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ATI at the Top Graphics Chip Maker for 2004
dirutz writes "ATI is at the top according to market share, but nVidia is catching up. Hopefully this competition means lower prices and more goodies."
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Hopefully this competition means lower prices and more goodies.
And better open-source support?A merger/acquisition and Higher prices!!
Nvidia is the answer
However, given their stance on Linux drivers, my next purchase will be Nvidia. I don't like the fact that I can't use my DVI port because ATI doesn't feel like it.
Vip
"Hopefully this competition means lower prices and more goodies." ...so I think it sounded more feasible when I saw "higher prices for bigger goodies.
___ In the words of Gen. Douglas McArthur: "I'll be right back."
I used to be all for ATI, but the current selection of cards from Nvidia is IMO more impressive, especially cards like the 6600GT which are pretty awesome in the $200 price range.
On the shelves at CompUSA, there seem to be a plethora of ATI cards with 9200s in them. Is the total volume shipped as relevant if ATI's bottom-feeding?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Could this be related to ATI's Half-Life 2 offer?
There are 2 types of people in the world, those who find that stupid binary joke funny, and those who don't.
Good for you. This is about market share, and not in any way about which one you think is more impressive.
I've owned various nVidia and ATI video cards. My current PC is using an ATI RADEON 9600XT from ASUS. Its a bit dated now, but a very nice card overall. My other PC has a nVidia GeForce4 MX400 made by Chaintech. That card is quite a bit more dated, and was kind of mediocre to begin with.
Anyways, the point I'm slowly coming to, is that, essentially, I don't really care if I own an ATI or nVidia card. High end cards are high end cards. I've had few problems with either; although, I find reliability of anything made by ASUS is best. Benchmarks aside, you get what you pay for. And most of the "discussion" over which is better in reference to ATI and nVidia is pure fanboyism.
... with regards to the availbility of their high-end cards. When was the last time you saw a store (online or otherwise) that had a x800 (of any stripe) or high end 6800 in stock? Probably not in the last 3 or 4 months. I was considering upgrading from my 9800pro, but until better cards become more widely available the costs are going to remain prohibitive.
Is ATI's prevalence at all related to their more dominant presence in embedded applications, such as the xbox, gamecube, and other consoles?
nVidia tend to have far better driver support - you try to get multimonitor working properly on an ATI card in pre windows xp. And nVidia have hawt fairies!
How about Matrox? Are they still in business?
Haven't heard anything from them for ages....
I don't need a signature.
I am waiting for Linux to run on my GPU and out of video ram.
Is Intel's 40% market share. Honestly, when I read that the biggest market is for the lower-end cards and the big guns are most for marketing and prestige I didn't imagine it was such a difference.
---- Take the Space Quiz!
I'm glad all the statistical reports of "Top X of 2004" come out several weeks after all the columnists report their own toplists. They're just making that crap up. With a month of writing "2005" under our belts, we can actually look back at the data without the holidays confusing us.
--
make install -not war
I would love to see the market share numbers broken down into separate markets.
Who gets the market share in the high-end workstation market?
Macintosh market?
Linux market?
They were in the mix in the late 90's but the lack of proper opengl support killed them as a "gamer's manufacturer". I still have a G200 running in one of my servers. Maybe they finally got out their opengl ICD, but by that time I was on the nvidia bandwagon and waffle between them and Ati depending on my mood.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Bah, personally I'd never call ATi any good name, their chips may not be bad, but their drivers work like Windows'95 or another calamity of that sort. They are instable, slow and non-portable. And I'm not talking about the Linux drivers alone, my Windows XP which I seldom use for games takes a couple of minutes to become useful because Catalyst is eating reasources like a cow in the beginning.
They'd do best by releasing the required specs open to let some competent people take care of writing drivers. But I guess they couldn't make overcloking impossible in the hardware so they need to give us buggy closed drivers to make money on the stronger cards.
When will ATI finally come out with a card with pixel shader 3.0 support? It's hard to take them seriously when they lack this.
And I do my best to regularly take stock tips from Anonymous Cowards. My cardboard box has a fine gigabit network connection.
___ In the words of Gen. Douglas McArthur: "I'll be right back."
I hope the Open Graphics project will make inroads into the graphics business, and force Nvidia and ATI to make the specs to their cards public. They can have a big market if all computers intended to run FOSS are equipted with one of their cards. And if the majority of computers in Brazil are destined to run FOSS for financial reasons, that's a huge market for their hardware.
Nvidia and ATI are really paranoid about their IP - at one point Nvidia even refused to share the specs for an ethernet card they made. The FOSS comunity doesn't want their schemas for the hardware, just the interface so that quality open source dirvers can be made and Linux/*BSD can have state of the art graphics capailities.
The big players here are Intel, ATI, and Nvidia. Since this report shows that ATI and Nvidia both gained market share, it's not really a sign that ATI is making major progress. It just shows that Intel is not doing so well in this area.
When they decided that they would not compete in the "game market" and instead released a card with features an insignificant minority wanted.
Their failure is that the game oriented graphics business lands the name on storeshelves. Right now most game geeks can only name two suppliers of video card chips, Nvidia and ATI.
