essentially allowing your system to gradually become a proprietary OS with a bunch of cheap hardware dongles hanging on it. This is what Apple does.

You say "It is naive to think that you could even understand, let alone improve, what the engineers - who know the hardware intimately - have written?" Apart from the fact that your question mark is on a sentence that is not a queston, this shows a naive and uninformed view of technical history. It shows you are the kind of person who looks at computing as a matter of reading Tom's Hardware and applying your "informed" reasoning to picking components off a shelf and plugging them together.

Perhaps you would be happier with a Mac. Then you could have a unix-like operating system, with about as much freedom as you care about, and an ATI card to boot.

Re:closed source != bad always

[NDPTAL85]

Whether its apple or not is irrelevant. Economies of scale come into play here. Since less of them are produced then the cost is higher for non-intel/amd platforms.

Re:closed source != bad always

[xSauronx]

how much better was the previous release?

thanks

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. These GPL fanatics are running /.

Re:closed source != bad always

[AntiTuX]

I know this kinda seems like a silly question, but what 3d applications and games run on linuxPPC, that'd require a 3d driver. I mean, for X, and console, why not just use framebuffer? I mean, it should work right? (I don't know, because I haven't owned an ATI card in about.... I'd say 7 years now)

Why do you need to port to sparc, or alpha, or anything else? Last time I checked, I didn't think there was a linux PPC port of quake III.

Dunno. I have nvidia cards all around. I don't do anything that requires 3d acceleration.

I know you want the option and everything, and you want to keep the kernel "pure", and all that bullshit, but seriously, you don't need 3d support. If you wanna play games, you're gonna get a windows box anyhow.

Don't make me sound like a windows lover or anything, I'm just being realistic.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Kyouryuu]

I've never had luck getting these to go with Mepis Linux, a Debian variant. Even with Alien, it proves to be more trouble that it's worth. It would be far easier if ATI made their installation scheme more generic, like a sh script.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Richard_at_work]

If Nvidia can, why cant whoever wants to produce an opensource driver? Learn to live with what you are given, if you continue to dislike someone because they do not share your beleifs then you are going to be very dissappointed with life.

Re:closed source != bad always

[lubricated]

What is illogical about using linux on an ibook?

Just because the software is free doesn't mean it's worse. Plenty of us, myself included prefer it over OSX which is just a resource intensive pig with a poor UI, bad cli, and missing key parts of the unix system.

Re:closed source != bad always

[thre5her]

#emerge ati-drivers

Yep, we're missing out.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

PPC? Using "free software" on a MORE EXPENSIVE hardware platform is highly illogical.

Well, let's use the term "open source" here so that you can't play ignorant about the two totally different meanings of "free" anymore.

Apple hardware is generally pretty high-quality (and especially the laptops' quality/price ratio is quite good). There are people who both appreciate Apple hardware and don't want to use any proprietary software.

And as someone pointed out earlier, PPC is not the only platform left out.

Re:closed source != bad always

[lubricated]

> It is naive to think that you could improve on what ATI design engineers came up with. They designed the product, you didn't. Get over it.

It's not naive to think that someone could find a bug and/or improve it, and/or customize it, and/or port it, and/or support it after ati stops.

So to summarize your arguments are worthless dribble.

Re:closed source != bad always

[lubricated]

blender comes to mind. Furthermore there is the chicken and the egg problem. No 3d drivers untill the applications come. No applications untill 3d comes.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Usquebaugh]

It's very doubtful that either Nvida or ATI do not know what is in each others past, current and future cards. The driver would not expose anything that is not already known.

The improvement is not what most people want, they want the ability to easily support their graphics card. When Nvidia/ATI moves on to the next release of hardware do you think they are going to want to support the current stuff?

Re:closed source != bad always

[randomblast]

>BTW: Don't forget to sign the Intel Support of Centrino Under Linux Petition.

Check this out. Closed-source, but it's better than nothing

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, trivial unimportant things like pixel vertex shaders.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Cyclops]

bzflag, tuxracer, chromium, etc.. etc.. . etc...

Re:closed source != bad always

[Endive4Ever]

My point was that 'average folks' can't use the hardware because support has evaporated. Wether it is open or closed source. The kind of enthusiasts who would be capable of backporting the driver are also the kind of people most likely to invest in the latest hotdog hardware, leaving the old stuff abandoned in the dust.

So it's all the same in the end, and there's no 'great tragedy' in closed source drivers that isn't also about the same with open source drivers.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Bombcar]

bombcar MP3s # emerge -p ati-drivers

These are the packages that I would merge, in order:

Calculating dependencies ...done!
[ebuild N ] app-arch/rpm2targz-9.0-r2
[ebuild N ] media-video/ati-drivers-3.2.8-r1

Gotta love "rpm2targz"!

Re:closed source != bad always

[forlornhope]

ATI cant and wont expose the low level details of their hardware's functionality to competitors.

I dont know why so many people use that argument. Its pretty much BS. ATI and Nvidia have totally different archetectures in how their cards do graphics. I dont remember the exact differences right now, but it would be very difficult to incorporate anything you learned from one's drivers into the other's products. Also there is this little thing called patents that would also stop such a theft. Im sure ATI has patents on all the intresting parts of its products that would keep nvidia from stealing them.

The main reason for ATI not open sourcing their drivers is plain and simple; its that corprate mentality of not giving away anything for free. Im not arguing that thats wrong or anything, its their driver to do what they want with, but just recognize the real reason for what they are doing. ATI is a corporation and Im sure if enough people sent emails saying how much they loved their ATI cards and how much it would make them love their ATI cards even more, and buy more of the beloved cards, if they had good high quality open sourced drivers to run their cards. Im sure ATI would open source the drivers if it got enough such emails. Isnt that how people got them to produce linux drivers and give specs to developers in the first place?

Re:closed source != bad always

[AntiTuX]

This might sound odd, but isn't tuxracer closed source? They haven't released an open-source version in like, 3 years. On top of that, uhm.. I just checked the webpage, and they don't even offer a ppc port.
I haven't even heard of chromium or bzflag.

Nothing amazing's gonna happen in the linux gaming world till id finishes up Doom 3. That's kinda a given. When that happens, then we'll see the comeback we had before. And while you're bitching about your closed-source drivers, I'm gonna be using them, on my x86 linux box, fragging demons.

kthx, drive through.

Re:closed source != bad always

[bfree]

Any Free software for x86 "could" be ported to ppc, some do use assembler, but most don't. So you could want to use blender or play quake at present (for example), and if Linux PPC is supported it makes the choice Free Software gives all the greater as you can also choose your platform instead of choosing x86 or no 3d. As it is, ati using PPC'ians (and Apple went all ati didn't they) are "stuck" without the choice of trying ATI's binary drivers. To be honest I'm happier with minimal binary releases as it keeps more people working on the Free drivers which are not going to "force" you to go to particular kernels or versions of X (what's next for ATI, will they release for XFree86 4.4 or will they join the 'splitters').

Re:closed source != bad always

[bhtooefr]

It goes here, which is a page saying that they're working on it.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Ichimusai]

It is naive to think that you could even understand, let alone improve, what the engineers - who know the hardware intimately - have written?

If that would be true, would it not be equally naive to believe that ATI knows all the inner workings and quirks of Linux as intimately as those who spend all their (free) time hacking the kernel?

Just a thought...

Re:closed source != bad always

[SkunkPussy]

> I won't be paying for high end cards.

Perhaps you're not into highend games or decent graphics. I bought a 9600 pro about 6 months ago on the basis that if I can't get it to work well in linux, then bollocks I'll just have to reboot to windows.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Heretik]

Troll. You know exactly why people get angry when things like this are made proprietary.

GNU/Linux is about 'open source', deal with it. If you don't care, go use Windows (or OSX, or Solaris, or ....)

Re:closed source != bad always

[Cthefuture]

NVidia drivers are hang my system all the time.

I'm curious as to what hardware you're using? Motherboard, CPU, graphics card, etc. And what Linux distro (version of XFree)?

I've never had a single problem with probably 5 or 6 systems I've used the nVidia Linux drivers on over the years (including stuff like laptops). I want to know what to avoid.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

You are bullshit.

Buy urself a cheap card that comes with an open sores driver or manufacture your own.

Re:closed source != bad always

[DF5JT]

" So why are other companies able to provide their drivers as Open Source? "

In the graphics sector? Name one (No, a three year old Matrox doesn't cut it).

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are scared of your competitors, then hiding your hardware internals costs them maybe a week, because:

1) They know how to do everything you do, anyway.
2) What they don't know they can figure out in under a week, if they put an engineer or two on it. The delta between what they do and what you do is minimal, and anything they want to know is trivial to reverse engineer.

So I guess whoever wrote the industrial espionage laws was trippin', right? Because no one ever bothers with industrial espionage when you can just figure out any technology for yourself in a week, right?

Re:closed source != bad always

[be-fan]

If their binary is anything like NVIDIA's driver, that'd be a dozen megabytes of code to reverse engineer! Remember, a graphics driver is *not* a simple register-banger. Its an entire implementation of OpenGL. Much of that code is more or less hardware-independent, and has to do with optimizing display lists and whatnot. Reverse engineering the driver would be extremely difficult.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

"ATI cant and wont expose the low level details of their hardware's functionality to competitors."

This is not true. The real reason the graphics cards makers don't want to open things up is due to the high-end market.

See, the high-end market pays THOUSANDS of dollars for a single graphics card that can do one thing better: draw lines. The difference between these thousand-dollar monstrosities and the consumer cards?

The driver.

That's it. Nothing else. In consumer cards, the driver detects if the user is drawing lines and purposely slows down. The professional drivers don't have this misfeature.

So, if they open up their drivers, all the sudden they can't gouge their customers any longer as some driver hacker will make a driver that doesn't slow things down on purpose. All that cash that high-end graphics customers are willing to toss away suddenly evaporates. Anti-trust lawsuits might even follow.

Both nVidia and ATI could open their cards, but to do so means, at best, a sharp cutting of their margins at the high end.

Re:closed source != bad always

[be-fan]

1) Because most other drivers are an order of magnitude simpler. Your modem driver, for example, does not need to do complex reordering of display lists to optimize performance. Also, OpenGL drivers are an entire OpenGL implementation. So its like open-sourcing not just your modem driver, but your whole IP stack.

2) No slight to the XFree86 developers, but:

a) Many of the XFree86 drivers (eg: nv) are significantly slower than their proprietory counterparts and in any case 2D is much easier to do drivers for than 3D,

b) The DRI project has not released any drivers that take full-advantage of the hardware. NVIDIA's binary driver will get you exact same performance and the exact same features the Windows driver has. The DRI drivers for Radeons are not only *much* slower, but don't even support basic features like vertex/pixel shaders!

Re:closed source != bad always

[BoomerSooner]

They can. As the poster below pointed out it's a very large project though. The drivers are several megs from what I've seen.

In a perfect world Intel would open-source their Centrino WiFi drivers. Until then I have to run Linux in VMWare on my IBM T41 Laptop. Sometimes you have to be happy with something instead of bitching about the fact that the drivers are closed source. I'd love to have closed source drivers for my 802.11g card. Beats the hell out of nothing.

I remember using Linux in the mid 90's and trying to program my dot clocks to work properly in my newish graphics card. Linux amazes me daily in how far it has come. Yet in the real world (run by businesses) you get what they decide to give you, not what you think they should do or what you think you deserve.

Hell I'm not sure anyone outside Linus and RMS deserve to use Linux & GNU tools.

Re:closed source != bad always

[zzabur]

The system is around 2.5 years old. It has Mandrake Linux 9.1, ASUS A7V mainboard, ASUS V7700/64Mb GForce2/GTS display card, AMD Athlon 1 GHz CPU, 256Mb RAM and 40Gb IBM HD.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand. Windows users don't get open-source drivers. Why should we? Not that it wouldn't be great if they would release open-source drivers, but what's with the attitude? All too often, I see people commenting about how they refuse to use a company's product because they have closed-source Linux drivers. Hello? Why should a company support Open-Source when believers in Open-Source aren't supporting them?

I mean, really people... baby steps... we'll get 'em on our side... don't worry.

Re:closed source != bad always

[be-fan]

Look, I care about freedom too. I use Open Source software whenever possible, and have sent in patches and stuff for it too. However, I'm willing to draw the line somewhere. For me, that line is: I'll use OSS software, unless it doesn't do what I need it to do. This is a case where OSS software doesn't do what I need it to do.

There are NO good OSS 3D drivers. By good I mean as fast and as full-featured as the Windows drivers for the same card. The DRI ATI drivers don't even support shaders! When OSS manages to make a good set of drivers for the R100 or R200 (whose specs *are* available) then they can say "OSS drivers would be better!" Until then, its just whining.

Re:closed source != bad always

[dont_think_twice]

ATI could give away free video cards, open source all their drivers, and hire a bunch of strippers to come to your house and make you birthday cake... and the Slashdot crowd would still piss and moan.

That depends - are they open-source strippers?

Re:closed source != bad always

[Xabraxas]

So what if the drivers are closed source? ATI cant and wont expose the low level details of their hardware's functionality to competitors. Whats the difference anyway?

It makes a big difference when you have a laptop. The drivers are specific to each different configuration since the monitors are all very different. With so many different configurations, without an open source driver, hardware acceleration in laptops is impossible. None of these hardware companies make Linux drivers for their laptops and I doubt they're going to start soon. With an open source driver, each configuration could be tweaked for different laptops by the community.

Re:closed source != bad always

[3.1415926535]

Older versions of the driver have locked up on every single computer I've ever used that has an AMD processor and a VIA chipset when you restart X (it works perfectly the first time, but the second causes a panic). A friend with such a system claims the new drivers fix the problem. I wouldn't know myself, because I haven't rebooted since two releases ago.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

The only good reason to use Apple is because they deliver the whole package. What makes the ibook worthwhile and the reason macs are known to "just work" is largely due to the OS.

Running Linux on an ibook is pointless. You needlessly put yourself into two minorities:

1) PPC users
2) Linux users

Compounded together, that makes for a LOT of incompatible hardware and software, which (at least in my case) would lead to lots of headaches.

Plus you have to deal with slow/overpriced PPC hardware that delivers almost 2x less price/performance as compared to x86s

Re:closed source != bad always

[boffy_b]

1. Some people will not use any proprietary on moral grounds 2. Nvidia does not use RPMs, they use shell-based installers for their drivers 3. I'd bet a lot of people know X as/more intimately than ATI programmersm I'd bet improvements could be made on that side...and what about th guy who released th unofficial driver?

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, then it would suck as much as GUS which just keeps getting bashed around here..

Re:closed source != bad always

[Tet]

There are NO good OSS 3D drivers. [...] When OSS manages to make a good set of drivers for the R100 or R200 (whose specs *are* available) then they can say "OSS drivers would be better!" Until then, its just whining.

No, it's not just whining. Freedom is important to some of us (for both pragmatic and idealistic reasons). I'd rather have a slightly slower driver than a fast clsoed source one, and to be honest, I haven't noticed my RV100 being particularly slow. It's more than good enough for what I use -- mostly 2D, plus some 3D gaming and home brewed OpenGL apps. Are other cards faster? Probably. Would I really notice? Maybe. Would the extra speed really be worth giving up my freedom? Nope. Note that I run a very heterogeneous network, running Linux not only on x86, but also on Sparc, Alpha, PPC, MIPS and (as of a couple of weeks ago) ARM. In fact, I think I've got all of the major architectures covered now :-) Closed source drivers tend to only be available for x86.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

"So what if the drivers are closed source?"

SDL_Perl crashes in the Nvidia driver in my system when loading OpenGL. Sinc Nvididas driver is closed-source, nobody except them can debug it.

closed-source is evil in the driver case.

Cheers,

Tels

Re:closed source != bad always

[blixel]

I have an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB. I have been playing with UT2K4 for the last couple of weeks since it was released for Linux. I thought it was running pretty well on my system ... until I booted over to Windows and gave it a try. What a disappointment. Under Windows my frame rate is - *at the very least* - more than twice as high (which gives me significantly smoother play - I never thought it was jerky or anything under Linux, but it's **WAY** smoother under Windows). And visually, just about everything looks at least a little bit better, and in some cases, a LOT better. Lighting effects, wall textures, fog/smoke, and especially the flags on the walls in CTF. They look silky smooth in Windows and wave in the wind ... under Linux they are much morer flat looking and almost pixelated. I guess it's the difference between OpenGL and DirectX? And the sound quality under Windows is also signifcantly better. Reverb, echo, stadium sound, whatever it is... it sounds great in Windows.

I'm pretty bummed out about it actually because I don't feel like there's anything I can do to make it better under Linux. (Updating to the 2.6 kernel didn't help. I'm running the latest drivers for my video card and I've downloaded the nForce2 Linux drivers from nvidia for my motherboard's integrated sound. (ASUS A7N8X Deluxe, rev. 2.0)

I still prefer Linux ... games just are a significant factor for me... but it was still a real let down.

Re:closed source != bad always

[beakburke]

Don't most of the "unsupported" cards work with the generic vesa driver?? I wouldnt write accelerated drivers for cards that old either.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

S3/Via provide full source to their official drivers, and have also released the code to the CLE266 MPEG decoder. These drivers will also support the new chipset they are currently developing.

SiS have provided source and support to the SiS driver project (Done by one guy whos name escapes me right now).

As you note, Matrox used to but stopped providing drivers right around the G400/450. Then they had an anurism, went crazy and even pulled the entire Developer Relations program which used to provide full documentation on all their chipsets. Now their a closed "La la la I can't hear you!" shop.

Shame really.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Overly Critical Guy]

a resource intensive pig with a poor UI, bad cli, and missing key parts of the unix system.