Matrox was great up until the G400 era where they slipped of the path and disappeared into obscurity.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Intel at 40%, ATI at 27%, nVidia is "closely behind" with 18%. Where is the remaining 15%? (Almost as much as nVidia). Don't tell they are Matrox's ;) Anyway - either I live in my own reality or the article author smokes something weird.
Im still enjoying my Radeon 9500 Pro from nearly 2 years ago. It has been a solid card, but I will never ever buy ATI again. The lack of well written and usefull linux drivers has turned me to the competition for the next time I purchase a video card. In Windows it is perfect, any linux distro I have tried there have been horrible problems with it, so since they will not write proper drivers Im gone.
Home of the midwest loser - www.say-10.net
How does TuxRacer run on it anyways? Is it double plus fast going down that slope?
I question how long it will go. I see a few sinareo's:
1. The more advanced gaming gets, the more complex it gets. Eventually graphics cards will outdo what game developers can program for. Until programming techniques allow them to take advantage of features, that could cause a temporary stall in sales.
2. Heat? PC's tend to be getting smaller. Small is the trend right now, compared to "I need a mini tower" craze of the 90's. I think that heat barrier is going to become a big issue too. How do you cram that hot processor into a little box, with a quiet fan.... if even a fan? IMHO the thermal barrier is not somehting they can ignore.
3. Price. After 1,2. How do they keep the price affordable? Especailly with dedicated gaming units like the PS2 and Xbox... how do you keep PC gaming and encourage people to shell out cash. It seems more and more common for a game to be PS2 only, or Xbox only.... and no PC version. This removes the motivation to spend big bucks on GPU's.
IMHO this isn't going to last. It's a mini dotcom bubble.
It will burst, it will scale back, and some of it will survive. But I think the over-emphasis on Graphics Cards will be a trend of times past in the next few years.
Sidenote: And ironically I type this with an ATI ad right on the top of the page!)
However, given their stance on Linux drivers, my next purchase will be Nvidia. I don't like the fact that I can't use my DVI port because ATI doesn't feel like it.
/etc/portage/package.keywords /etc/portage/package.keywords
... similiar to nvidia. So get either one ... I've used both, and both have their strengths and weaknesses (e.g ATI drivers and celestia have issues and nvidia can't hold a stable image at 1920x1200 under Linux), and now that ATI has finally gotten their act together WRT Linux drivers, they are a viable competitor to nvidia in that market.
echo "media-video/ati-drivers" >>
echo "media-video/ati-drivers-extra" >>
emerge -Du media-video/ati-drivers media-video/ati-drivers-extra
or do whatever the equivelent is for your distribution to install the ati-drivers version 8.8.25, and run fglrxconfig to configure X accordingly.
I've got ATI drivers running on a dual DVI card, on multiple heads in one case, and on a single 1920x1200 on another, and have used them in both 64-bit (opteron) and 32-bit (athlon/intel) environments. For ati 9250 and less I use the xfree drivers, for anything above that I use the new binary drivers.
I've done the same with nvidia cards (although I've yet to find an nvidia card that doesn't flicker incessently at 1920x1200 resolution, despite using the DVI port rather than the analog port -- go figure).
ATI is now releasing driver updates for Linux every 2 months
In other words, you can pick whatever card you like the best and expect driver support on Linux for it now, on both 32-bit intel and 64-bit opteron at least. PPC users are stuck with the free drivers (which work fine on my powerbook 17" BTW), and unfortunately other platforms are similarly limited, but for 99.99% of us the support is pretty damn good at this point.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I owned cards with both of their major chipsets and highly enjoyed them for their time. Too bad Micron had to buy them and demolish their offerings...
It will still run Linux's latest games including TuxRacer and nethack.
Wow, where have you worked where #1 and #2 were done correctly?
;)
Not saying it shouldn't be, just that i've yet to see it in my 8 years in
processor design.
Are you in Austin?
I used before an nvidia MX440 with personal cinema. kind of old but the 3d worked fine in linux. Personal Cinema sucked because there was no linux support for the tv part. Windows was fine.
:( but that will require another 200US$ :(
I upgrade to a radeon 9600 pro and it has been only headaches since then:
- Installing 3d acceleration in linux is really hard.
- I got an additional ati tv card that I installed, after a couple of days any 3d application had really bad texture corruption. I wrote to ATI and they replace my 9800pro card (with no proof of purchase because I lost the recipt.)
- The tv card was uninstalled for a long time, but I installed again and boooom... really bad 3d screen corruption. I turn off my machine and the 9800 was fine after a restart but I removed the tv card. Now ATI asked me to sent the tv card back. (again without recipt).
- Even in simple 2D screens I got screen corruptions.
- I did not do any overclocking to the card.
- Everytime i search for problem on 9800 it seems that they have the tendency of running too hot and people install additional coolers. But why do I have to expend more money in coolers if I already pay for the 9800 pro???
It seems to me that ATI is aware that some of their cards are a POS because they keep sending me RMA forms (return forms) at any complain I send.
I want to go back to nvidia
Altough I think the 9800 ATI card sucks, the support has been OK.
And they told all this to an interviewee? RIGHT
-mkb
The reason ATI has the majority of the market share is because they provide OEMS with a cheap onboard video solution like the mobile 9x00 series. When it comes to highend...ATI and Nvidia are head-to-head. Competition is good and lets hope it continues.
ATI is currently selling very few cards. Everyone knows the best value is in the 6600GT and 6800GT.
The x700 series, is just garbage.
The 9600 XT has the same performance for the same price, the 9800 pro is also the same price.
ATI has so little fab space they simply don't reflect market pressures.
Summary: nVidias grapes are sour!
The only care you'll find around here will be "Yeah but does it run (or work with) Linux!?!"
.. Nothing has really changed?
This certainly sounds like ATI fanboy FUD to me. nVidia has shown that they're capable of producing a quality product (hence their growing market share). I don't see why they'd suddenly veer from a path that's proven effective.
It really doesn't matter one way or the other. The video card market is fast paced and volatile. If nVidia does produce garbage, the market will react accordingly, and drop them like a hot rock.
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
Makes no sense in English. Does it make any sense in American?
That was classic intercourse!
Wow, all I can say is that they must have either some awesome management or lead engineers, then because their chips are head and shoulders above ATi's latest generation.
I know that you are being a w|seass, but I shall respond for the benefit of the audience. The interviewers did not volunteer this information. Rather, I asked them during the part, of the interview, in which I am expected to ask questions about the team and the company. "Do you have coding standards?" "What is the bug rate?" "How are bugs handled?"
You obviously have no experience in processor design. The simulator is a vital part of the design process, for the engineers use the results of the simulator to determine what goes into the microarchitecture.
The only company with a worse processor development "strategy" (quotes intended) is Sun. There was a reason that nVidia fell behind the performance and marketshare curve about 2 years ago. I stumbled on that reason.
Actually, the article points that ATI is the top "STANDALONE" chip maker. Intel is still very much the top chip maker, but they do not sell standalone graphics chips. ATI 27%, Invidia 18%, Intel most of the rest of total graphics chips. (4th quarter) ATI 55%, Invidia 41% of standalone chipsets.(4th quarter.)
For some time now, people who have successfully gotten their ATI cards working have had to put up with very poor performance compared to Windows.
I'd love to have another option for 3D on Linux :)
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
i am not not 1337 a gamer, but want a decent AGP card for video/movies and editing photos & graphics, maybe a built in TV card using a BTTV-878 chip, but i dont want ATI i only want a NVIDIA card...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Use the numbers and "lie with statistics"? Look here at this 0.25% market share or over here at this 2% market share! Within these Nvidia wins with 70%!!! Sadly that's not true because even Apple ships many with ATI cards.
You obviously have no experience in processor design.
You are obviously wrong.
Rather, I asked them during the part, of the interview, in which I am expected to ask questions about the team and the company. "Do you have coding standards?" "What is the bug rate?" "How are bugs handled?"
To which the answers were "Oh, we have a bunch of imports who speak horrible English" and "We don't have documentation on our simulator"? Did they have any evidence that you weren't already working for ATI?
-mkb
ATI reserves a whole special mode for suckiness of their drivers with windows too. I have an AIW Radeon PCI which I aquired primarily for using with a secondary screen + TV-in. The problem is that the card will not use the TV-in functions if it is not the only card on the system. ATI's webpage does indicate that it won't work if it's not the primary card, but while setting PCI to primary does allow for the drivers to be found, it still does not capture. An email to ATI results in a bunch of canned responses and eventually a "tough luck" answer.
ATI's drivers suck in windows, but not as much as their support for any OS.
Where is this founded?
:-) Well one is a 5200 :-( which is notably slower, even though it has double memory (256).
Here is a d/l for linux drivers, they have for about 20 of thier cards...
Are the drivers crap? Is this an urban myth? I loved my first ATI card with MPEG on board, and TV in... it was so nice! years ago now...
Then I had a matrox... damn thing, was a nice card but they supported my motherboard exactly 1 day (YES!! the next day they updated thier website!) after I ditched the card, after 13 months of unhappy marraige.
Now I just got two free nvidia 5700le's and they are nice enough
Doom3 on 5700le is definately playable on default settings.
me out.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Or maybe just out of curiosity?
I asked the interviewer, "Do you provide visa support?" Such a question is harmless. The interviewer responded, in a thick accent, "Don't worry. We hire many H-1Bs."
read this and support the opensource movement
http://kerneltrap.org/node/4622
http://kerneltrap.org/node/4622
as it spreads out to new fields of endeavour.
good luck to all the open and honest initiatives and fair projects, social practices and helpful goodwilling people around the world.
cooperation and openness help this world better than pure capitalism and monetary systems.
cheers.
... then you'd have commented on the apostrophic plural.
No you're nothing but a spelling nazi, and thus, YHL.
Probably not ATI's fault. Did you actually buy card where not just the chipset, but the board was made by ATI? I bought a cheap ass nVidia 5200 and had the same problem. On a graphics board likely the only thing made by ATI or nVidia is the actual chipset, all other parts are provided by a separate manufacturer.