Many more people say the same thing about the current Linux desktop.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

> So I guess whoever wrote the industrial espionage laws was trippin', right? Because no one ever bothers with industrial espionage when you can just figure out any technology for yourself in a week, right?

So you're telling us you don't know the difference between industrial spying and reverse engineering? Or maybe you think there is no difference, eh Darl?

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi,

I'm running Linux on my iBook as my main OS, I'm almost never using OS X. I know several other people doing it also.

If you like Linux and you like Mac hardware or you want a laptop with good mobility factor (long battery life, quiet - no fan, not becoming hot etc.), why you would not buy ppc hardware?

Usually, I choose the hardware the most appriate for the task. Linux runs on a lot of hardware.

Why buy x86-based if for my needs, the iBook was better?

Re:closed source != bad always

[DanielJH]

Seeing both the replies mentioned AMD chips...

Some AMD CPU's had issues with memory transfers. The issues usally showed up only when doing high CPU loads and high AGP loads. This happens anytime you are running a graphics intensive application. AMD quietly published a patch for Windows, but never bothered to inform Linux users. :-(

It is simply fixed by adding mem=nopentium to the kernel launch in lilo.conf, etc. Do a search of the NVidia readme file for the informaion. We have one AMD box that was very unstable until this flag was attached. Afterwards, we had no additional problems.

Re:closed source != bad always

[glitch23]

ATI could give away free video cards, open source all their drivers, and hire a bunch of strippers to come to your house and make you birthday cake... and the Slashdot crowd would still piss and moan.

What do you expect? You think we just take anything that is good looking and can produce a lot of heat? We do have standards you know. We don't just take any free video card ;)

Re:closed source != bad always

[gaj]

You are either ignorant, stupid or a troll.

I'll assume the first, and attempt to educate you. I've already pissed off a bunch of people who instead provided the usual whiny /. repsonse to your (possibly unintiontional) troll, so I figure I better piss off the rest. wheee!

So what if the drivers are closed source?

I value my time far to much to fully answer this one, but there are many reasons for preferring open source: philosophy, practicality, curiosity and quality are four of the biggest.

ATI cant [sic] and wont [sic] expose the low level details of their hardware's functionality to competitors.

This is, frankly, mostly an argument made by marketing and PHBs (and people who just plain don't know any better, but I repeat myself). The fact is, they can and they will. They have no choice if they want to ship a product. Rest assured that, to the extent that they care to, NVIDIA knows lots about the low level details of the ATI designs. Having the source to the drivers would be a small bit of help, but, frankly, things move so fast that by the time a competitor could reverse engineer ATI's current feature set and figure out a way to integrate sait technology into their own, ATI would have rolled on to the next level. The architectures of the leading solutions are sufficiently different that reverse engineering the competitor is of primarily academic value (and perhaps a bit of marketing). Both ATI and NVIDIA have some of the best engineers in the world on their teams ... I assure you, we engineers would much rather design new stuff the copy someone else's stuff. Hell, more often than not developers will reinvent the f'ing wheel rather than use something NIH.

Whats the difference anyway? It is naive to think that you could even understand, let alone improve, what the engineers - who know the hardware intimately - have written?

You must be kidding, right? Not only are there plenty of engineers reading /., but, frankly, if the code is so poorly written that a reasonably smart person who knows C can't figure it out given specs and time, it probably sucks ass and I probably don't want to be running it anyway. The lowest levels of driver code can indeed be twisty, but much of this stuff is code to present an interface to client code. Also, while Joe User may well not be able to understand the code, a) the XFree86 folks sure as hell can and b) if it mattered enough he could hire someone who does understand it. One of the beauties of open source, BTW.

And by the way, Nvidia does not publish its source either...

You f'ed up, man. You got one accurate (if obvious) point into your message. Bad troll ... no cookie.

HTH HAND

or not

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

But IBM doesn't support 1600x1200 over DVI on my laptop. Why?

A single cable doesn't have enough bandwidth to manage 1600x1200 at more than 60Hz refresh. (go check the DVI spec) There may be other parts in their system that they can't guarantee with that much bandwidth either, and they'd rather disable it than get a lot of support calls.

Re:closed source != bad always

[be-fan]

I'd rather have a slightly slower driver than a fast clsoed source one

At least frame it correctly. Its not "slightly slower." Its much slower, sometimes by several times. The trade-off is not a little bit of speed for a lot of freedom. Its turning your $300 graphics card into a $75 card, for a very little bit of extra freedom. Unlike an OS, or major software app, you're not tied into drivers. If the constraints of a closed-source driver become too much, I can switch out my card and its drivers in a matter of hours.

As far as I'm concerned, begging manufacturers to open source their drivers is whining. I don't think the OSS spirit is about forcing people to open their code. If they choose to, great. If they don't, well, we can just code something better. That's precisely what GNU did to UNIX. Now the issue at hand is that the OSS community has *not* been able to produce something that can replace this proprietory code. Until that happens, they really don't have a solid bargaining position.

Re:closed source != bad always

[John Hurliman]

There IS a solution... buy an Nvidia card. I remember when ATI cards were considered junk, the only decent thing they had was the All-In-Wonder and the drivers were terrible. Then ATI decides to get competitive and release a GPU that performs marginally better than Nvidia's latest offering in benchmarks, now all the gaming fanboys are raving over ATI. Problem is they STILL don't know how to write proper drivers. Nvidia drivers have always been on top of the game, supporting extensions like XvMC before 90% of the open source drivers were even thinking about it. I'm not getting paid to plug Nvidia, in fact I'd say buy a Matrox G400 (top notch dual-head and 2d acceleration, possibly the most solidly designed video card ever, full open source drivers that do everything and the kitchen sink), but people like 3d acceleration.

Re:closed source != bad always

[timeOday]

A single cable doesn't have enough bandwidth to manage 1600x1200 at more than 60Hz refresh. (go check the DVI spec)

I did mention it's an LCD panel, and 60Hz is perfect for an LCD panel. And let me tell you my 1600x1200 21" LCD2180UX looks awesome hooked up to the T40 through DVI using the open source driver. People accpting IBM's phony limitation at face value are missing out, and witholding useful information from customers because it just might lead to a bit of hassle is a perfect example of "corporate BS."

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

There was evidence to prove that Overly Critical Guy is a lying cocksucker, but he deleted it. Think independently.

Re:closed source != bad always

[noda132]

Because when nVidia wants to know something about ATI drivers it's only slightly less trivial to get the information when the driver source is closed than open.

The GNU GPL is about 15 years old now. That's precisely the kind of software abuse it's made for. If ATI released its drivers under the GPL, nVidia would have to do the same to copy any code from the ATI drivers.

Drivers aren't (supposed to be) what you pay for when you buy a piece of hardware; you pay for the hardware. The common excuse to keep drivers closed-source isn't the one quoted above; the concern is (supposedly) that ATI is afraid nVidia will notice architectural advantages of the Radeon series and integrate those into its hardware.

But what's the big deal? From drawing board to mass production is a matter of years; by the time a driver is released it's too late for the competition to integrate design ideas into its current product line.

What would open-source drivers bring, then? They'd bring the competition back to where it belongs: the hardware. Is GeForce or Radeon design better for most games? Nobody knows -- the driver hides how good the chips themselves are. (Personally, I'm under the impression ATI's chips are more powerful and their drivers are garbage.) Open-source drivers and open specs would benefit any company that released them; they'd also benefit the customer. And what if all hardware companies saw the light and released open-source drivers and open specs? Then they'd still compete much as they do today, and their customers would be better off.

Re:closed source != bad always

[blixel]

There IS a solution... buy an Nvidia card.

I am seriously considering doing just that. Though I am wondering if it will improve the graphics so they look as good as they do under Windows, or if it would just increase my frame rate. Even though the latter would still make it worth the switch.

Also - I'm wondering what kind of dual head support NVidia cards have. I'm using both the DVI and VGA on my Radeon 9800 Pro. Unfortunately the "big desktop" configuration makes it so that when I maximize a Window, it maximizes across both screens. And when I open a new Window, it will almost always open right between the two screens and the first thing I'll have to do is reposition the new window. It's quite annoying.

Finally ... what video card would you recommend as an equal to or greater than replacement for a Radeon 9800 Pro w/ 256MB? (I said 128MB in my previous message by mistake. I know 256MB is a waste at this point, but I got such a good deal on it I didn't see any reason to pass it up.)

Re:closed source != bad always

[mwilliamson]

Dammit! This driver still mis-identifies a VIA KT400 chipset. I'll have to hack the module source, once again. This pisses me off because this VIA KT400 based board is supposed to be linux certified. ATI should concentrate on these "linux certified" boards first. BTW, here is a link to the modification.

Do you remember your monitor's refresh rates and hsync? I recommend backing up your old XF86Config so you can modify the monitor section back to what your installation detected.

Redhat/Fedora both use the XFS font server. This driver seems to have trouble with it. This isn't that big a deal since I can stick my fontpath info in the XF86Config file, but I'd really rather use XFS then just stick FontPath "unix:/7100" in the XF86Config file.

Overall, I'm glad ATI is releasing updated drivers, I just wish they'd polish up their installation script and kernel module a tad.

Re:closed source != bad always

[EnglishDude]

There's a problem with the Matrox drivers - they take a long time start up X - with the nVidia drivers, X starts up quickly, but with the Matrox, takes ages (around 20 seconds) and my monitors makes some noises/flickers on screen before I see any graphics.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're telling us you don't know the difference between industrial spying and reverse engineering?

Sorry, you missed the point. In response to the original post, which claimed that reverse engineering is trivial, I tried to make the point that: if reverse engineering is so trivial, why do companies (and nations) engage in industrial espionage? Answer: because in many instances, reverse engineering would be very time consuming and very expensive, not trivial at all.

Re:closed source != bad always

[runderwo]

As far as I'm concerned, begging manufacturers to open source their drivers is whining. I don't think the OSS spirit is about forcing people to open their code.

I'm curious. How have you reached an equivalency of 'whining' with 'forcing' here? Let me guess, you're one of those people who contend that RMS is 'forcing' everyone to refer to a Linux distribution as GNU/Linux?

I think the implication that people would use force to get their way is thrown around just a little too lightly these days. A request for something that you disagree with, no matter how insistent and nonsensical, is not equivalent to a threat.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

I will say it again: It is very rare and unlikely that closing your software helps in a situation like this.

Why, because saying it twice makes it more true somehow?

Re:closed source != bad always

[Tet]

Its turning your $300 graphics card into a $75 card, for a very little bit of extra freedom

That "little bit of extra freedom" is worth at least $225 to me. Besides, only a fool buys a $300 video card. Yes, I may get flamed for that comment, but that doesn't detract from the fact that (with a few exceptions) it's true.

I don't think the OSS spirit is about forcing people to open their code. If they choose to, great. If they don't, well, we can just code something better. That's precisely what GNU did to UNIX.

No, the point is that we can't[1] code something better because they won't release the necessary programming information. I personally don't particularly want ATI or Nvidia to open source their drivers. What I want them to do is provide the necessary programming information. When the 2.8 kernel breaks your binary drivers and your vendor doesn't release an updated version, you may start regretting your lack of source code and/or programming info.

[1] Without reverse engineering their drivers, which is a huge task, and not likely to happen soon.

Re:closed source != bad always

[spongman]

Sounds like a great platform...

I've just decided. My next machine is going to be absolutely useless for the things I want to do with it, and on top of that, I'm going to bitch about how I can't do those things with it...

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

Insightful my *ss. the gpl does not protect against other extracting algorithms, techniques, or ideas. it only offers distribution guarentees using copyright laws. for example, intellectual property that ati does not want published in a patent and is keeping as a trade secret is not protected if they publish gpl. much of corporate america still relies on trade secrets rather than publishing algorithms, because then you can tweak your algorithm to avoid patent infringement.

jherber

Re:closed source != bad always

[aquabat]

You find that it almost works, but makes a sparkling or shimmering effect from random bit errors at 1600x1200.

OT(SO): I got something like this effect with a fireGL X1 hooked up to a DVI-D Viewsonic VP201s. It actually permanently damaged the digital input of the panel. Had to send it back for replacement. Looks like ATI fixed it in 3.7.0, but that version is truly flakey for a lot of 3D stuff.

I am convinced that 'closed source = bad always'.

Oh, and that's not a typo; I meant to assign, not compare.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Tony Hoyle]

AMD64.

You can run 32bit binaries on it, but the drivers must be 64bit. However ATI won't support 64bit so you can't run 3d games on an AMD64 with an ATI.

Even nvidia fubared this one up by making their 64bit drivers require 64bit OpenGL.

Re:closed source != bad always

[grolschie]

This driver still mis-identifies a VIA KT400 chipset.

Strange, because most newer kernels support the KT400 AGP/GART. Does ATI include it's own inferior AGP/GART driver? If so, why?

What I don't see is, why don't ATI allow a small part be included in the kernel i.e. the interface to the driver - and just distribute the closed-source driver as a separate release. I hate the hassle of compiling kernel modules etc. NVidia's used to be ok, as a script does everything, but ATI's get your hands dirty.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Gheesh]

I've never had that kind of problem with my G400. I use a similar machine with an NVIDIA card and they start X in about the same time. The Matrox card also plays movies more smoothly with MPlayer using the built-in mga_vid driver, both in X and the framebuffer.

BTW, if any of you think closed source drivers are not that bad, try Linux in a non-x86 platform... :(

Re:closed source != bad always

[EvilAlien]

Sadly, you are living in the past.

ATI's GPUs have outperformed NVidia's for a couple years now in benchmarks and in real life. ATI has also stepped up to the plate with driver development, and now its Nvidia that lags behind. The drastic change in quality of ATI's products still shocks me (and it was a drastic enough change for me to actually spend money on an ATI product after swearing I'd never do so again).

Now you may wonder why (if you believe me) ATI's drivers went from suck to their current quality?

But one is as good as none. Nowadays, video cards based on ATI chips are being manufactured by 12 partnering companies, and the Catalyst driver (created by former developers of nVidia) demonstrates quite serious stability and performance and, like nVidia's Detonator, has turned into a symbol of stability and continuity.

- Gigabyte & nVidia: "behind the scenes" of the deal

Nvidia has been spiraling since the 3dfx asset acquisition.

Re:closed source != bad always

[be-fan]

Besides, only a fool buys a $300 video card. Yes, I may get flamed for that comment, but that doesn't detract from the fact that (with a few exceptions) it's true.
First, $300 isn't unreasonable at all, especially if you're a heavy gamer. $300 is about the point where you get a top-of-the-line card, without spending extra change for features that don't add any performance. Spend less than about $200, and you give up significant amounts of performance or next-generation features. To those who spend a lot of time gaming, an extra $150 for the ability to turn the detail to maximum in all theri games is worth it. Especially when you consider that the amortized cost is only about $12.50 per month if you upgrade once a year. Second, not everybody uses their cards just for gaming. $300 cards aren't fast enough when you've got a deadline coming up and SolidEdge feels slower and slower by the minute...

No, the point is that we can't[1] code something better because they won't release the necessary programming information.
Check out this driver comparison on the Radeon 9000. The DRI drivers perform very poorly. Yet, the documentation for chips up to the Radeon 9200 *was* supplied to the DRI project. Indeed, the DRI project doesn't support any cards that don't have documentation. So "no documentation" is no excuse. Its just the simple fact that ATI knows the hardware because they designed it, and they are in a much better position to write these drivers than the OSS community.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

The previous is a lot better IMHO. This version doesn't even load with my xfree 4.2 (the kernel module does, but not the actual Xfree driver) ... So i'm running version 3.2.8 of their drivers again.

Still, their nonsense with rpm-only makes we want an NVDIA card. Somehow ATI's license is also more restrictive then the NVIDIA one, i think, otherwise i'd expect better repackaged versions of the driver already.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

ATI gives you some AGP drivers, but you can tell the driver to use the OS agp driver; then it should work.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

NVIDIA have a shared codebase with their windows drivers (according to their site more than 95% of code is shared ...) so graphics should be just as good as on windows. Though linux lags behind a few driver releases most of the time.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

Not so much the Linux kernel as XFree86...which is yet another reason why open source would be better; portability.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it is you who are naive on what people are actually capable of. There are a good number of extremely intelligent people out there, and having many different minds look at a problem in different ways is the best way to come to an optimal solution.

So yes, I believe there are people who could understand AND improve upon the original design.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

You're being plain ignorant, surely you must know AliasWavefront Maya, or SideFX Houdini, or Softimage3D, or SoftimageXSI, or Apple(ex-NothingReal) Shake, or IFX Piranha, or (now defunct) SilliconGrail RayZ, or D2 Nuke, or Blender, or Jahshaka, or K3D, or Cycas, or any of the dozens of commercial and open-source 3D/VFX/CAD applications out there, that need fully hardware accelerated OpenGL, and yes, open-source drivers would be a great thing, just look at the GF4/Quadro4 cards, same chips, slightly higher clocked, but the drivers only load the more highend OpenGL functions (like overlay planes, unified front+back buffer, window/page flipping) on Quadro's, when the slighly lower clocked GF4's also have the same capabilities on-chip but are blocked by the drivers. Why spend lots of $$$$ on R&D and manufacturing of different chips for consumer and workstation cards, when you can just use the same chips, clocked at slightly different speeds on the 2 ranges of cards, and just block the highend features of the lower end cards?
If open-source drivers would become available, then why buy the Quadro's ? For a slightly marginal performance improvement due to the higher clock speeds?
I think the situation has changed with the FX chip, but ATI had the same situation, at least with the chip on Radeon9700 and FireGL X1.
To my knowledge (someone correct me if i'm wrong, can't be sure 100% sure of this), the only manufacturer that did manufactured different chips for their cards, was 3DLabs, and they charge accordingly, but then again, they also have closed-source drivers (made by XiGraphics > www.xigraphics.com , free on Wildcat3/4, but you have to pay $$ for the linux drivers for the lower-end VP models).
So the next time you start wondering why someone needs proper 3D performance on linux, look at LOTR trilogy, Hulk, X-Men, StarWars, Terminator3, ... ... ...