Oh, and my Powercolor 9700pro has run like a dream for the last 5 months.
Photos.
Would a 9200 be low enough power that I can replace my Xpert 2000 AGP in my cheap-ass 185 watt pentium4 crap-box?
The synopsis is wrong anyway. Intel is the leading graphics chip supplier by a huge margin. The nVidia/ATi split is tiny.
No, this is an outright lie. I know people who work there in QA, and nobody at NV is as stupid as the parent tries to suggest.
Last computer I bought, I went with the latest and greatest ATI card. Installed a new game to test it out, graphics were messed up, buttons were white back ground with white text.
I look up problem, update graphics drivers. I updated, had to reformat because driver were so bad I couldn;t get PC to come up, this was a brand new PC with nothing but a game on it. Reformatted went to driver before. Great everything worked, except it didn't recognize 8X AGP 2 weeks later another driver, this one broke serveral apps, but I got my 8X AGP back. 2 weeks later another driver. Broke some apps fixed others. The whole time sometimes in the middle of the night any basic Open GL screen savers would cause my atisomething.drv to go into an infinite loop. Finally after another driver update and my productivity apps I use, Rhino 3d, Maya, etc wouldn;t even start I went out and bought a NVidia, will never go back to ATI.
To this day I still can't get rid of all the ATI drivers on the machine without a reformat. Why because Uninstall of drivers say Can not detect ATI Device. Well no crap I threw that $300 card out.
Pay attention to context in these stories, ATI's the lead in standalone, swapping places with Nvidia (just slightly). Overall Intel is still on top.
My company is the source of this data and doesn't release it, but on a regular basis portions get leaked, often to present a particular picture that isn't entirely complete. (Usually the leaks come from someone with a financial interest in driving perceptions on way or the other, and not the graphics companies themselves.)
I used to work at ATI, and between the periodic beatings from management and the forced sodomy from the cafeteria staff, morale was so low that we could barely afford the time to make human sacrifices to the God of video cards! You think poor comments are bad? Well you've never been violated with a Microsoft USB mouse then.
Gross profit from these items will be somewhere in the region of 50-60% of the purchase price is profit. The net profit will be neared 10%, or less for the budget cards.
If you increase your market to the 15% linux systems (remember, not all of them are x86!), where your marginal costs are already paid for, you will see 30+% profit margins there.
Would you sniff at an increase from 10% to 15% Net profit?
Of course, as the OSS market becomes more competitive, the net profit in serving that market reduces, but you keep most of the first-mover advantage.
Someboddy has a potty mouth. Does your mother know you talk like this?
You jsut blew a buncha money supporting a manufacturer who feeds on lip service.
Intel releases all the info needed to support their shit. And any modern intel (on-board, included, available now) graphics set is going to be at least as powerful as that "Opengr" chipset that might get developed someday.
Congratulations on being a sucker.
Twice.
2. Heat is certainly a problem, but not one that is unresolvable. I have a Gefore FX Go in my laptop that blows away my previous Geforce, yet is stuffed into a smaller form factor and produces less heat. It's certainly not a higher end GPU today, but it's no slouch. Many companies are working on the heat problem today, and there techniques being created to deal with it.
3. Do you live in a hole? NVIDIA and ATI both have contracts to create the GPUs for next gen consoles. ATI is working with MS and NVIDIA with Sony. Both are well on their way to completion.
That said, you may be right that things will slow down, but that doesn't mean it's a bubble similar to the dotcom bubble. If/when it slows, it will because technology simply can't keep up. That does not indicate a bubble burst and deemphasis on 3d video technology.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
So does yours... she told me last night.
Nvidia gets around it by doing a binary driver with a bit of open sourced glue between it and the kernel. I don't know what ATI does. (I've owned one ATi product, and that taught me about buying Ati) But either way they are putting some work in it already. The parent was just hoping for MORE.
How about taking a deep breath and trying not to be such a idiot.Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
sometimes, life is simple... ;)
You obviously have no experience in processor design.
And you inferred this from his one sentence statement in which he expressed doubt that so much information woud be given to an interviewee? What exactly does that skepticism have to do with experience in processor design?
The ATI managemend seems to slowly realize that their mediocre driver support is not very beneficial to their sales goals. If their software engineers get the OK from above and are clever enough to write and release some good drivers ATI's market share will go up dramatically.
ATI Sucks, well there software does anyway. I don't care if it's fast at this or that.. Every time I use ATI it's nothing but problems.
NVidia for ever.
Riiight. Except that Sony's about to plug x0 million NVidia GPUs into the PS3. I don't think flurried coding standards are going to be the end of NVidia, and especially not while it's Sony's bitch.
I am doing my PhD research at University in computer architecture (more related to CPU than GPU but still very related), and this has been my experience with all simulators I've worked with. The one I am currently working with had a good infrastructure to start and now is a huge amalgamation of hacks. They also lack any sort of intuitive interface. They simulate properly but do not relate back to the typical diagram used to shot pipeline stages and component interconnects and flips flops. This can make it very difficult when you are brought in to work on a simulator you've never seen before. Typically any other simulator experience you have will not help since this one will be very different. Someone needs to create a strong and robust toolkit and infrastructure for CPU/GPU simulation -- perhaps for my thesis.