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's not an OpenGL vs DirectX thing. If you can tell any difference in the rendering using one or the other, is because the programmer is better, or spent more time, in one of them. Unless the driver sucks greatly, both OpenGL and DirectX should look the same given similar programming.
The culprit in this case is the driver.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

But according to many sources i've heard, including my own recent experience: it seems that nvidia's implementation of 2.0 shaders in the 5x00(FX) series goes about 11 or 14 bits deep vs the standard 32, among a large number of other shortcomings. things will have to be developed especially for nvidia for it to work well, and the higher up 5x00's having big-assed heatsinks and fans show that the only way they can crank it is running it faster and hotter.

i just went from a MSI ti4200 4x FW/SBA to an Asus FX5200 8x FW/SBA - and it's SLOWER! nvidia hobbled their chips, the bastards.

I just want to run UT2004 well, and i've got to stay nvidia loyal because i've got (get ready to feel sorry for me) dual LCDs, so I need a dual digital card- at an affordable price. so i'm looking at a 5700 dual dvi.. *shrug* 900mhz RAM, 500mhz cpu, i'm sure it will be loud

anyone got any input?

i've got an asus p3v4x

Re:closed source != bad always

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"The GNU GPL is about 15 years old now. That's precisely the kind of software abuse it's made for. If ATI released its drivers under the GPL, nVidia would have to do the same to copy any code from the ATI drivers."

It's not about code. It's about information. Drivers are a huge part of any 3D implementation - as we have seen with the XGI Volari, good hardware can be brought down with bad drivers. And, as we have seen with NVIDIA, slower hardware can be improved with better drivers (they have implemented "dynamic compliation" code in their drivers that works like a JIT compiler, changing the generic pixel and vertex shader instructions to more optimized NVIDIA specific ones).

NVIDIA doesn't want to give away their secrets. If ATI could look at the source code of their drivers, it would be easier for ATI to engineer better drivers - and possibly even better hardware.

Moreover, NVIDIA can't OSS their drivers. They contain 3rd party code which they have licensed.

Re:closed source != bad always

[AstroDrabb]

I have an NVidia GeForce 3 Ti 500 and use it under Linux and Windows XP. The NVidia drivers are leaps-n-bounds better then ATI's drivers. NVidia uses a unified driver which means you have EVERY feature under Linux that Windows driver has (except for DirectX of course). There is a huge difference between my NVidia card and my Radeon under Linux. The Radeon would mess up Americas Army, RTCW and UT. If you want to do any gaming on Linux, you need an NVidia. I personally don't care if an ATI can give me an extra 5-10 FPS. I would rather have good to very good performance with an NVidia that has a top-notch driver and does not muck up the display.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Ben Urban]

I wouldn't exactly equate the XFree86 people with free software people.

Re:closed source != bad always

[EnglishDude]

http://www.mail-archive.com/xfree86@xfree86.org/ms g12464.html Here's the bit: - the first time X is started it takes a very long time to initialize; not only is it much slower than w/o mga_hal, it also seems to initialize each head several times. I've a G550 btw. Are the Matrox drivers opensource or closed? I agree with you, the drivers should be open.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

The poster was referring to the linux drivers not the windows ones. And as any linux user knows, the nVidia drivers are of much better quality. ATI just seems to be porting their windows code without considering some of the finer points of coding for another operating system.

nVidia is indead a bit behind the curve, but I've had nothing but problems with my ATI card, while my nVidia one worked out the box. Something tells me you're still chewing on some ATI marketing instead of FACTS.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Crazy Eight]

I can empathise with your disappointment. I recently bought a 9600XT to replace my 64MB Ti4200. I had to hook it up to my CRT, because the ATI card's DVI port can't handle VESA type negotiation (or however it works) with my particular LCD -- so no POST display or bios screens, etc... ATI's support page indicates that they know this has been a problem for quite some time and their stock response according the discussions found in forums and their support page is to blame hardware misconfiguration and suggest disabling USB in the BIOS. I don't know enough about what happens in the boot process before a single sector of your hard disk is loaded into memory to understand how a USB device could interfere with the way a graphic card configures itself at power on, but I do know that between Matrox, NVidia, and ATI, the ATI cards are the only with the problem and it isn't limited to my hardware or the 9600XT.

That being the case I couldn't resist pushing forward with the card to see how much fun gaming would be with something that isn't outdated (and was "bottom of the line" in it's class at the time I bought it!) so I get the drivers from ATI's site. They're only available in RPM format. That's idiotic as makeself archives can include RPM's functionality for those who need it while maintaining distro agnosticism. After running alien on it to get at the goodies I find a serious lack of documentation. Unless I fubared the conversion somehow these things don't even have so much as README. I install the libs and utility programs and go to build the module. There isn't any makefile! They've written two shell scripts to build the module and what's worse is that the scripts won't work if the sources aren't installed under /lib/modules! Why?!! Who decided that!

I got it up and running with accelerated 3D but the custom glxgears program written for ATI hardware wouldn't run and performance wasn't dramatically superior to my measly 4200. In fact, in some ways it wasn't any better. I really wanted an RV3xx to work for me, but until ATI can get it together with everything surrounding the solid tech they put into the latest Radeons I'm going back to NVidia.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

This would not be one of those instances.

Espionage is useful if you know a company is developing something, but it's not out yet. This gives you the chance to steal it and beat them to market. These drivers are all available to the public already, no spy-game here.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the technology is in the hardware (otherwise we'd all just be using software rendering, right?). And pixel/vertex shaders are no mystery to the people who they'd be trying to prevent theft from anyways. The original poster is correct. Too many people here have been brainwashed by the wrong people.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Crazy Eight]

NVidia really blew it with NV30. Part of the aftermath is that they've flooded the market with an insane number of variations and revisions in their product line. As far as I can tell any FX series card with a number lower than 5700 is going to suck ass completely. The price point where you get the most performance for your dollar is with the 5900XT -- that's a no brainer. Anything less and the money saved won't be worth the performance loss. Anything more and you're shelling out big bucks for a small increase in core/mem clock speed that you might achive anyway with nvclock or the coolbits.reg hack.

As far as the dual dvi goes... that's another black mark on this generation of NVidia cards. For some reason -- maybe because NVidia has revamped and rereleased NV3x too much -- dual dvi isn't really hitting the market. IIRC, one GeForce 4 manufacturer put dual dvi on all its Ti cards, but the only non-sucky FX series card I've noticed with dual dvi is a 5700. You might consider trying to find an older 4600 or 4800/4600-8x with dual dvi. After the 5700 Ultra NVidia went to a 256 bit memory bus and the bandwidth gave the line a nice bump in performance. The difference between the 5700U and an 5900XT is greater than the difference between a 5700U and a 4600 so if you can find a deal on one it might be worth waiting for the next generation.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Tet]

Check out this driver comparison on the Radeon 9000. The DRI drivers perform very poorly.

Either I'm missing something, or you're just not reading it right. Take this quote from the linked article, for example:

In general, the ATI driver just seems to be slow. In a lot of tests it is more than 3 times slower than the dri driver, in a few cases more than 100 times slower.

So by your logic, ATI know their hardware intimately -- so well in fact, that they can write a driver that's up to 2 orders of magnitude slower that a free driver. That's not doing much to prove your case...

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is that this is Slashdot where the cranks di tutti cranks hang out. ATI could give away free video cards, open source all their drivers, and hire a bunch of strippers to come to your house and make you birthday cake... and the Slashdot crowd would still piss and moan.

What, and let a bunch of crazy ATI whores into my house? No thanks.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Johnny O]

Their LACK of Linux support is what just made me go out and buy a GeForce FX this weekend...

I loved ATI in the past and stopped at their lack of ATI All-in-Blunder cards whe I couldnt get ANY ATI derived support for the tv tuner except for reversed-engineered stuff..

screw ATI until they fully, and I mean FULLY support their cards under my system, Linux. I dont recommend it to my windoze friends. friends dont let friends do ATI. Sorry... Change yer attitude, and i will change mine.

Re:closed source != bad always

[SoTuA]

Also - I'm wondering what kind of dual head support NVidia cards have.

Great support. I have a FX5600 (piece of shit, I know, I know). I ran Gentoo, and you can configure wheter maximize uses one or two screens. Sold the monitors since so I didn't get the chance to try it on another distro, but I'm guessing it'd be the same, being XFree and the nvidia drivers all that was involved.

I think that, if you want something to beat/equal the Radeon 9800 pro, you'd be looking at a FX5950 ultra or something like that.

(wish I could spend that much on a vidcard)

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, NVidia (and probably ATi) have been known to do nasty hacks to "optimise" common applications at the expense of full opengl-spec compliance. You couldn't get away with such "special-casing of quake" with open source drivers.

Personally, as a guy who uses opengl for _serious_ work, I'd much rather their drivers were open source, as I'd _know_ where they were failing to be spec-compliant (or more likely, letter-but-not-spirit compliant) in small ways.

Re:closed source != bad always

[13Echo]

For starters, you can use rpm2tgs, alien, or any of those other programs an they work fine.

Second, this article is very misleading. ATI's been releasing drivers for a LONG TIME now, so saying that they have "finally relased drivers for X 4.3.0" is ridiculous. The 3.7.0 driver set was released MONTHS AGO. 3.7.1 just came out a few days ago, but 3.7.0 was out in late-December. I've been using 3.7.0 for months on my X 4.3.0 system (Slackware 9.1).

Though the performance could be better, the drivers have been quite stable on my machine.

Re:closed source != bad always

[EvilAlien]

Actually, no. I've been chewing on third party reviews, the testimonial of people I trust, and my own experiences. I don't listen to the marketing drowns, they are the ones who told me that Nvidia's drivers forcing games to run with less than the complete DX9 feature set was somehow a cunning performance tweak rather than a really clumsy way to compensate for crappy DX9 support.

As far as the two vendors and Linux support go, I'm a huge fan of Nvidia and their drivers for Linux (I've got cards ranging from the TNT up to a GeForce 3 Ti200 in my main workstation). All of my Linux boxes run Nvidia cards, whether or not I expect them to do a lot of 3D. ATI has sucked hardcore when it comes to the !windows world. I wasn't commenting on the specific Linux context.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Afrosheen]

What? You *have* to run linux in vmware on your laptop because there aren't open source centrino wifi drivers? Um...I'm not sure how long you've been using linux, but ndiswrapper has been around since last year, and will get your wireless card working in linux.

Poke around on google or sourceforge for ndiswrapper. I got my Inspiron 8600's broadcom card working in linux with ndiswrappers and I know from the docs that the centrino is supported.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Afrosheen]

Let's not forget the ENTIRE quake series running with 3d acceleration under Linux. And the whole Unreal series. And Savage. And Enemy Territory. And RTCW. And Armagetron.

If you were a linux gamer, you'd already know. There are more than a few 3d games available on linux. Doom3 and UT2k4 are the biggest coming soon titles however.

Re:closed source != bad always

[be-fan]

You're the one who isn't reading it right. The quote you cite is referring to *2D* performance, not 3D performance. Yes, it makes sense that the DRI folks would know XAA better than ATI. Also, its well-known that modern GUIs don't take advantage of a fraction of the acceleration primitives offered by X (mostly because they're obsolete). If you take a look at how ATI does in the important benchmarks (bitblits, fills, line drawing) they don't fare so bad.

More importantly, take a look at the 3D numbers. In many cases, especially in high-detail scenes in SpecViewPerf or high-resolution scenes in the gaming benchmarks, the ATI drivers are twice as fast as the DRI drivers. The DRI drivers also had the most rendering errors of any of the drivers.

Re:closed source != bad always

[cheesybagel]

You aren't supposed to have both a patent and a trade secret of the same thing. A patent application discloses your device, so it is no longer a trade secret. Your point is moot.

Re:closed source != bad always

[klaussm]

I think that the problems with open-sourcing the drivers are that it will allow patent holders to look at the code, and see which patents a specific card is violating.

If I remember correctly, it is illegal to reverse engineer software in the US. So the patentholders cannot reverse engineer the drivers and then say: "You are violating our patents", because then they would have broken the law in order to do so.

However this is not an excuse for keeping the specs of the card secret. If there were parts of the specs that would be "off-limits" they could just leave them out.

However, I still bought an ATI Radeon 9600, even though I have to use a closed source driver for 3D. ATI still releases specs for 2D, which is better than NVidia releasing no specs at all...

Re:closed source != bad always

[kundor]

I disagree. If you want to do linux gaming, nvidia is the way to go. Nvidia drivers are much easier to find, install, come with source, and offer better compatibility and performance than ATI's. One of the biggest programs in linux gaming, winex, only works with nvidia cards.

and if the rumors are true, nv40 is going to kick serious ass....

Re:closed source != bad always

[kundor]

Out of curiousity, are you using something like Gnome and kde? If so, they slow down ut2k4 a LOT.

What I do is create a custom xinitrc. (The following applies to Mandrake linux.) If you move /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc to xinitrcold, and replace it with an xinitrc than only contains
exec /usr/bin/ut2004demo
(or wherever you keep the program), and then restart X, you should get about 12 more fps. I do, anyway, with my nice nvidia drivers: I average 74 frames per second on ONS-Torlan, with max demo settings, on Mandrake cooker. I haven't noticed a degredation in visual or sound quality but it could very well be the case, I tend not to notice these things.
Despite winex improving and ut2k4 being available, I still have to keep a windows partition for games. But I've had to spend less and less time in it...hopefully, in a few more years, it can be gone for good.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

No source comes with the Nvidia driver. Don't pretend to be a coder when you're obviously not.

PS! No, the glue code doesn't count.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

ATI cant and wont expose the low level details of their hardware's functionality to competitors.

You don't expose any hardware with drivers, other than the HW interface (which is supposed to be open. How the fuck else are 3rd parties, graphics board makers and alt. OS driver dev., suppose to know what to do? ). Please stop spreading this kind of FUD. And of course it's simply to improve the drivers. I'm not a software developer. I'm a hardware developer, and a SW developer is better then me at makeing drivers.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Anonymous Coward]

Many more people say the same thing about the current Linux desktop.

No they don't.

Re:closed source != bad always

[Crazy Eight]

I would certainly appreciate an accelerated framebuffer driver for NVidia cards. If you've ever used radeonfb or matroxfb you'll find the vesa driver pretty lacking.

Re:closed source != bad always

[kundor]

Most of the source can be read and changed. Not all, but most.

And while I may not be a very good coder, I am involved with several projects.

ATI was waiting for debian

[Rushuru]

ATI was just waiting for xfree 4.3.0 to eventually enter debian

Re:ATI was waiting for debian

[Mitchua]

But where is the justice for Gentoo users :-)

Re:ATI was waiting for debian

[Anonymous Coward]

you inflict justice on yourself with every 'emerge' ;P

Re:ATI was waiting for debian

[Too Much Noise]

Then this release is early - they were supposed to wait until Debian finally moved to rpm!!!!

Re:ATI was waiting for debian

[Joseph Lam]

obvious, ATI engineers were waiting for their Gentoo to...

Re:ATI was waiting for debian

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time you run "emerge", God kills a Microsoft drone.

XFree86 4.3 support is not new.

[Anonymous Coward]

ATI has been offering drivers for XFree86 4.3 since some time late last year.

What's new is that there are new Linux drivers. No mention of whether they support GLX 1.3.

Re:XFree86 4.3 support is not new.

[Stickney]

True, I don't see any difference between the "new file" and the ones I installed to run my Radeon 9800 under SuSE several months ago...the only thing I'm waiting on now is for the 9800 drivers to become integrated into the SuSE YaST configuration, so that it will actaully use them!

Re:XFree86 4.3 support is not new.

[Kyouryuu]

The drivers were new to me and I suspected they were new for others as well. Either way, I don't recall any stories about it - old news or not. It should be easy to understand that after a half-year of waiting, I convinced myself that ATI just wasn't going to support its official packages anymore and so stuck with the Schneider Digital packages instead.

When by chance I went to ATI's site yesterday and saw that there was an XFree86 version, dated 3-2-2004, I thought it was a new thing and worth mentioning.

I accept the criticism for pointing out what is apparently an old story, but clearly it's new to some people. :)

Re:XFree86 4.3 support is not new.

[slacktheplanet]

What is odd, I checked out the site on march 2nd. the driver version was 3.7.1. 3.7.0 has been out for months... wonder what went so horribly wrong that they went back a release.

Re:XFree86 4.3 support is not new.

[iCEBaLM]

They compiled 3.7.1 to require SSE2 (Pentium 4) only CPUs.

Re:XFree86 4.3 support is not new.

[aliens]

I think the big hoodoo is that these are Official drivers. The previous iterations weren't supported.

Re:XFree86 4.3 support is not new.

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn it! Why does someone always have to say "This is not new" or "This is nothing new."? Why can't we have a slashdot article for once where someone admits that it IS new?

Re:XFree86 4.3 support is not new.

[cubic6]

Parent sayz: No mention of whether or not they support GLX 1.3.

tom@box tom $ glxinfo
name of display: :0.0
display: :0 screen: 0
direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.2
server glx extensions:
GLX_EXT_visual_info, GLX_EXT_visual_rating, GLX_EXT_import_context
client glx vendor string: ATI
client glx version string: 1.3
client glx extensions:
GLX_EXT_visual_info, GLX_EXT_visual_rating, GLX_EXT_import_context,
GLX_ARB_get_proc_address, GLX_ARB_multisample, GLX_ATI_pixel_format_float,
GLX_ATI_render_texture
GLX extensions:
GLX_EXT_visual_info, GLX_EXT_visual_rating, GLX_EXT_import_context
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: MOBILITY FIRE GL 9000 DDR Pentium 4 (SSE2)
OpenGL version string: 1.3 (X4.3.0-3.2.8)
OpenGL extensions:
GL_ARB_multitexture, GL_EXT_texture_env_add, GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array,
GL_S3_s3tc, GL_ARB_point_parameters, GL_ARB_texture_border_clamp,
GL_ARB_texture_compression, GL_ARB_texture_cube_map,
GL_ARB_texture_env_add, GL_ARB_texture_env_combine,
GL_ARB_texture_env_crossbar, GL_ARB_texture_env_dot3,
GL_ARB_texture_mirrored_repeat, GL_ARB_transpose_matrix,
GL_ARB_vertex_blend, GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object, GL_ARB_vertex_program,
GL_ARB_window_pos, GL_ATI_element_array, GL_ATI_envmap_bumpmap,
GL_ATI_fragment_shader, GL_ATI_map_object_buffer,
GL_ATI_texture_env_combine3, GL_ATI_texture_mirror_once,
GL_ATI_vertex_array_object, GL_ATI_vertex_attrib_array_object,
GL_ATI_vertex_streams, GL_ATIX_texture_env_combine3,
GL_ATIX_texture_env_route, GL_ATIX_vertex_shader_output_point_size,
GL_EXT_abgr, GL_EXT_bgra, GL_EXT_blend_color, GL_EXT_blend_func_separate,
GL_EXT_blend_minmax, GL_EXT_blend_subtract, GL_EXT_clip_volume_hint,
GL_EXT_draw_range_elements, GL_EXT_fog_coord, GL_EXT_multi_draw_arrays,
GL_EXT_packed_pixels, GL_EXT_point_parameters, GL_EXT_rescale_normal,
GL_EXT_polygon_offset, GL_EXT_secondary_color,
GL_EXT_separate_specular_color, GL_EXT_stencil_wrap,
GL_EXT_texgen_reflection, GL_EXT_texture3D,
GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc, GL_EXT_texture_cube_map,
GL_EXT_texture_edge_clamp, GL_EXT_texture_env_combine,
GL_EXT_texture_env_dot3, GL_EXT_texture_filter_anisotropic,
GL_EXT_texture_lod_bias, GL_EXT_texture_object, GL_EXT_texture_rectangle,
GL_EXT_vertex_array, GL_EXT_vertex_shader, GL_HP_occlusion_test,
GL_NV_texgen_reflection, GL_NV_blend_square, GL_NV_occlusion_query,
GL_SGI_color_matrix, GL_SGIS_texture_edge_clamp,
GL_SGIS_texture_border_clamp, GL_SGIS_texture_lod,
GL_SGIS_generate_mipmap, GL_SGIS_multitexture, GL_SUN_multi_draw_arrays
glu version: 1.3
glu extensions:
GLU_EXT_nurbs_tessellator, GLU_EXT_object_space_tess

Fresh from an installed-yesterday Gentoo box. Does that help?

Re:These drivers

[Bishop, Martin]

No, rage chipsets, radeons use the rage chipsets, 9800 = Rage 350, and so on down

Not just RPM...

[OrangeHairMan]

from the readme:

Some notes for debian users:

The debian Linux distribution in most cases does not come with the
ability to handle rpm packages with the rpm tool. But there is a
tool called "alien" which allows you to convert rpm files into the
debian supported *.deb package format. Please consult your debian
documentation on how to operate this tool.

A typcial debian installation commandline will look like this:

dpkg -i <ati_package_name>.deb

In order to override complaints (which might be caused by an already
installed package "xlibmesa3" that also provides the file libGL.so.1.2)
please use this installation command line:

dpkg -i --force-overwrite <ati_package_name>.deb

Hopefully this helps!

Re:Not just RPM...

[bfree]

But how hard would it be for them to fix up an alienised deb and distribute that, or to plain create debs in the first place?

Re:Not just RPM...

[AntiOrganic]

I can run a disassembler on the code and claim they released the source in 100% pure assembly as well, but that doesn't really make it so.

Re:Not just RPM...

[Erratio]

There's support issues, once they release those packages they are responsible for them.

I'm running a computer with an ATI without a package management system but I installed RPM and forced an install of the package and it works fine. I think the RPM in this case is mostly just a way to archive the different parts of the driver (kernel module, X module, doc) without actually being too system specific, and considering it worked on my computer which is running all the latest, non-standard libraries, I'd guess that the only real variable to watch for is the X version which is the one they release different versions for. I did need to hack the driver in previous versions to get direct rendering to work though (I'll find out about the new one shortly).

Re:Not just RPM...

[Jeffrey Baker]

ATI doesn't support their driver on Linux, so there are no "support" issues at all.

I have ATI hardware but I'm considering switching to nvidia. They very frequently release drivers, their drivers actually work correctly, and their drivers are available for Opteron and even Itanium.

Re:Not just RPM...

[asciono]

This package is worth checking out if you use Debian
and want to use ATI's own drivers:
ATI Linux drivers packaged for Debian

Hm, anyone actually know what the big difference
between using ATI's closed source drivers or the
open sourced DRI-ones? (except not poluting your
karma ;>)
DRI (debs)

Re:Not just RPM...

[Kyouryuu]

Hey, awesome link! Hope it works! :D

Re:Not just RPM...

[ArmorFiend]

anyone actually know what the big difference
between using ATI's closed source drivers or the
open sourced DRI-ones?

I don't know, and nobody talks about it, however, I think the answer is:

tens of thousands of man-hours of optimization and bug fixing

Re:Not just RPM...

[Erratio]

There's support in the more general sense of maintaing the releases. If they were to release .deb files or any other packages then they'd have to update those with each driver release, and it makes more sense to just not release them at all then fall behind or have to think about it. If there were complications in repackaging it would be time consuming...if it's simple then the users can do it.

Re:Not just RPM...

[Trashman]

In order to override complaints (which might be caused by an already
installed package "xlibmesa3" that also provides the file libGL.so.1.2)
please use this installation command line:

dpkg -i --force-overwrite .deb

This is bad. don't do this. If you do, then the next update of xlibmesa-gl will break.

man dpkg-divert

Re:Not just RPM...

[chickenwing]

Most Debian users would not like to pollute their systems with a converted RPM. I would much rather install non-Debian packages by hand.

Re:Not just RPM...

[joib]

The DRI drivers only support 3d acceleration with <= 9200 cards. If you want 3d acceleration with the newer cards you have to use the closed source driver.

Personally, I have a radeon 9200 and I use the DRI drivers. Works just fine for me.

Re:Not just RPM...

[jazzer]

Nvidia drivers don't always work, their last set of drivers (5336) 'cause my system to hang when booting into X, beyond that having to go back to the command line to install a new driver would be annoying for a new user.

One poster mentioned earlier that it's hard for the distributions to include these drivers, they shouldn't have too; nvidia, ati if they don't want to open-source their drivers should include them on the CD's.

Re:Not just RPM...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your a retread. Eat sheat and dies.

Uh... this isn't new?

[TyrelHaveman]

I downloaded fglrx-glc22-4.3.0-3.7.0.i386.rpm over 2 weeks ago. Why do you post old news?

Re:Uh... this isn't new?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree... this is old stuff that doesnt work with kernel 2.6.3 .

error while loading the .kvo module.

an anonymous coward

Re:Uh... this isn't new?

[Paul Crowley]

That's nothing, I downloaded xqzyk_K32-287634-m452Z-ZZ92ZA.e987.DNA.fqz three months ago!

Well

[Bishop, Martin]

There is always rpm2tgz

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Your a retread of fucka. Eat sheat and dies.

However, open source == better bug finding/fixing

[betelgeuse-4]

Remember the Win2000 source leak. Someone noticed a fairly simple programming error (signed instead of unsigned variable IIRC). That person didn't have an initimate knowledge of Windows 2000, but they still found a bug. This is the type of situation where more eyes make for better code.

two points

[Lucretian]

1. ATI has offered drivers since last year.

2. the RPM has nothing to do with being closed source. It has a binary "IP" library that gets linked in when you compile it... if you want to install on a non-rpm system use alien or some other method of unrpming it, then compile and install. Yes, it's still closed source, but rpm the reason for this.

What I'm upset about is that they have all the hooks for 64bit amd support in the wrapper code, but the binary IP driver is not released for x86_64.

This isn't a news

[maxun]

ATI 3.7.0 drivers are already a few month old.
3.7.1 are in fact been release this week.

Re:This isn't a news

[Anonymous Coward]

3.7.1 has been pulled because it doesn't work. Unresolved symbols in fglrx_drv.o prevent X from loading, so it's back to 3.7.0 but with a much more recent release date, giving the impression that it was just released, if you weren't paying attention :-)

Re:This isn't a news

[Arae]

Just FYI, the unresolved symbols only occur on non-SSE2 systems.

Re:This isn't a news

[dniq]

Works fine here. In fact, finally OpenGL works fine on my Radeon 9800XT!

Re:This isn't a news

[Anonymous Coward]

"Only works on a narrow range of current x86 CPUs" sounds very much like "doesn't work" to me.

Fine if you happen to be using one that works, but not so good if you have an Athlon, for example.

Re:This isn't a news

[Anonymous Coward]

Athlon nazi.

well...

[temojen]

1) I have a Radeon card in a Gentoo system. Gentoo doesn't use RPMs.

2) What if ATI has linked it against the wrong library version?

3) What if I get an Opteron?

Re:well...

[kinzillah]

Portage downloads the rpm, pulls the content out and puts the pieces where they need to go.

Re:well...

[gaj]

1. Quitcherbitchin. Gentoo can use RPMs just fine ... install RPM. Or is that too hard for an 3L337 63|\|700 |-|4x0r?
2. They link against glibc 2.2, so it works great with either 2.2 or 2.3 installations. I'm running it on a 2.3.2 system right now. This could become an issue ... but it is not at this time.
3. Then you should, at this time, get a damn NVIDIA card. This does suck a bit, and is a perfect example of where having competition is a good thing. OTOH, you could also use a 9100 or earlier Radeon and use the open-source drivers, or do withought 3D acceleration. You have options.

Sheesh. No one is holding a gun to your head saying "Buy an ATI video card or die!". If you don't like 'em, don't buy 'em.

Would it be better if both ATI and NVIDIA released their X servers as open-source? Hell yeah! OTOH, it is a very good thing that they are supporting Linux with current cards. The rest, we can work on with time.

Re:well...

[MoronGames]

You use gentoo? Try this:

emerge ati-drivers
fglrxconfig

You now have ATi drivers installed on your gentoo box and you're setting up the configuration file for them! Congratulations!

Re:well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to dispell your firt two claims:
12:05:20 /usr/portage $ cat app-*/*/*.ebuild | grep "\\.rpm" | wc -l
47
12:06:47 /usr/portage $ cat dev-*/*/*.ebuild | grep "\\.rpm" | wc -l
93
12:07:19 /usr/portage $ cat games-*/*/*.ebuild | grep "\\.rpm" | wc -l
4
12:08:16 /usr/portage $ cat media-*/*/*.ebuild | grep "\\.rpm" | wc -l
21
12:08:31 /usr/portage $ cat net-*/*/*.ebuild | grep "\\.rpm" | wc -l
28
12:09:01 /usr/portage $ cat sys-*/*/*.ebuild | grep "\\.rpm" | wc -l
8
12:09:29 /usr/portage $ cat x11-*/*/*.ebuild | grep "\\.rpm" | wc -l
15
1) Gentoo is not a crazy backwards that refuses to use binary only packages. I think there are ati-drivers already in portage.
2) How many library dependancies are there going to be for a driver?

3) This is a valid concern. What if I have X chip? What if I have X kernel version? This is really the strongest case for open sourcing, so it can work for everyone.

Re:well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah that looks great on paper, but seldom works. You have to read through about 200 forums.gentoo.org posts before you have a prayer at getting ati-drivers configured correctly.

Re:well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, you're a fuckin' pissy retard. STFU ::middle finger::

Re:well...

[MoronGames]

It worked first try for me. I've never bothered looking in the forums for help with it.

Re:well...

[gaj]

Wow.

No really. Wow.

That has got to be the most stunning ripost I've ever been subject to.

<snicker>

Re:well...

[C10H14N2]

Yeah, unfortunately, it sucks when you have laptops you'd like to dual-boot Linux on and you have to deal with shit drivers for ubiquitous chipsets in machines you can't just pop another card into.

I have one that uses an ATI Mobility and I'm just glad I was finally able to get 24-bit at 1024. Hardware acceleration would be great, but I've already spent more time getting it to where it is than the damned machine is worth.

Mercifully, I have plenty of other machines. However, it would be nice if there was a laptop manufacturer who really embraced Linux so we wouldn't have to bury ourselves in the specs of 150 machines every time we're in the market for one.

Re:well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh shut up you fat Hindoo cock-worship, urine drinker. Just wait for 10 years and we muslims will drive you out of your own country. Fagagagagaga.

XFree86, not XFree

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, it's sometimes seen as an overly pendantic point to make, but it has to be said: the project, nor the software it produces, is NEVER called "XFree". The "86" is part of the name -- it's like calling Linux "Linu" or Windows "Window".

Just because it runs on more architectures than x86 thesedays, it doesn't mean parts of the name can be omitted.

Several?

[ghostis]

several months after the originally proposed release date of April last year.

for large values of several apparently...

Whay has RPM got to do with anything?

[X-Nc]

Closed source is bad, there's no question about that. But what's the big deal about the release being in RPM format? Any competent Debian (or derivitive) user will easily be able to install it using alien and as for tgz binary distros, again, alien will convert.

RPM -> Good!
Closed source -> Bad!

Re:Whay has RPM got to do with anything?

[ptr2void]

I'd still prefer a proper Debian package made by a competent maintainer over some converted RPM. Automatic conversion can never be as good as a handcrafted solution, and this is especially true for Debian kernel-related packages. (Ever heard about make-kpkg?) Yes, we can still convert to tar.gz and rip it apart :-)

An Open Source driver would be even better, but probably that's unrealistic to expect from ATI.

Re:Whay has RPM got to do with anything?

[scrytch]

You don't even need alien. Last I looked at RPM, it was simply an ar archive wrapped up in cpio. Nothing tricky about it, just odd choices of archivers, but ones any unix should have.

Re:Whay has RPM got to do with anything?

[Slack3r78]

Actually, I look at it more from the perspective of comparing to the way NVidia distributes its drivers. I just installed nVidia drivers by hand for the first time in a couple of years yesterday, and I had set aside a couple of hours expecting problems, remembering the trouble I'd had with their RPM based drivers (admittedly as one fairly new to Linux at the time).

Instead, I ran a shell script, which brought up a nice menu based installer, it checks for a precompiled version of the driver, if there's not one available, it fetches what it needs, builds it, and installs it. From there I had to chenge 2 lines in my XFree86Config file (one of being uncommenting a line) and I was done. This isn't perfect, but it's by far the most user friendly way of doing a driver install under Linux that I've seen. Most importantly, it's entirely distribution agnostic.

Honestly, the open/closed source driver thing isn't something that I really care about - whether the drivers work or not and how easy it is to install them is what's critical. This is how your average user views it, and this is what's critical to adoption by the masses.

Re:Whay has RPM got to do with anything?

[NineNine]

RPM -> Good!
Closed source -> Bad!

You're young, aren't you? Aaah, I remember being young and naive, when everything was simple and was black and white.

And how, exactly, are people supposed to know what in the hell "alien" is, that is exists, and how to use it?

Re:Whay has RPM got to do with anything?

[Anonymous Coward]

For those not using crappy, bloated distributions (Mandrake/RedHat), use 'rpm2tgz' to convert them to the 'correct' software package format.

Dumbass.

Re:Whay has RPM got to do with anything?

[hpa]

The problem with the NVidia drivers is that at least on my Opteron system they crash the box every few days. If I run without it it stays up arbitrarily long.

Re:Whay has RPM got to do with anything?

[void warranty()]

http://www.google.com/search?q=install+rpm+debian

Re:Whay has RPM got to do with anything?

[X-Nc]

Young? I guess that depends on your point-of-view. I'm 41 years old and have been working with and using Linux since November 1991.

As for alien, it's a common tool that's been available for years.

ERROROR?

[brain_not_ticking]

I wonder what's different between this v3.7.0 and the v3.7.0 I've been using for the past few weeks...

I didn't h4x0r aTI or anything, they've just been publicly available for quite some time. Hopefully they pre-patched their code to allow the drivers to work under 2.6.x with no additional modifications. It was a bitch to get them working.

AMD64?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just bought four Athlons 64 with radeons. I will
replace them with nvidia on Monday. I can not wait for ATI's x86_64 drivers...

Why ATI?

[Phoinix]

With the availability of other companies who are willing to provide open source drivers, why should anyone by ATI products?

I would rather buy products of other companies who sympathize with the open source community.

Re:Why ATI?

[ptr2void]

Now that sound interesting. Which company makes 3D cards akin to nVidia and ATI technology and provides open source drivers? I'd like to get one, please tell me!

Re:Why ATI?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's ATI or Nvidia. Neither support Open Source. You can use an inferior card from another company or you can deal with the drivers being how they are. You can't have everything your way...there are some compromises.

Re:Why ATI?

[Jacek Poplawski]

With the availability of other companies who are willing to provide open source drivers, why should anyone by ATI products?

Which companies?

Re:Why ATI?