People like you are the reason that linux has a hard time being accepted as mainstream on the desktop. One zealot losing his temper right here could make a PC user reading this thread think "Damn, linux people are freaking weirdos", instead of reading people's ideas on why they release the drivers or not, and making their own decision.
So thanks, crazy man, for reaffirming the general public's thoughts that linux users are angry people who froth at the mouth at anything that isn't 100% open source, and type shit like M$ instead of MS/Microsoft.
If you'd just step away for a second and try to be open-minded(like open source, but use your brain), you can see why the companies do this. Sure, I don't agree with it either, but I'm not going to lose my temper over something that makes pretty colors show up on my monitor.
i use linux and windows oh god how can i have an opinion
Oh Canada!!!
Sometimes it may seem like Dell owns the PC world, but they still face competition from other vendors (notably HP). Graphics is a good way to differentiate your box from the others.
Most people don't really understand the difference between various graphics cards. But I do, and everyone I know that buys a PC asks me about it. I suspect that many (if not most) PC buyers have a knowledgeable friend help them the same way.
Many if not most major vendor systems equip their lower end systems with integrated graphics anyway. I bet that the majority of the systems they ship are these low-spec systems. IIRC standalone graphics chips are more commonly found in aftermarket graphics cards.
ATI shipped more chips last year because they started shipping better hardware (the Radeon 9700 and 9800 chips) the year before. Nvidia released the 6800 series last year and took back the performance crown, so this year they will probably take back market share. For several years now the market for standalone graphics chips has always gone to the vendor with the best hardware.
Nvidia is still offering much better driver support than ATI and ATI keeps ignoring that fact. My bet is that 2005 is the year Nvidia sales outpace ATI's simply because of the driver issues. My next card will be a Nvidia. Again.
Who cares about market share, monthly volumes and top-of-the-line performance when 90% of the features of an ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder card are NOT available on Linux? It's only a couple a weeks ago the first feature-less driver for the X.org / 2.6 kernel came out!
ATI's graphics drivers suck. Would it be so hard guys to document your control registers so one of us out here could write a decent driver? Intel and AMD are wide open in this respect. Why aren't you?
an ill wind that blows no good
Everything looks like it's going into parallelization of some sort ... multicore CPUs, Cell suggest a multicore GPU ... all we need now is a multicore audio board and maybe a multicore nuclear poweplant to power all that.
"I owned cards with both of their major chipsets and highly enjoyed them for their time. Too bad Micron had to buy them and demolish their offerings..."
Same for PowerVR. Good graphics for the time.
ATI and Driverheaven was planning an unofficial support for Linux Radeon drivers. They're now opening a new section in their forum for that.
Intel integrates basic graphics functionality into many of their desktop chipsets. The chipset is on the motherboard. Many people have integrated graphics and don't even use it because they have installed an aftermarket graphics card. The extra cost of a chipset with integrated graphics is generally less than $10, so the added income is much less than that of a standalone graphics chip. While Intel ships a lot of graphics capable chips I suspect that both Nvidia and ATI earn more revenue on their graphics products.
What is interesting to me is that both ATI and Nvidia have entered the chipset market. Nvidia owns the AMD based market and rumor has it they will be making Intel chipsets soon as well. Their brand name and superior graphics technology could give them an edge. Meanwhile ATI is busy owning the high-end laptop market. Even Via has carved out a dominant niche in the emerging mini form factor market. These are all minority elements of the PC market now, but these segments are growing much faster than the mature desktop PC market.
Unfortunately, the manufacturers obviously don't see enough value in open source drivers to offset the risk of patent suits and/or cloning of their special hardware features. It's a matter of perspective - we see no legitimate reason why they should not release their internal documentation to interested/qualified open source developers, but they probably see themselves sunk if they did. After all, look what happened to the trailblazers in open source graphics docs: 3Dfx, Matrox, 3DLabs, etc.
The only solution for people who value open source drivers is to stop buying their products and develop our own to compete with them. Relentless lobbying will only waste their time and make them less likely to deal with folks in the open source community.
For people who don't care about open source drivers as long as a binary driver works good enough for you, just go ahead and buy a card from the leading manufacturers. But don't blame Linux when the driver blows up or acts strangely. As long as these vendors refuse to cooperate with the open source development model, the onus is on them to go the extra mile and produce a stable product that interoperates with the open source world.
So far, they haven't done well at that challenge, suggesting that either open source developers are deliberately foiling them (some people believe the absence of a driver abstraction layer falls along these lines), they employ incompetent programmers, or they are simply not providing their best effort as a company towards Linux support. I suspect the latter, and only market share will change that. (Hence the driving force behind platform advocacy, as opposed to the 'zealot' label that platform advocates receive from neophytes who misunderstand or reject the fundamental correlation between platform market share and quality of vendor support)
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
I'm not pissed at the graphics companies. I'm pisssed at the morons who throw their money at them and then say "they're supporting the open source community" when clearly they are doing NO SUCH THING.