[furballphat]

Will you people please stop your whining and bitching? They are giving away drivers for Linux, that is sympathising with open source. When someone gives you something, it is courteous to say thank you, not complain that they didn't violate countless agreements and give away trade secrets just so you stupid Stalmanites can sleep slightly easier at night.

Re:Why ATI?

[yagami]

> "When someone gives you something"

give ??? i though i paid 250 euros for the video card !!! damn , didnt know the video card was free!

Re:Why ATI?

[DrWhizBang]

They are giving away drivers for Linux...

OK, you get the prize. They are giving away nothing. ATI users bought these cards, and expect decent drivers to go with them. Never mind that this may have not been a wise purchase, given the state of the drivers (buyer beware), but you certainly can't claim that ATI is giving drivers (as if out of the kindness of their hearts...). They are supporting their customers, and based on how well they do that, they will get more customers.

Myself, I own an NVidia card. I'm not happy about the closed source driver situation, but at least my closed-source drivers don't suck. If there was a vendor with decent hardware that did provide open drivers, I would certainly have voted with my dollars.

How about AMD64 support?

[johannesg]

I checked out the site and cannot find anything regarding AMD64 support. Is it there?

Re:How about AMD64 support?

[ptr2void]

No.

Re:How about AMD64 support?

[The Analog Kid]

No, but nVidia does provide AMD64 support, so if you planning on building a Linux machine with an AMD64 CPU inside, I'd go with nVidia. Actually for Linux I would always go with nVidia, for right now anyway until ATI can pick up the pace, because a Radeon 9700 spits out FPS in GLX gears that is less than a GeForce 5200.

Re:How about AMD64 support?

[CmdrTHAC0]

glxgears is the crappiest benchmark ever. On my box, I see ~256 FPS from software rendering and ~590 FPS in hardware (32-bit display on a Radeon 7500LE.) Yet, despite glxgears being only 2.5x faster, it makes the difference between 1 fps and 30 fps in actual games.

Re:How about AMD64 support?

[Anonymous Coward]

However, it gives a rough estimate of the perfomance of your card. The Radeon 9800XT *should* have around 5000-8000, but it's getting maybe 2500 FPS from what I've seen, there obviously something wrong here.

Never going to be fully open

[Anonymous Coward]

ATI uses proprietary technology licensed from others. It also has a cross-licensing with Intel. They give Intel technology rights for access to the Pentium 4 bus. They're not going to give this stuff away. They couldn't give away the parts they license even if they wanted to.

good graphics card?

[Daytona955i]

Ok, so ATI and nVidia are out since they release a binary only graphics driver. I have a GeForece card and It's really a pain to get it working properly.

It there a good grapics card that has good, open source drivers? With 3d acceleration etc...?

Re:good graphics card?

[Dave2 Wickham]

What problems do you have getting it working? I can't say I've had any problems, especially since the switch from distro-specific packages.

Re:good graphics card?

[mikeee]

Not really. From my limited research, the Intel video chipsets have opensource 3D accelleration, but the fastest 3D cards with OS drivers are the previous generation ATI boards (R2?0 based, the 8500/9100 or maybe the FireGL 8800 (an overclocked 8500).

Re:good graphics card?

[The Analog Kid]

It is not hard at all to install Linux nVidia drivers. All you have to have is the sh installer, and the kernel source you used to compile your kernel or the kernel source from your distro that they used to compile the kernel with. Then just type sh nvidia-xxxxxx.sh. It launches the installer, and searches for a packages that matches your kernel and if it doesn't then it compiles the "glue" between the kernel and their proprietary driver. After that, modprobe nvidia and make sure you change the "nv" in the XF86Config(-4) to "nvidia".

Re:good graphics card?

[Daytona955i]

I got it working, it's just another step that can be a pain. Especially when say 2.6 first came out... I had to wait until nVidia recompiled their drivers. I'm tied to their drivers and I'd prefer to not be. Switching to ATI again isn't an option because they too are closed source.

Re:good graphics card?

[Dave2 Wickham]

A bit late to point it out now, but for 2.5/2.6, there were patches available (and, later, pre-patched installers) from minion.de.

No suprise here

[theatre_freak]

I can't say I'm suprised by ATI's move to stay closed source. I've never been happy with anything ATI and most likely won't buy anything ATI. I've had a very bad experience with my ATI TV Wonder - sure they've updated their WinXP drivers, but the new drivers are a 2MB download, Multimedia Center (of which I only want the TV) is a 24MB download, and on top of that, you need Microsoft's Data Access Objects (a 17MB download) to make the parts of MMC that I don't even want to work. I've never gotten this combination to work, so I'm using the new drivers with an old version of MMC which mostly works, but doesn't respond well to Right-Clicks on the display area of the TV. I don't even dare to request tech support because they'll tell me to download the newest software and will be little help beyond that (which was the run-around I got when I was trying to make the card work in Win2k). Simply put, I love ATI's hardware, but their drivers are simply awful and for those of us who don't want the fluff, we still have to download the whole package and try to figure out how to install just what we want and still have everything work.

Re:No suprise here

[Anonymous Coward]

The ati tv wonder works with the opensource http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/ its 300K by the way and works with Virtualdub etc.

Re:No suprise here

[theatre_freak]

Hey! This driver seems pretty cool - even mostly works with the ATI TV program! Thanks!

no Linux PPC support?

[Chuck Bucket]

I still see no support for Linux PPC, so the correct title for this article is: "ATI Releases Drivers for XFree 4.3.0 for x86 based systems only"

Thanks.

CBV

Re:no Linux PPC support?

[Anonymous Coward]

... the correct title for this article is: "ATI Releases Drivers for XFree 4.3.0 for x86 based systems only"

I guess the correcter title is: "ATI Releases Drivers for XFree 4.3.0 for x86 based Linux systems only"

S.

Re:no Linux PPC support?

[Chuck Bucket]

I guess the correcter title is: "ATI Releases Drivers for XFree 4.3.0 for x86 based Linux systems only"

-or-

"ATI Releases Drivers for XFree 4.3.0 for x86 based GNU/Linux systems only"

CBV

I think some Nvidia users are out to get ATI ....

[phoxix]

Why do I say this ?

Because this story is pretty much misinformed. Support for XFree86 4.3.0 is nothing new at all. It has been for quite sometime.

Additionally the previous article about ATI's support for linux/XFree86 has also been totally wrong as well.

And apparently there is a port of the driver to FreeBSD going under way .... (check out #ati on Freenode for more )

Sunny Dubey

umm, theese are old.

[noyren]

The news should be ati pulls the 3.7.1 drivers because.. well, they sucked (no offence ati, but I guess you know, since you pulled em). Theese drivers are two months old..

Re:umm, theese are old.

[meshmar]

Actually, these are the 3.7.6 drivers - not the 3.7.1 pos drivers. These drivers have resolved the issues on Athlon systems and provide hardware acceleration under WineX. ATi has also added support for the 9800XT cards.

Suggested graphics card vendor w/ Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anyone suggest a good 3D graphics card which is either the best officially X11R6 supported video card or has opensource drivers. Basically I don't want to buy a new card and be burnt with comments which say X is sluggish because of the drivers that I'm using. Oh yea........ this box will dual boot with that other OS for gaming especially Half Life 2.

Re:Suggested graphics card vendor w/ Open Source

[TheLinuxWarrior]

I use Nvidia because IMO, their drivers are much easier to get running under Linux and have excellent graphics under both Windows and Linux.

I recently swapped from an ATI Radeon 9000M to a GeForce 4 Go in my Inspiron 8200. Took me about the same amount of time to update drivers on Linux as it did on WIndows.

That's just me...YMMV

Re:Suggested graphics card vendor w/ Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

NVidia 5950 is MUCH SLOWER than Radeon 9800XT. Even overclocked as hell NVidia can't even get close to non-overclocked Radeon.

The real question is:

[Qbertino]

Will they finally stop sucking?

To be honest, I don't give a damn if drivers are closed, open or whatnot, as long as they actually work and properly use the cards features.
That the Nvidia drivers are tied to the kernel is anoying, but bearable since they actually do work. Nvidias Linux support has been next to none - they've got high karma with me.
From ATI though, I've heard only negative stuff. Same from Matrox, whos Linux support seems to be an utter joke.
Can anybody confirm or debunk this about the new ATI drivers?

Re:The real question is:

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using ATI drivers (with full 3D hardware support) in Gentoo for over half a year. They existed before that. They run fine, OpenGL is supported, you can play Neverwinter Nights, etc.

How about we stop spreading FUD on very old news? I use both Nvidia and ATI cards in my linux machines. Both are closed source, which sucks, but both work just fine (on 2.4 and 2.6 kernels btw). And they were "just released" as the story implies, even the 3.7 drivers have been out for some time.

Re:The real question is:

[Jagasian]

What would be the point of Linux if it was all closed source? For many people, "open" is why they use software like Linux, and they want to minimize the amount of closed technology they use.

Re:The real question is:

[dniq]

Works great here. Radeon 9800XT. Tried to play Unreal Tournament 2004 demo the other night - works faster than in Windows. ATI driver v3.7.1 (I was able to download it before they pulled it out).

Re:The real question is:

[An Anonymous Hero]

Nvidias Linux support has been next to none - they've got high karma with me.

I might agree with you (I think you mean "second to none") if only they'd bother to compile their drivers for PowerBooks

(or then, rewrap the already included OS X drivers).

Re:The real question is:

[blackeye]

I use a Matrox G450 at work with Redhat 9. The drivers they provide for dual-head support worked great for me.

Check here to see what they support.

Nick.

Re:The real question is:

[bolverk]

Same from Matrox, whos Linux support seems to be an utter joke.

OK, so not only do they provide drivers, but they provide *source* code under a license that allows much of it to be incorporated directly into XFree86 and you call that an utter joke?

Damn, man, what will you accept?

ftp://ftp.matrox.com/pub/mga/archive/linux/2003/ mg adrivers-3.0-src.tgz

I run OpenBSD on non-i386 hardware. It's support like this that makes Matrox the only real option for me. I mean, try to get the nVidia Linux kernel module and binary XFree86 module running on OpenBSD/alpha.

Re:The real question is:

[DanielJH]

Are you saying the only reason to use Linux is that it is open source???

I personally would use Linux even if it was closed source. We can argue that it wouldn't be as good if it was closed source, and there is alot of truth to that statement, but I would also make the statement that if Microsoft wasn't so big then other closed source software would exist that would fulfill most of my needs.

I use linux because it increases the bandwidth between the screen/keyboard and me. This is the greatest problem with Windows, and a growing problem with Gnome and KDE. Linux is a power users dream, not because it is Open Source, but because it was designed by Power Users for Power Users, not by Usablity Specialist for my Grandmother and pointed hair boss. (Both of which haven't even figured out Windows yet.)

(A note on Window Managers. I liked Gnome 1.x, and am currently using Enlightenment. They provide a great amounts of power, while staying out the way enough to focus on work.)

Re:However, open source == better bug finding/fixi

[Stevyn]

So you're saying that because someone found a bug in windows (surprise fucking surprise), then everything should be open?

I agree with the parent, graphics drivers do a lot more than say modem drivers and probably have a lot of secrets that ati would not want to get out into the open, pun intended. ATI sells hardware, not software. But the software is what makes the hardware run so well and therefore is just as important to them as the hardware. If ATI spends a couple million on research only to have nvidia steal it, it's bad for ATI. Doing this keeps the competition no matter what you communists believe (not you necessarily, but you know what I mean).

It's still an improvement

[Gary Destruction]

Did you see ATI or nVidia providing drivers for Linux years ago? Linux's acceptance has earned it the recognition it needs from big time hardware manufacturers. Sure the drivers might not be open source, but at least they exist. And companies like IBM embracing Linux could act as a catalyst for future hardware support.

Re:I think some Nvidia users are out to get ATI ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost every story on Slashdot is biased one direction or another. You just figured out that ATI are the bad guys and Nvidia are good in the open source world? :)

Ati is one step from dominating Nvidia in the windows desktop and will most likely do so in april when the next set of video cards are released. Slashdot'rs will still say Ati sucks because they don't open source their drivers, yet fail to mention neither does Nvidia.

ATI drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

It is naive to think that you could even understand, let alone improve, what the engineers - who know the hardware intimately - have written?

Writing a driver requires an understanding of the hardware and the OS/driver framework.

ATI has a reputation for delivering drivers that affect system stability.

Re:No.

[dinivin]

Why do people keep spouting this BS? It took nVidia a full two years to incorporate 3Dfx technology into their own products when they bought all the 3Dfx IP. By this time, the entire industry had moved on.

Maybe you should actually research these things before you spout out crap, you pretentious fucking idiot.

Dinivin

Re:No.

[pe1rxq]

By the time the hardware goes to market they should already be atleast one or two generations further in their development.
So yeah, it doesn't make sense to rely on reverse engineering to compete, likewise it also doesn't make sense to keep it a secret anymore.

Assuming they would do atleast some reverse engineering (they could be doing some magic you hadn't thought of and adding it in your next model can still make sense) it would take so little extra time compared having the source it just doesn't make sense for a harware manufacturor in a pressed market to keep its software closed.

Jeroen

RPM2targz

[cuban321]

One suggested way to compile and install the ATI drivers is to use a package called rpm2targz.

Just run it on the rpm
untar the tar.gz to /
cd lib/modules/fglrx
cd build_mod
./make.sh
cd ..
./make_install.sh
Modify your XF86Config-4 or run fglrxconfig

That should be it. If you have AGP 8x you really should use Kernel 2.6.X. You can get it to work with 2.4.X but it's a pain. Search google for 2.4.X.

Daniel

This is OLD OLD News

[Bruha]

I've been using ATI 4.3 drivers since december IIRC... from their site..

Did this guy just notice???

Now they did release a new version the other day.. I think he's just been out of touch with his drivers.

3.7.0 has been out at least since January

[gaj]

Jesus H. Christ on a popsicle stick, could you MORONS at least sniff-test stories? I downloaded 3.7.0 for 4.3 back on January 3rd. Earlier versions (at least 3.2.8, probably others) were available for 4.3 long before that.

As for the poster's whining about RPM, get real. There is no current major distribution that cannot handle RPMs right out of the box. Choosing RPM as a package format is a no-brainer if you only want to support one.

As for the closed-source X server, I, too, would much prefer that it be open-source. But, given the choice between full support for the ATI chip in my T41 and having open source, I'll take the former. The open-source server just doesn't cut it for me. Or, rather, it is great for 2D, but the 3D makes playing NWN even more painfull that it is now.

Re:3.7.0 has been out at least since January

[Atzanteol]

Umn. Gentoo handles RPM right out of the box? FreeBSD (uses XFree86 too remember)?

Re:3.7.0 has been out at least since January

[gaj]

I said major distributions.

As for FreeBSD, this was about Linux "drivers".

OTOH, if those 63|\|700 |-|4x0r5 can't figure out how to install rpm, guess that's just too bad for them, eh?

My understanding is that a FreeBSD port of the X server is under way. I'm sure that it will not be an RPM, though rpm runs on FreeBSD as well.

Consider using DRI driver.

[Jacek Poplawski]

ATI driver is closed source. It means that after installing you will have one piece of system (kernel module!) without source available. It makes your system not 100% free. It is almost same situation like with nVidia. Almost, because ATI driver it's little different - without all win32 shit inside.

I am pro-Radeon, because ATI released almost-complete (without HyperZ!) specification for older Radeons (r100 and r200), but I am not going to buy their new cards (with r300). If you have old one - I recommend using open source DRI drivers.

Re:Consider using DRI driver.

[sakti]

It means that after installing you will have one piece of system (kernel module!) without source available.

The X driver is binary only. With the kernel module you only get the source and have to compile it into your kernel yourself.

Why buy Ati?

[mao che minh]

Because Ati cards are better and cheaper than nVidia.

You see, a vast majority of people buy better graphic cards in order to make video games running on the Windows operating system run better. Whether or not the drivers are open source does not matter to this vast majority. What matters is price and performance.

You can get a Radeon 9600XT 256MB for roughly $170. This card performs as well as a $300 nVidia card. Other Radeon cards, such as the 9700, perform better than their $50-$75 more expensive nVidia counterparts.

I am an open source proponent. I push Linux at work and at play. But, I know that open source has its place, and frankly, it shouldn't matter to anyone if a graphics card manufacturer opens up their drivers or not. If that irrelevant fact actually bothers you, than the issue lies within you, not the company.

This is the old driver

[Anonymous Coward]

3.7.0 is a couple of months old. The most recent version was 3.7.1, which for some reason was pulled out. I couldn't get OpenGL to work on my Radeon 9800XT with 3.7.0, but it works fine now with 3.7.1.

Original Radeon Drivers???

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an original ATi Radeon DDR with VIVO, where can I download the ATi drivers for it that actually work? These drivers posted only do Radeon 9000+.

2.6 kernel compatability?

[Bob Loblaw]

I didn't see any mention of the 2.6 kernel series in the readme. Would there be any problems with using these with the 2.6 kernel (for instance with the Fedora Core 2 test 1 distro)? Has anyone tried this out yet?

I would suspect not but I wanted to get people's first hand experience.

Re:2.6 kernel compatability?

[gaj]

Nope. I'm running 3.7.0 under XFree 4.3 on my T41 using 2.6.3 kernel as I type. In fact, I've been running 3.7.0 under 4.3 for months and under 2.6 kernel since (IIRC) pre1.

Re:2.6 kernel compatability?

[j0hnyb1423]

I had no issues installing fglrx-3.7.0 with the vanilla kernel-2.6.3. Just ran the rpm and it compiled the module with no complaints.

Re:2.6 kernel compatability?

[Plug]

Notes, hints and tips regarding Radeon driver and Kernel 2.6

Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't hear anyone complaining about Matrox or S3.