And some linux users ARE "angry people who froth at the mouth." So fucking what? So are most of the idiots who run windows. And we don't even want to get into the nuts running Macs...
4. An army of H-1Bs are working on the simulator. The code itself has few comments because using American English is a hassle.
An army of H-1Bs? Terrifying--if you're an F8 Flower.
But seriously, take my wife, please!
*buh-dum tschhhh!*
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Lets see, from your interview, you have decided all the 5 points that are really the kind of stuffs you get to learn after having worked on it for a while. I call bullshit. Explain to me why is NVIDIA's latest generation of chips generally regarded as being better than ATI's counterparts? How did NVIDIA fought its way to the top to topple 3dfx with these kind of practices you are speaking of? Let me give you a clue, best hardware period.
For your information, I have classmates that worked in both companies. NVIDIA is much more white than ATI. ATI is located in the metro Toronto area, right in the part with the highest Chinese immigration population. Cantonese and Mandarin are commonly spoken in technical discussions. All of the ATI's founders are Chinese. NVIDIA has 1 Chinese founder, and a much more diversified worker population. (Although the % of Chinese and Indians are still impressive, but thats true for any Silicon Valley companies.)
I guess you just didn't feel too good about been walked out early of your interview process eh?
"However, given their stance on Linux drivers, my next purchase will be Nvidia. I don't like the fact that I can't use my DVI port because ATI doesn't feel like it."
Basically your argument is Doesn't give me feature ___ under my particular OS.
Here's today's dose of irony. I run a Nvidia card (with TV out) under Linux and Windows. Under Linux I can play a Disney DVD out the TV port. Under Windows I can either get a Macrovision output, or I get an error message indicating I can't use my TV out due to restrictions.
So based on your argument, Windows users should jump to what video card?
What about my SB Audigy2 under Windows and their disabling of the Digital Out?
You all can complain all you want about who's the better monopoly. But when it comes down to it. You still don't control your hardware. Nvidia and ATI do. Simple as that.
Has anyone tried this company's product. The Volare lineup. This is even mentioned in the article but nothing about marketshare. Recently they had a tie up with Dell for the usual - MOB addition. They have Linux driver support on their site. I hope this will provide us a good alternative to the top two.
gonna happen! I'll settle for better linux drivers instead.
I guess it goes with the territory, if a thousand people can design CPUs that are made in the millions, that's not a huge market for software vendors to bother implementing new software for, and because there are millions of CPUs at stake, no one is going to give a chance to the new software. Ever design an IC? Would *you* chance a fab run on a new IC tool?
A very good article has detailed why the shift from nVidia to ATI happened, it's very enlightening. It's interesting to note that ATI wouldn't be where it is today had Microsoft not adopted their pixel shading implementation for DirectX. Perhaps their feud with nVidia over the X-Box has led to this, along with ATI being chosen for X-Box 2?
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
Well tell me which opensource manufactor I should buy then?
Every one of htem is closed source except the wildcat which is out of my price range for a non engineer.
In the old days the manufactors had to be opened because programs like autocad and 3d studioMax could not run properly. Today Microsoft took over with their drives so they only need to be open with Microsoft and no one else since everyone runs Windows or will if they need your product.
If you want to use your 3d card then purchase Windows.
http://saveie6.com/
I've purchased hundreds of ATI cards, and hundreds of nVidia cards. These are business class machines. This means older model video cards that have been around for a long time.
Neither vendor offers good drivers for Windows. My ATI cards have artifacts out the wazzo, and nVidia's latest unified drivers don't support older model (MX440/MX400) video cards we use. You end up with bad sync. This can all be verified by doing Google group searches.
I've used both lines in my gaming machine at home, with simular issues.
They both suck.
What you don't seem to realize is that releasing specs that would allow you to speak directly with the hardware would necessarily reveal trade secrets about how the hardware works.
Consider the overall architecture of the layers are gone through when you make a call to the hardware in OpenGL or D3D:
Application -> Open/GL / D3D -> Hardware Abstraction Layer -> Device Driver -> Hardware
The device driver is translating from a hardware independent language into a hardware dependent one. This means that the driver not only speaks the language of the HAL, but it also speaks the language of the hardware. Embedded in that language are the techniques of how the low level hardware gets its job done. If they expose that, they might as well start giving their trade secrets to their competetion.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
ATI's method of competing has been to lie continually about the future of being able to use this feature. For example, back in 2000, ATI announced the VHA SDK to allow Linux users access to the MPEG2 accelerators on their cards. After 5 years of waiting, ATI still has not released this to the general public. Instead, they claimed in a FAQ that the GATOS project is currently working toward hardware assisted IDCT... But the GATOS project had already publically announced "no planned support."
So, I contacted ATI developer relations via the web in 2003 and waited three months. They never got back to me. So, I contacted them by phone, they confirmed the following:
They stated they would get back to me about my interest in assisting in writting a driver for the iDCT support. It has now been OVER A YEAR and they have refused to contact me back.
Bottom line: ATI lied to the Linux community to maximize sales to those that where interested in this specific feature. ATI will NEVER HONOR their feature announcements to the Linux community.
Right now my main machine is running a 9800XT. It runs pretty good in Windows, of course there are always driver issues. For one great example, it wasn't until a couple releases ago that I was able to actually get the screen adjustment feature in Catalyst Control panel. Although, I'm not sure if this option was available in the Catalyst (Lite) version.
The last couple of weeks have been a battle getting the card to use OpenGL hardware acceleration under Linux (Fedora Core 3, X86_64). Down right a giant pain in the ass. If anyone has any suggestions I would be glad to hear them!
I have also seen many brand new ATI Radeon cards of numerous generations DOA, right out of the box. I've also seen them die pretty early in their life as well. A number of friends picked up the 64Meg original Radeon when it came out (circa 2000?) Every last one of them had problems, drivers were also terrible.
I've had a number of NVidia cards over the years as well. I can quite honestly say that I only ever had a problem with one of their "cards" once. I bought a new PC and the card didn't seem to work in the new computer, although replacing it into the old machine worked just fine.
I'm not sure how other peoples experiences compare, but as I find myself playing less games (other than the odd couple now and again) and my Linux usage increasing greatly (I'm contemplating complete migration). I find myself fed up with poor ATI drivers and am once again considering a Nvidia solution.
Anyway, thats just my experiences and $.02
HAHA Injured Hippies
"The video card market is fast paced and volatile. If nVidia does produce garbage, the market will react accordingly, and drop them like a hot rock."
;) Even though they're Binary-Only And Therefore Evil, the nVidia drivers have proved remarkably solid even on cutting edge hardware and software. There's currently a problem with the latest driver release and my MX4000 in the TV box, but it's a world apart from the world of "emerge ati-drivers and pray" I experienced with a friends 9700 Pro.
Too damned right, and this is exactly what happened with nVidia's GeForce FX series. Hot, noisy, underpowered - and everyone switched to ATI 9700's and the like. nVidia eventually pulled their socks up and released the GF6 series which have put nVidia back in the running again.
In terms of Linux drivers, ATI have produced nothing but garbage as far as I'm concerned - hence why I dropped them like a hot rock
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
And the ref rules:
"Failure to observe parent's 'Obligatory' header. Overreactive sensy-pants. Minus one karma, first post."
Or: Calm down, man. I think grandparent's tone was reasonable, but yours sure ain't.
For windows users.
well, don't know about other distro's, but we've been trying to get ati drivers to build properly under fedora core 3 for a few days now - getting any kind of 'real' 3d acceleration under fedora just isn't happening so far, and the bug reports & 'unofficial fedora faq' seem to have basically said 'ati == teh suxors' essentially as far as their linux drivers goes.
Just because you might have gotten the ati drivers to work for your machine doesn't mean that it's 'easy' or that 'ati has gotten their act together'
when i can actually get 3d accelerated OpenGL support running on one of our many machines (all with ati cards unfortunately) then i'll reconsider...at this point we're looking to support nvidia on linux but that's about it, which is unacceptable...
we're trying to get our game engine ported to linux, which shouldn't be TOO hard, but we've been stumped even getting 3d acceleration working under these stupid ATI cards.
can't wait to harass them at GDC about this...so stupid, how are we supposed to make linux the 'new gaming platform' when a roomfull of nerds can't even get 3d support working, let alone our game engine ported & tested & released to the point where the average consumer can use it...
ridiculous - it's pretty sad state of affairs at the moment though
Gekido's Lair
Flashing Radeon cards with faster BIOS and dumping them on e-bay is a pretty common occurence.
Many Radeons can be flashed with faster BIOS'
I have a Radeon 9800 Pro that I flashed to a 9800XT, and a 9700 I flashed to a 9700 Pro.
I added some extra cooling to mine though, its likely you'rs could be overheating with stock cooling.
my 2 cents.
...leveraging them is. MS has a monopoly, integrates the browser, strongarms OEMs so they can't can't bundle netscape and remove IE, etc. Intel has a lot of marketshare for iX86 though not a monopoly, integrates things but doesn't strongarm OEMs and board manufacturers, etc. That's the difference.
You can have features, and you can have a monopoly, but you can't use those facts to kill competitors.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
"The x700 series, is just garbage."
" The 9600 XT has the same performance for the same price"
You're thinking of the x600, which is a 9600XT derivitive.
The x700 is a nice card, but I'd choose a 6600GT over it any day.
ATI's new lineup looks good, particularly the x800XL, but it's PCIe only. ATI also doesn't seem to bee particularly good in getting parts out the door - the XL still isn't showing up, more than a month after it was "launched".
NVIDIA has announced they won't be shipping a 6800 "refresh" part. The 6800 has a great architecture (a 400MHz 6800 is still competitive with the X850XT-PE at 540MHz). The 6600GT proves that the architecture scales to 500MHz, and I eagerly await a 16-pipe, 256-bit card at that frequency.