Re:Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is that this is Slashdot where the cranks di tutti cranks hang out. ATI could give away free video cards, open source all their drivers, and hire a bunch of strippers to come to your house and make you birthday cake.

Hey, that's a good idea! Except do away with the video cards and source code. What a business plan! Boy, ATI is really on to something.

Re:Nonsense

[Nutria]

I don't hear anyone complaining about Matrox or S3.

Because the article's not about S3. But I still can't get my built-on-mobo ProSavage-DDR working with XFree 4.3. :(

Re:Nonsense

[SoTuA]

But I still can't get my built-on-mobo ProSavage-DDR working with XFree 4.3.

This is normal. It doesn't work with Windows either.

(I've seen lousy motherboards, and THEN the Pro-Savage chipset ones... man, what a pile of steaming crap)

confusing the meaning of free again?

[Anonymous Coward]

Think free-as-in-speech.

That's relevent regardless of the price of either
software or hardware.

Cost-as-in-money is not everything.

Curious

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not a troll. I'm new to Linux, and one of the things that surprised me about it was the fact that the graphics drivers are dependent on the window system. Isn't this bass ackward? I would think that the drivers would be dependent on the hardware only, and that the window system would be a layer above the drivers.

Re:Curious

[gnuman99]

This is the way that nVidia writes their drivers. The part of the driver that they distribute in source form is the *glue* between Linux hardware API and the driver.

The 2D drivers for X and Windows glue is not nearly as difficult to write as the actual drivers which are device (video card) dependant.

Name ONE [was Re:Why ATI?]

[gaj]

So, pray tell us all, which company is it that provides open source drivers, hmmm?

Re:Name ONE [was Re:Why ATI?]

[metamatic]

VIA. They released the source for drivers for their EPIA hardware.

Re:Name ONE [was Re:Why ATI?]

[Anonymous Coward]

MATROX

Re:Name ONE [was Re:Why ATI?]

[be-fan]

That's because VIA hardware *SUCKS* Same thing with Matrox. Their 3D cards sucked, so they released the specs for it. When they got a card that didn't suck (Parhelia) they stopped releasing specs.

Re:Name ONE [was Re:Why ATI?]

[Anonymous Coward]

Matrox supports open source drivers for all of their graphics cards. They have superb dual/triple monitor support and excellent 2d. Unfortunately 3d acceleration is not their strong point... but you asked..

Re:Name ONE [was Re:Why ATI?]

[Anonymous Coward]

Matrox supports open source drivers for all of their graphics cards.

My G400 is well-supported, but AFAIK there are no open-source drivers for the Parhelia (Matrox's current-generation card, with triple-head support). Matrox has a press release saying they have open-source drivers, but I can't actually find any. Their driver page just has some Red Hat drivers (probably binary RPMs), and you can't even download them without registering.

Various mailing list and forum posts reference binary-only Parhelia drivers. The XFree86 4.3 mga driver ("man 4x mga") doesn't support anything after the G550.

Re:No.

[Art Tatum]

ATI's drivers blow fucking goats and nobody can fix them but ATI. They won't and they won't let anybody else fix them, so I won't buy ATI products. Ever. And that's OK, they'll just have to lose the business. Oh BTW: you pretentious fucking idiot.

HAND

You know linux isn't ready for the "desktop"..

[Anonymous Coward]

.. when up to date video drivers are slashdot headlines.

Too bad they lost me as a customer long ago

[xutopia]

cause NVIDIA was the first to release drivers for XFree and I have gotten used to NVIDIA line of products as a result.

Re:Too bad they lost me as a customer long ago

[Sabalon]

I switched to nVidia due to the "quality" of the ATI drivers for Windows. nVidia was much better. This carried over when I made hardware decisions for a couple of non-linux server boxes I have (ie. mythtv). Even though I have quite a few ATI cards laying around, I probably won't even try then. Time to make modern art with them.

Re:I think some Nvidia users are out to get ATI ..

[Kyouryuu]

Then why is ATI's site dating the drivers 03/02/04?

Not new

[ebeneazer]

This is news? I downloaded those exact drivers from the ATI site 2 months ago (exact same driver version for XFree 4.3). No telling how long they were there before I got them. In fairness to ATI at least get the release date information correct before implying that they have been taking forever to respond. The poster should say, I just discovered that these drivers were released, not say they were released today. They weren't. Not news, no definitely not.

This article has no relationship to reality

[bgeer]

First off ATI has had 4.3.x drivers for at least a year. Secondly these drivers (3.7.0) are not new, they were released dec 18th. Check the modification dates in the file if you're skeptical.

The reason the web page says they are new is that they briefly released 3.7.1 and apparently pulled it for some reason, putting back the older version on the driver page.

In short, Dumbest.Slashdot.Article.Ever

Wait this isn't NEW?!?!?!

[martin_b1sh0p]

I don't understand...the link does indeed show that it was posted on their site Mar-2-2004 however I downloaded these exact same drivers back in January!!! I went ahead and downloaded it again anyway and the filename/version etc is all the same (this is for the 9200)?!?! So I don't get it.

Re:Wait this isn't NEW?!?!?!

[martin_b1sh0p]

I guess I should have read everyone elses' post before I replied; apparently others noticed the same thing I did.

Reaction to ATI closed source

[dpilot]

So your obvious reaction to ATI staying closed-source is to ?buy nVidia??

IMHO, this is where we need some Open Source Hardware. (I just tried to find "freehardware.org," it didn't exist. I forget the name, now.)

Too Late

[fire-eyes]

Quite too late for this customer.

I had a radeon 9000 pro 64MB.

I had nothing but problems with it. A few games worked okay with it, but a majority didn't. Severe tearing issues, games totally unplayable, very frequent hangs. Since switched to nvidia, i have had none of that.

Nvidia is clearly far more serious about their drivers and linux support than ati.

Re:I think some Nvidia users are out to get ATI ..

[Coneasfast]

And apparently there is a port of the driver to FreeBSD going under way

you can use the 2D radeon drivers for linux under freebsd, i'm doing it right now, not the 3d drivers though (since they also require a kernel module)

These are not NEW

[Kihaji]

These are not the new drivers, the 3.7.0 drivers were released in December. They released 3.7.1 drivers on the 2nd, and after 2 months of work this is what they had for thier changelog Added support for the Radeon9800XT Oh, and they broke them for almost all AMD users. After 4 days or so they removed them from the servers saying "we will have new ones up in a few days"

OpenGL is used for more than games!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's used for 3D modelling, for which there are a few open source applications now. It can be used for some extreme 2D accelleration, too.

Displaying HD video will make many a XVideo overlay driver puke. Using OpenGL instead may work, and in some cases work faster.

Do I here someone saying "No one uses Linux for video, and certainly not HD"? You're wrong. Of course, the kind of shit we have to put up with from NVidia and ATI (and Matrox, too, I think) makes Linux a marginal choice for such applications.

The apologists are just too willing to defend the hardware manufacturers because they provided drivers for their platform. Anybody using another platform must be weird, eh? Anybody using hw-accelerated GL for something else than gaming is weird, too, of course.

Empathising with weird* people is hard, I know. But it won't hurt if you try.

* People with other interests than you

Re:OpenGL is used for more than games!

[spirality]

Abosoulutely 3D graphics are used for 3D Modeling. In fact scientific modeling drove the 3D graphics business for years and in many ways still does. My company is actually writing such a beast right now, and it runs on Linux and Windows.

All I can say is this driver is a god send, because now my laptop, which is an Inspiron 8600 with a 128MB ATI Radeon, now is fully functional. I've just got it running and am using it right now. That is, I actually used the driver before writing this post. (Does that make this post more credible? :)

Anyway, it's quite nice. I'm running at 1600x1050 resolution and my 3D graphics capability is needless to say far superior to what I was getting with the Vesa driver...

Yippy. Yay for ATI. Closed source or not my computer works better for it and I can now do my job better, and that matters a lot.

-Craig.

Re:No.

[iminplaya]

My, my...I didn't know that throwing around insults like that could garner so many points. Let me see if I can do it...Ummm...Errr..."You fart sucking, blithering idiot, I hope all your teeth fall out, except one...so you get a tooth ache!! How's that? Will it get me at least a three?

Now for something completely different...How 'bout them Cubs?...No, seriously, Everybody knows deep inside that open is better than closed, and cooperation is better than competition. It allows ideas to be built on other ideas to make it all better. You money grubbing corporate bastards :-)

Re: not 100% Free

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD nazi.

Re:However, open source == better bug finding/fixi

[canajin56]

It's not even a question of what they WANT. If they are anything like nVidia, they CAN'T open them up because they licence technology from other firms, and can't publish their licenced code.

slashdot is a joke...these are from JULY LAST YEAR

[Anonymous Coward]

3.7 means 2003 .07 , thats atis naming convention. they said they were going to do QUARTERLY linux releases HAH

I have a radeon 9000 aiw that still works like SHIT in X even in 2d (the brightness is ALL FUCKED UP). thats using stock xfree, ati's drivers cause a damn LOCK UP.

and FORGET about any of the TV stuff working...WINDOWS ONLY FOR ATI

Not about stealing the technology

[AllenChristopher]

It isn't just about stelaing the technology. ATI and nVidia both have support for future features in their drivers. For example, nVidia just added PCIX support to their detonator drivers, even without any available cards on the market which need it.

Imagine actually looking at the comments of code that's designed for internal use at ATI... this goes way beyond reverse engineering. I'm sure the code for the drivers says all sorts of helpful things like "we use a 24-bit number here because we've committed to 24-bit floating point for the R-V4xx line in the forseeable future..."

That's a naive and simple example, but it demonstrates the concept. There's way more in that code than just the variables and algorithms you get from reverse-engineering. Stripping out all sensitive comments to open-source the drivers is an insane amount of work.

Once you have that information, sure, it's too late to incorporate it into your cards. nVidia isn't going to say "cancel the tape-out! we just read the comments in the new open-source driver!" But it might give their marketing people a lead on how to spin things. Open-source mean openness in more than source, and I can understand any conventional company being loathe to give in to that.

Re:Not about stealing the technology

[PyromanFO]

Well let's all cry ATI a river, poor poor multimillion dollar corporation. Meanwhile I'm stuck with a crappy driver for my Radeon Mobility M7 because their driver doesn't support it.

Seriously though, have you ever read an article where people dissect the design of the boards? They go into way more detail than the source code to a driver would have to. These are just journalists analyzing information ATI themselves have released. I understand that you think releasing the source code would release all kinds of information that previously wasn't released, because it will. However I think you overestimate how much anybody will care. PR using open source comments is just ludicrous, try imagining a press release where they explain, "Well ATI released their open source drivers, then on this one line this guy says "we can only do 24-bit zbuffering in pipeline 37 if the 5th register is also full". That's bad! Very bad! Don't buy their products! Don't understand it? Trust me, as their competitor I am in a completely unbaised position to tell you that it's very bad. It's may well be really really bad. Give us money."

Nobody will care. All of the real interesting technology isn't in the drivers, but the cards themselves. Drivers are just value-add and they spend alot of time just taking care of the quirks of the various applications they're trying to run. These quirks would be handled pretty easily with open source, and not be applicable to other people's drivers.

I just think "Open source drivers are bad because they'd be giving away their secrets!!" is just a knee jerk reaction, similar to when people said the same thing about closed-source operating systems. If you really stop and think about what source code they'd be giving away, there really isn't much there that is so revolutionary that it must be kept under lock and key at all times. The real beef is in the silicon.

Re:Not about stealing the technology

[Tet]

Stripping out all sensitive comments to open-source the drivers is an insane amount of work.

You're barking up the wrong tree. Were that the cause of the closed source nature of the drivers, it would be a non-issue. They could simply release the full specs and programming information for the card, and someone else could write a driver. But they refuse to do that.

Re:Not about stealing the technology

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean PCI Express, not PCI-X, and it's not a 100% native PCI Express solution, it's a hybrid made to facilitate the transition from AGP to PCI Express

Re:Not about stealing the technology

[Krach42]

Stripping out all sensitive comments to open-source the drivers is an insane amount of work.

Apparently someone has never heard of regular expressions. Seeing as how comments are very well defined elements of a program. (They have to be) One can easily hack up a lexx program to eliminate them:

GOD DAMN LAMENESS FILTER JUST WON'T LET ME POST THE LEXX CODE. Really, it's just 3 lines!

OOoo.... eliminating comments is SO hard!

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a child fucker

Drivers have been out for quite some time...

[iCEBaLM]

This is not "new" news as 3.7.0 has been out for quite some time. You won't get that impression from ATI's website however because they just tried releasing 3.7.1 but screwed up the compiler flags to require an SSE2 CPU and then pulled the release but never changed the "date posted" back to when 3.7.0 was released.

What is interesting however is that the 3.2.8 drivers give significantly better performance almost reaching that of the windows drivers (about 10% off) while the 3.7.0 drivers are quite terrible performance wise. Hopefully ATI fixes this in the next version of the driver.

Fuckin RPMS!!!!!!!!

[bangular]

It's the fact they are RPMs. Who the fuck uses a RPM based distribution anymore? So then you have to convert it to a cpio archive and then fool with trying to get the damn thing to work with your kernel. NO THANKS. I'd rather deal with nvidia and their little wrap around script to compile a kernel module. Have run with your unresolved symbols...

Re:Fuckin RPMS!!!!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

How many dependencies do you suppose a driver has? Usually zero.

In any case, rpm2targz is your friend.

Radeon Drivers

[Ray Radlein]

I just wish that ATI's Linux drivers supported the older radeons, like the 7200 series (which is what I'm still using). Their Win32 drivers support the old cards as well as the new ones; it's a shame that their Linux ones don't.

TV-Out

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean that Radeon cards now have S-Video out support with Linux? That was one of the reasons I haven't bought an ATI card.

Re:TV-Out

[mackermacker]

They have S-video support. Let me know if you can get it working in clone mode though

When TV out drivers for 9600 based cards available

[lamikr]

Sadly they are still not supporting tv out in their 9600 based cards. Same problem is with gatos drivers.

FireGL?!?!

[HeX86]

FireGL drivers are optimized for cad or 3d modeling applications which primarily push polygons.

Add textures and FireGL sucks. I beleive there's win32 firegl drivers too.

ATI needs to make Catalyst drivers for linux. Until then, the high end ATI cards will never perform well.

So, what IS the best graphics card for gnu/linux?

[flacco]

IS there a decent card for gnu/linux with:

• hardware acceleration
• decent performance
• support for multiple simultaneous X displays
• open source drivers

??

Open Drivers are...

[Kor49]

...great for wallhacking, btw. If everyone could roll their own version of the driver, you cannot track how many versions are out there and which does what.

Maybe Linux kernel should provide (I don't know if it does already) md5sum's of loaded drivers so that anti-cheat software like Punkbuster can detect. In that case, even with the open source, you need official binary distributions...

Re:Open Drivers are...

[Anonymous Coward]

(Posting as AC as I need to get an account)
(Yes, I know this is offtopic, just want to clear up a few things)

Actually the problem with wallhacking is that a server shouldn't be sending data to the client about things it can't see. If the game sends the correct data, hacked drivers aren't going to have any effect at all.
Sybil

Re:Open Drivers are...

[Kor49]

Yeah, the server "shouldn't", in theory. However, the server's CPU is already overloaded, so you have to trasnfer the burden to the client.

Moreover, things like fog just cannot be done on the server side.

Re:Open Drivers are...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, for decent game performance over latency links like the Internet has, it pretty much has to send some information beyond that which the user of the client needs to know at any given point. Otherwise, you have stuff like people popping out of nowhere and disappearing at corners or walls a lot, or bullets appearing out of nowhere.

Get latencies below 10ms total for everyone involved, and maybe you could do the above of sharing only necessary information. Of course, that's probably impossible for true world wide gaming.

But it probably is something to think about for LAN games. Of course, if someone cheats in a LAN game, all you have to do is walk over to them in the next room and wallop them with a 2x4 anyhow.

Non-OSS arguments don't hold water

[BigBuckHunter]

I am trying to grasp why manufacturers don't open source their drivers, or in the case of NVidia, the hardware specs to their GPUs. The hear the same feedback from the SD community all the time, and it appears that there are two main arguments.

1: They can't OSS the driver cause there is propritary info (patented S3TC and such)

2: They can OSS and release their specs to projects like DRI as it would reveal stuff to the competition.

I say nonsense. These two arguments seem to equate OSS to GPL.

1: NV and ATI could make up their own OSS license. Lets call it the "We Need To Hide Stuff" license. They take their existing codebase and print it out. They then take a black magic marker to the printout and cross off all of the IP related stuff. They then scan the documents into Acrobat distiller and release it as a PDF. Add a statement that the code is their property under the WNTHS license and cannot be used by others, and all changes should be sent to NVidia. Problem solved. It's OSS.

2: I have never seen a processor designer "hide" their chip specs. Intel doesn't. AMD doesn't. What makes NV different? Unless they have unlicensed hardware in their product, there is no reason for them to hide what they have.

Are there any other reasons that I am missing?

Thank you for your time,
BBH

Re:Non-OSS arguments don't hold water

[DeathPenguin]

This guy seems to have it right:

"Suppose you create and design feature X into your chipset. You might find, via a lawsuit, that feature X is patented by company Y. I've talked to vendors who would like to open their hardware but are scared to do so for this very reason -- they might have designed a patented feature into their hardware without realizing it."

Re:Non-OSS arguments don't hold water

[RPoet]

Just because there's some code somewhere in a PDF file that you explicitly cannot use doesn't mean it's Open Source. Open Source licenses must adhere to the Open Source Definition which among other important things says that derivatives must be allowed. Which is a huge part of the point of Open Source to begin with.

Re:Non-OSS arguments don't hold water

[Bitmanhome]

Nvidia and ATI cards are high-end cards, and people are willing to go out of their way to acquire one. This gives the companies some power to abuse the situation to make a little more money.

Specifially, if they keep the driver source closed, then EOL a product, you have no choice but to buy a new card. If the source is open, then you could keep your old card, and they wouldn't make any money.

Re:Non-OSS arguments don't hold water

[LordHunter317]

1: NV and ATI could make up their own OSS license. Lets call it the "We Need To Hide Stuff" license. They take their existing codebase and print it out. They then take a black magic marker to the printout and cross off all of the IP related stuff. They then scan the documents into Acrobat distiller and release it as a PDF. Add a statement that the code is their property under the WNTHS license and cannot be used by others, and all changes should be sent to NVidia. Problem solved. It's OSS.

This isn't open source. This is you can look at our code, but you can't do shit with it source. Its not even compilable without those confidental components. You fail to show what this gains us. People clamoring for open source drivers need the whoel source, and in a form you can build in. What does this give you?

2: I have never seen a processor designer "hide" their chip specs. Intel doesn't. AMD doesn't. What makes NV different? Unless they have unlicensed hardware in their product, there is no reason for them to hide what they have.
WTF are you talking about? The inner workings of AMD and Intel's chips are very much far away from the public eye. The public porition is the ABI and API to use the processor, which has to be made public -- otherwise no one would be able to use the processor.

Re:Non-OSS arguments don't hold water

[Anonymous Coward]

2: I have never seen a processor designer "hide" their chip specs. Intel doesn't. AMD doesn't. What makes NV different? Unless they have unlicensed hardware in their product, there is no reason for them to hide what they have.

Ask Google about Ultrasparc III documentation being withheld from OpenBSD developers. Sun won't let you know how their stuff works unless you sign a non disclosure agreement saying you won't let anyone know about bugs in the chip that need to be worked around.

Re:Non-OSS arguments don't hold water

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"What makes NV different?"

NVIDIA makes GPUs, not CPUs. A CPU supports a standard, in the case of AMD or Intel, usally x86 or x86-64. This standard is supported by many companies and is completely open. There is no benefit to hide specifications because there is nothing to hide. Moreover, with things like SSE, it benefits Intel to get the broadest appliction support, and they don't have to OSS their drivers to do it.

The sam does not hold true in the GPU world. NVIDIA cards and ATI cards use completely different interfaces. There is no common interface. Thankfully, we have the driver to abstract the hardware to a known graphics language. DirectX provides another layer of abstraction. Releasing the drivers would release the secrets of the GPU-Driver interface, which plays a *big* role in the performance of the part.

Re:Non-OSS arguments don't hold water

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong, the GPU-Driver interface (aka the registers), aren't a vital secret to the performance (the preformace stuff, like jit, are in the driver). The registers aren't even a factor. It's all in the drivers (and the core HW).

IOW, release the HW specs, but keep your drivers closed!

No mobile drivers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems there are no drivers for the radeon IGP series.

I know there are unnofficial ones, but it is Ati who should support the customers, not the customers supporting the customers.

Re:No mobile drivers?

[ddavis539]

It's about time that ATI released linux drivers for their cards. I tried downloading and installing the drives on my hp laptop, but the driver does not work with the Radeon IGP card.

I guess I'll go back to waiting. At least the nvidia drivers work great on my two desktop linux machines that have GeForce cards.

Because don't forget

[Anonymous Coward]

anecdotal evidence is the BEST evidence.

Nail on head.

[Anonymous Coward]

No tinkering. No learning.

There you have it, the reasons why you won't see open source OFFICIAL drivers from a hardware manufacturer such as ATI and NVIDIA.

First off they're Official, so ATI is supporting these drivers. Should you have trouble with them they are responsible for them.

Secondly, no learning. I highly doubt they want anyone learning much from the way they do things.

Yes you can argue by the time you pull something useful out of an open driver you're behind the game because you're copying rather than inovating.

But I think these companies would be totally happy not letting anyone learn from their work.

Just what I think.

ATI was open until we accepted NVidia

[Anonymous Coward]

ATI used to provide specs, and NVidia didn't.
So we bought ATI cards. No problem.

Then the XFree86 developers bent over for
NVidia, creating an interface to support
binary-only drivers. ATI saw that we had
accepted this, so now they screw us too.

XFree86 gets an extra lock-in with this.
The www.freedesktop.org, Xouvert, Y, and
Berlin/Fresco developers are left out in
the cold. Drivers are made for XFree86 only.

Re:However, open source == better bug finding/fixi

[betelgeuse-4]

"So you're saying that because someone found a bug in windows (surprise fucking surprise), then everything should be open?",

No, I'm just saying that bug finding/fixing is better/quicker with open source software. I don't no how much would be revealed to competitors by opening up the source (or how much they already know from reverse engineering), so I can't comment on whether it would be a sensible business move, but I'm fairly confident more bugs would be found and fixed if the drivers were open.

P.S. I'm not as much of a Linux Zealot/Communist as you infered from my original post, although I do run Gentoo.

This should have been about v3.7.1 drivers, but...

[antdude]

v3.7.1 driver was PULLED a few days ago due to many complaints. See this ATI Linux driver forum for the complaints. I had issues with both v3.7.0 (Xscreensaver's OpenGL didn't work) and v3.7.1 (X server didn't start at all) drivers on my old Red Hat Linux 7.2 box.

Re:However, open source == better bug finding/fixi

[the_c0de_man]

Well, then as has been said on /. before, that is an awful stupid place to keep your secrets.

But seriously, there is no way, on my system, that I would use closed source drivers under Linux. The code isn't opened up for review, to anyone but inside the company. The drivers are crap. I don't give my rootly powers to just anyone.

Mandrake 9.2 Problem

[Non Dufus]

Followed instructions closely, everything builds okay. Failed when performing 'insmod fglrx.o'.

Typical.

Re:Mandrake 9.2 Problem

[mackermacker]

whats does your /var/log/XFree86.0.log say? ON Mandrake 9.2, I couldnt get the driver working, but with the previous driver release.

rpm?! closed-source?!

[MoFoQ]

It doesn't sound like the official releases are worth it especially for those ppl who use non-rpm-able versions of linux or non-x86 builds, etc.

Debian (x86 and ppc) and those using YellowDog (ppc) on their G5's (which I'd like to do if I had the money to buy a dual g5....dump the mac os and install either deb or YD and have one the of most bitchin' linux machines on my block) and other versions are out of luck, official release-wise.

What about 4.4.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

4.3.0 looks so old now that I installed 4.4.0...

Re:What about 4.4.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

RMS will be arriving at your house later on this evening to whip you with a wet noodle.

Re:What about 4.4.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't care less about what RMS thinks. Maybe he should stop doing paid lectures and go back to code.

Bullshit

[niko9]

...writes "ATI has finally released official drivers for XFree 4.3.0 and updated their Linux drivers to 3.7.0 for supported XFree versions,

They have had support for 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3 for the last six to eight months at least.

...users who have ATI Radeon cards can now benefit from an official release.

If you read the README these are all "officially unsuopported"

Unfortunately, ATI still insists on using RPM exclusively...

Again, if anybody cared to read their instructions, there are specific details on how to get these RPM's converted to debs via alien.

The only real news concerning ATI and Linux drivers isn't even mentioned here. I wonder how this passed as news, since these unofficial drivers have been out for the longest.

The real news is that ATI released 3.7.1 on the fourth. There was only one sentence in the changlelog: "Support added for the Radeon 9800XT"

Of course this, and the fact that that the new driver trashed alot of X servers, sent the Rage3d crown into a flame frenzy. ATI promised linux driver updates every two months, and after waiting and waiting (with numerous issued datailed here)
they added one ChipID for the 9800XT which results in some unstable X servers for people who don;t even have 9800XTs?

As a result the 3.7.1 drivers were pulled several hours after being released with no explanation given.

I'm happy they are making an effort, but their enthusiasm seems misguided at best. After declaring that they re writing the ATI drivers from scratch (as oppesed from upgrading the Schneider drivers) they rename them from 3.2 to 3.7? What? Shoudn't the rewritten drivers from scratch be labeled a alpha or beta release at best?

I currently have two radeon cards, and have gone back using the open source Xfree 2d driver and dual booting into windows for playing games until this mess gets sorted out.

Re:Bullshit

[B-o-K]

From the Rage3d-forum comes:

3.7.0 were released on December 29, 2003.
3.7.1 were released on March 3rd or so, but were "UN"released due to the fact that they didn't work on any system that didn't have SSE2 support (i.e. non-p4 systems).
As such, they "un"released 3.7.1 and reposted 3.7.0, but with a whole new date.

OT: glxinfo output

[Anonymous Coward]

Could somone please post or link me to a glxinfo output of the latest driver? I dont't have such a card, but would be interested in the versions they support. THANX

Thought 3.7.0 came out in December?

[explorer]

So, what distinguishes this release from the v3.7.0 drivers they released at the end of December? It supported XF86 4.1.0, 4.2.0, and 4.3.0 just fine, and I've been running 3.7.0 for two months now.

Or perhaps is the poster just now becoming aware of v3.7.0?

Dan

Re:Thought 3.7.0 came out in December?

[B-o-K]

You're right!! This is very confusing.
And these drivers suck! Won't run on an ATI Radeon 9600PRO 256MB. Which I had a nVidia again...

two things

[bleepme1974]

linux? use the generic svga driver like everyone else. the configuration needed to get 3d to work is probably impenetrable to anyone without 23 hours to spare ;) like someone mentioned, in windows where there are actually games, hackers would have a field day with making wallhacks and other visual cheats.

Re:However, open source == better bug finding/fixi

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually there is a way around that little problem which has been used in the past by Matrox. All ATi or nVidia need do is seperate out the "sekrit" bits into a HAL module which can be linked against the rest of the driver, which can be open source. A totally open driver can then choose to stub out the functions provided by the HAL module while retaining simple but useful things like 2D acceleration, multiple head control, DDC, LVD control, video playback...in other words, all the stuff that the XFree drivers do anyway and stuff which none of the chipset vendors should give two hoots about anyway.

Proprietary and quality are two different things.

[Anonymous Coward]

I see a lot of people here are assuming that just because something is proprietary and/or comes from the same company that does the hardware it is assumed to be of higher quality than if it was done by someone else or in an open fasion.

As a person whom is working for one of the biggest hw/sw companies in the world and has been contributing code to some of our products, I'd say that we do things a bit different at times.
For one thing, QA and legal processes are much different than in the OSS world. The QA is extensive and a scheduled activity in a project instead of letting the users (alpha or beta teams ) find most bugs. This is just one way to do QA which might be considered a legacy of *old school* corporate development and will probably continue for quite a while longer due to many reasons.

As for the quality of code... We more or less come from the same background as most *hackers*, meaning we attended the same classes in school, read the same books on patterns, languages, design etc. as most other people in the field. We also are just human incapable of perfection and do not envision ourselves as incapable of error, error which could be spotted by peer review.

Unfortunately, peer review is still just in it's infancy at many places in the corporate landscape and there are a lot of prejudice to cope with before that process can be adopted (reasons which I believe a lot of you can imagine.. See Dilbert :-).

It's true however that we have a slight advantage like sometimes being able to talk directly to the person who did stuff X which we happen to depend on and/or are tasked with wrapping in a software layer. However, most often we just design according to specs without contact with other HW/SW teams unless QA or unit testing reveals that the implementation is not in line with the specs, in which case we need to join forces with the people who did component X.

I for one would welcome a more open approach and it seems one of our directors of technology also understands the gain in peer review and having the code available to a larger audience. The result thus far has been that a few products have been moved to an internal sourceforge-like system/repository, to which all employees can apply for access. As we have a lot of code-litterate people, opening up the code of these products will no-doubt spur a lot of innovation, extensions and a quicker "time to market" of functionality our customers or even our own people crave for.

Please, do not assume that just because something is close sourced it's of higher quality. It's just code written by people, people who are probably a lot like yourself...

Insults

[Overly Critical Guy]

Is it just me, or have Slashdot posters gotten generally more insulting lately? It's immature and anti-social. "You pretentious fucking idiot." Way to bolster your argument there, pal.

Again, insults

[Overly Critical Guy]

Why have Slashdotters gotten so damned insulting lately? "Quit your bitching!" "Is it too hard for an 3l337 63\|\700 |-|4x0r??" "No one is holding a gun to your head!"

All the guy did was ask a few questions.

Re:Again, insults

[Anonymous Coward]

You are such a hypocrite. I could list the innumerable times that you've done the exact same thing, but that would be a collosal waste of time since you are a known liar.

Better luck next time, on your next karma whore attempt.

Re:Again, insults

[Anonymous Coward]

There was evidence to prove that Overly Critical Guy is a lying cocksucker, but he deleted it. Think independently.

Other reasons NOT to buy ATI...

[nvrrobx]

I just attempted to install the new drivers on a Radeon M7 (in my Dell Inspiron 4150).

Well, I'm not shocked, but it doesn't work with this card. ATI has this very bad habit of dropping support for a card too early.

Atleast NVIDIA releases unified drivers, so recent updates even work for my old Diamond Viper V330 card!

Still Crashing?

[tempfile]

I've had XFree (all versions) crash for no reason back in 2003, already in 2D mode, after a few elements had been displayed on screen. I've been thinking I was the only one with this problem, but perhaps I'm not. Are the drivers still doing this?

Uh, ATI doesn't support laptops period

[Overly Critical Guy]

That has always been their stance. The reason is that sometime laptop manufacturers do things a little differently with their cards.

ATI's own Catalyst developers will tell you that their drivers do support Mobility Radeons, for instance--but they cannot officially support them. Too many issues, including liability issues.

ATI always tells you to go to the manufacturer if you tell the website you have a laptop. People make tiny mods that edit the INI setup file of the Catalyst drivers to allow them to install on your laptop anyway. 80% of the time, it works--but really, your laptop manufacturer IS the person you should be going to since they're the ones that soldered the damn card into your laptop and configured it for their board. But manufacturers are lazy as hell, so we mod the Catalyst drivers, and ATI knows it. Just how it is.

Re:Uh, ATI doesn't support laptops period

[timeOday]

That's all just what I said - "a bunch of corporate BS" - in more words.

The upshot: the OSS drivers support my setup, the closed source drivers do not.

Re:Uh, ATI doesn't support laptops period

[Anonymous Coward]

There was evidence to prove that Overly Critical Guy is a lying cocksucker, but he deleted it. Think independently.

Y-Windows

[Overly Critical Guy]

If people would help finish Y-Windows, which will support driver module loading and unloading without even needing a restart (imagine the ease of upgrading video drivers), ATI would probably be putting out drivers more often, with better support. Right now you have to compile Radeon DRI into the 2.6.3 kernel if you have a card up to an 8500. Higher than that, you use the XFree86 DRM drivers, or the ati-drivers.

Re:Y-Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

There was evidence to prove that Overly Critical Guy is a lying cocksucker, but he deleted it. Think independently.

Why should everything be "OPEN"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Unfortunately, ATI still insists on using RPM exclusively and keeping the drivers closed source."
Its their drivers and they chose to make it closed. I don't see what the problem is.... Open source fanatics want EVERYTHING open! Why dont you guys open up your families.... then we will have "OPEN WHORES" for everyone to "compile"!

Wide Pages

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo where's all my wide pages at, bitch? I ain't seen a wide (read wiiiiiiiide) page in forever. Quit sleepin' on the job you tool.

Also, eat some fucking vegetables

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

rpm is no problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, ATI still insists on using RPM exclusively
Try man rpm2cpio.

Re:However, open source == better bug finding/fixi

[Stevyn]

I don't doubt the possibility that more bugs are found more quickly when lots of people have access to it as opposed to the people working for ATI. But, ATI opening it up to their competitors (even if their licensing alowed it) is more damaging and costly than keeping it inhouse.

"I'm not as much of a Linux Zealot/Communist as you infered from my original post, although I do run Gentoo."

I'm not going to touch that one :)

Just because you support an open source OS...

[betelgeuse68]

Doesn't mean every piece of code you write should be released for others to see. It's ATI's code, their call, the fact that they're support XFree86 finally is a good thing. So who cares if their drivers are not open source.

IMHO,
-M

Re:Just because you support an open source OS...

[Grievre]

You can't support an open source operating system with non-Free code. When you're writing a binary driver for Linux and X, you are not in fact supporting it.

Re:Just because you support an open source OS...

[betelgeuse68]

I meant software support, e.g., Adaptec supporting Windows with drivers for its products, by "support" I mean empowering end users to use device not support of the emotional variety, e.g. "Rah, rah, rah! Go go go LINUX!"

As an end user what do I care if I can or cannot see the source code to some drivers. Yeah sure some people do (and on this site, lots), but um, ultimately computing is about getting work done as much as it is being a dweeb. Speaking as a practical dweeb myself.

It is precisely this mentality, people whining about software "X" not being released as open source when binaries are targeted at LINUX that gives ammunition to Microsoft to make non-sensical statements like "We believe in protecting intellectual property" when they have had occasion to pooh pooh LINUX. Implying that some just because you write code that targets LINUX you must release it as open source. Not. Though MS would be perfectly happy if you believe this and the very nature of this thread goes in that direction.

Just my 2 cents,
-M

Re:Just because you support an open source OS...

[Grievre]

"Implying that some just because you write code that targets LINUX you must release it as open source."

I never said this, read more carefully.

"by "support" I mean empowering end users to use device"

What's your definition of "use"? I "use" Linux by
looking at its source code to find out how it
works. I "use" quakeforge by modifying it to learn
how to light models more realistically, or to
draw more efficiently. When I "use" software, I
don't just use it's functionality, I use its code
and I use its Freeness.