Like why the 6600GT with 128mb DDR3 costs MORE than the x700 with 256mb DDR3.
Guess what I bought!
X700 is all I need....
Hopefully ATI can provide better Linux support. I know many people know that Linux isn't exactly huge in the PC videogame industry and would ask whether Linux support is all that necessary. They do not realise that Linux is heavily used (almost exclusively) in the animated film, computer graphics film industry. Weta Digital (Lord of the Rings), SKG Dreamworks (Shrek 1, Shrek 2), and other developers (Sony, Rhythm & Hues, Industrial Light & Magic (Star Wars episode 1, 2, 3) and others) use Linux for not just back-end rendering, but for original content creation. They are using extremely powerful computers with extreme demands for speed. Often the need for professional video cards is required, along with mountains of memory and disk space.
I specifically mentioned that the reason we don't see any docs, boils down to that the companies don't see enough value in open source development in order to justify the costs involved in being helpful - that includes the cost, in whatever form, of providing documentation, be it in the form of revealed trade secrets and lost competitive advantage, or a patent suit.
Trade secrets are rarely an issue because the market is defined by 6 month product cycles and engineers flow back and forth between companies. Any innovative new idea will either be reverse engineered or patented. Most of the time, it's patented, because patents are cheap and easy to obtain these days. If a feature is patented, the company could freely release documentation and be safe from cloning. However, they still don't release documentation, and the reason why is because _they_ may be infringing any number of an unknown competitor's patents at any given time, and the last thing any company wants to do is invite legal problems. The inevitable outcome of such a battle is cross-licensing, which dilutes the value of the held patents.
The end result is that the best any company will do these days is to provide docs under NDA after a background check. This way, they are protected from secrets being handed over to a competitor indiscriminately, and also from others discovering that their patents are being violated. Unfortunately, for some companies, the risk is too great compared to the benefit to even justify an NDA policy. This stance is the most common in the industry today, and is the natural result of a system where frivolous litigation is the norm and where the PTO grants patents willy-nilly to anyone who asks.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
There are no more open source manufacturers. That's why Open Graphics is the last resort for anyone who cares about transparency and freedom in graphics hardware.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
there's a lot of posts about poor ATI drivers. i dont think that's the only problem - how about support for agp 8X? right now only 1x, 2x, 4x are supported under X...
my blog
The 'new' ATI drivers, which were claimed to fix a bunch of stuff, still have far too many fundimental flaws.
:)
:)
For example, you cannot readback from the depth buffer using readPixels(GL_DEPTH_BUFFER...). This is some MAJOR basic functionality which ATI has been told monthly is broken and two years later still is. Cube doesn't work properly thanks to this
Of course, thats only one example. Also, the drivers make development on Linux close to impossible. They leak like a sieve (When it decides to not lockup your machine), oops or race in many mobo configurations, and most importantly will frequently go into an infinite loop and corrupt the stack under valgrind.
They're shit. A little better, but frankly, still unusable shit. I like ATI far better as a company than nvidia, EXCEPT they just don't get that Linux people want stable functional drivers
It would be rather clever to "inundate" the graphics chip market with a third choice.
Why not whip up a new operating system and displace both Windows and Unix by next Monday. The world could use some competition.
The only way to fix that is to get rid of slashdot. This is the biggest hotbed of linux zealots in the world, and most have zero communication skills.
Bad. I have a Toshiba Tecra notebook here with a P-M 1.5Ghz / 512Mb RAM and Radeon Mobility 9000 chipset. Dual booting Windows 2000 Pro and Gentoo (up to date).
Quake 3 demo (1024x768, vertex lighting [otherwise the textures are screwy in linux]):
Linux (8.8.25 driver, DRI enabled)
demo001: 66 FPS
demo002: 68 FPS
Win 2000 (2003 driver from Toshiba hah!)
demo001: 115 FPS
demo002: 123 FPS
And this is a five year old game.
Note: the linux performance is unchanged from 3.14.6.
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
What you don't seem to realize is that releasing specs that would allow you to speak directly with the hardware would necessarily reveal trade secrets about how the hardware works.
What you don't seem to remember is that ATI has published the documentation for the older radeon cards. Why not for the new ones?
What you don't seem to realize is that releasing specs that would allow you to speak directly with the hardware would necessarily reveal trade secrets about how the hardware works.
I already pointed out the single fact that blows this idiocy out of the water: if Nvidia wants to know how ATi's chip works, they have the equipment and staff to reverse engineer the damn thing. They don't need NDAs or permission, they just need microscopes and state analyzers and gate level logic probes. High end shit none in the open source community can afford, and the few who even get near such things do so only on their day jobs.
Jeezus. Learn to think for yourself and stop being a corporate parrot.
Toppling 3dfx by creating the best hardware? Nope, they did it the Microsoft way:
e id=433
1. steal technology from 3dfx
2. make loads of money using stolen tech
3. buy 3dfx
4. let 3dfx to rot
http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.cfm?articl
Feel free to look up more (just query nvidia patent 3dfx on Google).
If it's so obligatory, why bothing posting it?
i use linux and windows oh god how can i have an opinion