A very large part -- even if it is a minority --
of people using Linux do so because they want to
use a Free Software operating system, not simply
because it's better. When proprietary drivers
are required for Linux to be useful for a purpose,
you are faced with a choice:

a) Don't use the proprietary drivers and suffer
a lack of functionality.
b) use them, and cause your OS to become non-free.

In regards to your comment about end users not
caring, I agree. I also agree that end users need
to stop being end users.

S-Video out Radeon 9600

[mackermacker]

Has anyone had luck with the S-Vidio out on a Radeon 9600?
The last driver they released simply wouldnt work, couldnt even get a screen. The drivers with Mandrake 9.2 worked after editing the xf config by hand. I have S-video out, and the only way I can get it to work is either just the monitor, or just the TV. Isnt there a clone mode, where I can have it going to the monitor, but then replicating it on the TV at a different resolution? Or even a way to switch back and forth using a virtual consle.

As a matter of fact...

[rsilvergun]

someone is holding a gun to my head and saying "Buy an ATI video card or die!" Send help now.

Re:As a matter of fact...

[wolrahnaes]

and here you are posting on slashdot. what devotion. :)

That's the least of it...

[evilviper]

Unfortunately, ATI still insists on using RPM exclusively and keeping the drivers closed source."

That's the least of the problems... Let's talk about how so many of the features of ATI cards are completely unusable under anything except Windows (and Mac OS in several cases).

I'm not a fan of NVidia's closed-source approach, but at least the drivers are 90% source, and only something like 10% binary-only. There are open-source versions available with XFree86 (minus a few features). Most importantly, with their drivers, you can use ALL the features of the hardware you paid for, like hardware playback of MPEG1/2 even at HDTV sizes (with XVMC, using MPlayer, MythTV, etc.)

Re:That's the least of it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry,wrong percentage

Their driver is 99.9% binary-only. Noticed the very large OpenGL binary library that they ship with the `driver'? The hardware interface is actually in there. The open-source `driver' that they ship is actually a very thin wrapper to this library.

Re:That's the least of it...

[evilviper]

Sorry,wrong percentage

Sorry, you don't know what you are talking about...

Take a look at the FreeBSD driver package some time...

Re:So, what IS the best graphics card for gnu/linu

[niko9]

IS there a decent card for gnu/linux with:

* hardware acceleration
* decent performance
* support for multiple simultaneous X displays
* open source drivers


Check out the DRI page. Seems ATi has reelased the specs to their older Radeon cards; you can get hardware 3D with Radeons upto a 9200 series. Not to mention fixed Xvideo support.

You can get a 9200 with 128MB of RAM and DVI for 44 bucks on Pricewatch. Another bonus is that their fanless; that's if a 6000rpm fan bothers you.

so what

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF cares if the drivers are closed source. The video card market is competitive enough that they should be able to protect their IP.

The fact that they are releasing them as RPM is what sucks. They should be tar files to enable everyone to use them easily.

Current FC2-test problems

[Bob Loblaw]

After a bit more research , it seems that the latest Fedora Core 2 test kernels have problems with the ATI drivers. I guess the trick is to compile a vanilla kernel.

Re:However, open source == better bug finding/fixi

[groomed]

Why should it be impossible for independant third parties to develop drivers for graphics adapters? What is the valuable IP that, say, ATI, will lose through such an arrangement? What secrets are there that cannot be exposed? How can somebody like Nvidia steal it, given that ATI has a head start of at least half a year to get the hardware up to production quality and then another half year for the software? This argument just doesn't work.

The "radeon" Driver Works Fine

[Anonymous Coward]

I use the normal radeon driver, which a specially configured XF86Config-4... It was hard to configure at first, especially considering that some versions of XFree86 4.3.0's hardware rendering didn't quite work, but that was fixed with an "apt-get upgrade" one day...

I have found that EnablePageFlip for the "radeon" driver dramatically increases frame rate. Also, I had to manually set my AGP rate to 4x or it would default to 1x.

glxgears reports 2510 fps, which is quite good for an official XFree86 driver.

My XF86Config-4 file follows:

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Server0"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "Files"
RgbPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"
ModulePath "/usr/X11R6/lib/modules"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/"
EndSection

Section "Module"
SubSection "extmod"
Option "omit XFree86-DGA"
EndSubSection

Load "dbe"
Load "dri"
Load "glx"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "keyboard"
Option "CoreKeyboard"
Option "XkbRules" "xfree86"
Option "XkbModel" "microsoftpro"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "CorePointer"
Option "Protocol" "ImPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Sony"
ModelName "CPD-200ES"
HorizSync 30-70
VertRefresh 50-120
Option "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "radeon"
VendorName "ATI Technologies Inc"
BoardName "Radeon 9000 Pro"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
ChipID 0x4966
Option "AGPMode" "4"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "True"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Card0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultFbBpp 32
SubSection "Display"
FbBpp 32
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection

Re:bitchslapped?

[jdifool]

/. has gone askew for a long time.

This is sad to see that they are supposed to be *the* tech site backing up free software.

Whatever.

Your situation is a fucking shame : however, I don't think the eds did that manually. There must be something in Slashcode (just like : too much controversial moderation --> bing bong !), some kind of nice easteregg implemented in the very version of /.'s Slashcode (which you won't see on downloads, for sure... :)

Regards,
jdif

How about XFree 4.4.0?

[BSDKaffee]

Seems like anything concerning XFree 4.3.0 would be old news. XFree 4.4.0 is out now, and whether you like the licence change or not, a bit of good news would be ATI's support for that.

Re:However, open source == better bug finding/fixi

[Anonymous Coward]

Having the source can help, even if you don't know the hardware perfectly. My company had some special needs that the stock ATI driver couldn't meet so we bought the source. Not only was it modified to suit our needs, we improved performance by at least 20% (last year numbers).

RPM = LSB standard method

[Nailer]

While I've got my own views on open/closed source, why on earth is RPM a bad thing?

If your distro supports the Linux Standard Base, you can install RPMs, its that simple. Why should ATI manage multiple packages just because someone's bitter with that choice?

He said, she said.

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's not even a question of what they WANT. If they are anything like nVidia, they CAN'T open them up because they licence technology from other firms, and can't publish their licenced code."

[Richard Nixon]
"I'm not a crook!"

It's basically they say, and no outsider can prove otherwise. Welcome to the world of closed business.

Only the onlies.

[Anonymous Coward]

"If their binary is anything like NVIDIA's driver, that'd be a dozen megabytes of code to reverse engineer! Remember, a graphics driver is *not* a simple register-banger. Its an entire implementation of OpenGL. Much of that code is more or less hardware-independent, and has to do with optimizing display lists and whatnot. Reverse engineering the driver would be extremely difficult."

I'm certain the Mesa guys would agree with you.
Damn open sourcers can't even do a complicated spec.

Re:Only the onlies.

[be-fan]

That doesn't make any sense. The Mesa guys *implemented* an open specification. And it took about a year and a half for Mesa 1.0 to come out. Reverse-engineering an existing driver would be a whole lot more complicated.

Party til it stops working.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Yippy. Yay for ATI. Closed source or not my computer works better for it and I can now do my job better, and that matters a lot."

Yes, now try this. Go to the Nvidia site and download the latest Linux driver and run it on a 2.6 kernel. Let the fun begin. Now browse their forums for 2.6 kernel and latest driver (5336).

I'ved had to go back a step with a patched version someone did, and even that had an issue or two.

It's fun until it stops working. Now what?

Re:Party til it stops working.

[Anonymous Coward]

Consider yourself happy that you can even run these buggy drivers. I have Powerbook and Nvidia 5200FX Go and Nvidia doesn't support PPC at all.

Re:Not just RPM...DRM Vector.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I have ATI hardware but I'm considering switching to nvidia. They very frequently release drivers, their drivers actually work correctly, and their drivers are available for Opteron and even Itanium."

Would you feel the same way if Nvidia started incorporating DRM into their drivers, along with the bug fixes, and additional features? What would you do about it? Nvidia's drivers already shut down (or macrovision) the TV-Out when playing certain DVD's under Windows.

What about old hardware?

[Boltronics]

When very old hardware (2+ years) is phased out and no longer contains relevant performance-enhancing techniques, why couldn't video card manufacturers release the drivers (or at least portions of them) under the GPL?

If there are sections of code that cannot be redistributed, then let the free software communities fill in the gaps - even if that section inefficient. This would encourage new hardware buyers to purchase the brand that does this, since it will dramatically enhance the cards life expectancy.

The freedon that closed brings.

[Anonymous Coward]

"And companies like IBM embracing Linux could act as a catalyst for future hardware support."

All of it closed. Were do you want to go today?

closed source != bad always-switch addict.

[Anonymous Coward]

" If the constraints of a closed-source driver become too much, I can switch out my card and its drivers in a matter of hours."

Better hope this "binary is good enough for me" crap doesn't catch on, or you could end up spending a lot of money and time "switching".

closed source != bad always-Consumers.

[Anonymous Coward]

"They can. As the poster below pointed out it's a very large project though. The drivers are several megs from what I've seen."

And as I pointed out Mesa is an OpenGL implimentation (already done Be-Fan!)

So unless he wants to make the Nvidia's OpenGL is vastly different than the standard OpenGL, he's full of it. There may be difference, but certainly closer to the goal than starting from scratch, which is Be-Fan's argument.

"I'd love to have closed source drivers for my 802.11g card. Beats the hell out of nothing."

But it will never beat picking your hardware carefully (had to do this under Windows as well) and having Open-Source drivers.

"Yet in the real world (run by businesses) you get what they decide to give you, not what you think they should do or what you think you deserve."

And people wonder why we're called "consumers"?

They should know about it...

[Ndr_Amigo]

I told Alexander Stohr about this, after he left ATI, and he apparantly passed it on the driver team.

But of course, knowing about it and fixing it are two different things. Meh.

I'm using XF4.4RC2 now, as the native driver there works fine. But I miss s3tc :P

Re:Not just RPM...DRM Vector.

[Jeffrey Baker]

The nice thing about the current situation is we can decide when to use the vendor drivers and when to ignore them. It would be pointless to build DRM into nvidia's driver, because the user can always remove that module and procees with whatever he wants to do. There are perfectly great 2D and video drivers for every popular display card. The vendor drivers are *only* needed for OpenGL acceleration.

Re:So, what IS the best graphics card for gnu/linu

[Anonymous Coward]

By hardware acceleration I assume you mean 3D.

If so, then no, you can't have all of that at once with the current state of open source drivers. XFree86 specify in their doc that Xinerama (multi-head) and DRI (3d acceleration) are mutually incompatible for the time being. So no joy.

The best you can get as far as open-source is concerned is getting an ATI radeon 9200. This is supported in DRI, it does Xinerama, it has decent performance, it does 3d, but remember, not all at once.

If you want all at once with all the nice bits such as video out, DGA (hardware video scaler) and a modicum of stability, you need to go Nvidia + proprietary drivers, end of story.

Note that from personal experience, I have no end of minor troubles with the combination of Nvidia, 3D, multihead and SMP, and things aren't getting any better.

Rant

[Prong]

Aw, jeeze.

I'm going to probably repeat what a whole bunch of people have already said (probably better than I will), and go on a minor tear.

ATI is being silly. For that matter, so is Nvidia and anyone else who makes consumer products who insists that they are some how preserving comptetive advantage by not publishing driver source.

As someone who's worked in the gizmo world (read: consumer PC hardware), everyone knows there are no trade secrets in a product once it has been released. Every single company has at least one team of engineers disecting their competitors' products from the day they can lay hands on them, and that includes drivers. If anything, it's gotten cheaper and easier with the availablity of overseas engineering centers. The non-patented stuff that ATI spits out shows up in the next gen of the Nvidia cards (and Matrox, and all the rest). The patented stuff gets licensed if the respective companies are really interested.

Every video card producer makes design decisions that are going to be different than other video card producers, whether it be because of different target markets, or just plain old "we think this is more important". ATI is leading the gamer frame rate race right now. Nvidia has a better array of high end workstation products. Matrox is making very solid, inexpensive 2d chipsets with serious office productivity implications. The half dozen other video card producers all have areas of expertise, and any one of them could make an advance that puts them on the top of the charts in a given niche next week. And all of them are looking at all the other products out there, and clean rooming them.

I don't know. Maybe this is just a case of the first big producer saying "you know what? Screw it, we'll open source the drivers". Given what the GPL requires, the first one that does it is going to reap huge benefits for a long time to come. But I'm not holding my breath for that breakthrough in corporate thought.

The thing that strikes me is that the consumer networking world largely seems to understand the process.

-sigh-

In the the mean time, I'm going to forgo the the few frames per second advantage that ATI gives me and stick with Nvidia. Easier to lump into my custom setup, and that buys them a point advantage until someone gets smart and plays nice.

(Note: no invalid end-of-rant scope delimiter. I'm _so_ not done.)

Wow! Already?

[vandan]

XFree86-4.4 has only just been released, and ATI have drivers out already?

What's that? The drivers are for 4.3? And most distros are considering forking X and/or following an alternative to X? Sounds great!

All the more reason to pressure ATI into releasing docs for the R300+ chips. Until they do, I'll only be upgrading to an R250 or R270 or whatever the latest one supported by open source drivers is. However if they leave R300+ support out in the cold for too much longer, I'll switch back to nVidia simply because they are much faster to release drivers than ATI, and therefore more likely to support whatever direction everyone else moves in when abandoning XFree86.

Re:Offtopic sig related posting

[Anonymous Coward]

> Taco Semen Story

Ugh...sounds like a bad N-Gage porno.

3.2.8 are Better than 3.7.0

[�nertia]

3.7.0 Have severe bugs, which make many applications which use standard mesa/glut libraries display artifacts or not work at all (Try celestia with 3.7.0 and you will see what I mean).

Also winex3 has major issues with 3.7.0, warcraft3, starcraft become unplayable.

3.2.8 (the previous release). Seems to solve all these issues. Unfortunately ut2004 then becomes massivly artifacted... DAMMIT ATI get your s#$$ together, considering that NVIDIA only have 2 coders who work on porting the linux/*nix X free drivers, you would expect the reinging GFX card chip makers to do a better job and more thorough testing.

Glad to leave all this shit behind

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading a discussion like this sure makes me glad that I left the world of desktop Linux behind about 6 months ago. Dealing with bullshit driver issues and bullshit open source zealots yelling at each other when all you wanted was to find some useful information just isn't worth the advantages of Linux. OS X runs great on my 12" G4 PowerBook, all the hardware works, there's no driver issues, and the local zealots are too busy arguing with Windows users to be bothered insulting each other instead of helping.

Goodbye desktop Linux, it wasn't nice knowing you.

Re:However, open source == better bug finding/fixi

[Afrosheen]

Three words: Licensed SGI code. End of story.

ATI Linux drivers packaged for Debian

[cur3]

i using ati 3.7 with xfree 4.3 in debian, tyan mpx with dual barton 2600mp and ati 9600 pro 128mb i find this page with a script for building a deb package of the drivers: http://xoomer.virgilio.it/flavio.stanchina/debian/ fglrx-installer.html it works fine for me, it gives about 3000fps in glxgears, quake3 and ut2004demo works fine, with the later ati driver 3.2 ut2004demo crashes always

Only a technical approach

[AllenChristopher]

I've used them for that purpose. So what, you want ATI to give us the open-source driver without ANY comments?

That's practically no use at all. The backlash from the open-source community would be enormous. It would take years to work from that. Remember that the catalyst drivers are for many, many chipsets, integrated into one. Many assignment codes for different chipset capabilities would be gibberish without the documentation.

If you can make a program to eliminate only secret comments, though, and let all the others through, I expect the same program will be able to run and win the Loebner Prize. As far as I know, the only way to figure out if there are any trade secrets in the comments is to have humans read them.

Remember that secret comments are not prefaced with "// THIS IS A SECRET:" They're only secrets for a little while. The engineers who wrote the code may not have really known it was a secret. There may be no secrets at all! But if I were a non-coding executive, I'd be worried, and I might doubt the advisability of open-sourcing it for little or no gain for my company.

On the other hand, if I were starting a new company, I'd set a policy of making all comments open-safe, in case we wanted to open-source the drivers, or in case a court-order required that we expose our code to legal scrutiny.

Re:Only a technical approach

[Krach42]

Yeah, I can see all your points... I was just saying that it's not enormously difficult to remove comments from code. The parent post of mine said nothing about removing trade-secret information from the code.

Now, I do like your idea of "open-safe" comments though. Good idea. Props++

Will ATi release their R300 drivers?

[Psyrg]

Correct me if I'm worng, but isn't ATi planning on releasing their R300 drivers open source when they release their new R400 gear?

I for one am looking forward to the prospect. If they don't release them, I may have to switch back to my Voodoo5 to de-taint my system.

Re:So, what IS the best graphics card for gnu/linu

[kundor]

I concur, you can get three out of four.

With my nvidia drivers, I get 3d acceleration, multimonitor display (simulataneously even), great performance, but proprietary drivers.

However, it IS possible to read and edit the majority of the nvidia code, if you want. So it's halfway-open-source.

Best free software drivers?

[leandrod]

So the question is, what are the best free software drivers available?

It's a shame about Matrox

[Crazy Eight]

I didn't know that Matox changed it's ways so dramatically. Why would they do such a thing? Do they really think Parhelia is going to compete with RV3xx and NV3x in the minds of those who want those chips? If so, why wouldn't continuing to distinguish themselves with open drivers and specs lend them a mark of distinction? It's sad. Excepting 3D acceleration, their cards have excellent features and the Linux drivers -- both framebuffer and X -- were rock solid and complete. I wish the new ATI could be fused with the old Matrox.

Corebreech has been lost...

[Anonymous Coward]

Where are you ? jdifool