ATI Committed To Fixing Its OSS Problems

Sits writes "Chris Blizzard blogged from the Red Hat summit that an ATI marketing spokesman said, from the stage, that ATI knows it has a problem with open source and is committed to fixing it. Does this mean ATI will finally resolve alleged agpgart misappropriation, and fast track the release of open source 2D drivers on its latest cards while releasing specifications for its mid-range cards? Or is ATI only concerned with fixes to its binary driver to maintain feature parity with competitors?"

Comments

Likely binary drivers only.

[danomac]

I'd wager a guess they're going to fix the binary drivers only.

Why would they open a spec when they can compete with the binary drivers?

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[InsaneProcessor]

The video card industry is so secretive with thier software. ATI even locks the BIOS so after POST you cannot access the card to download it. They are so afraid that the competiition will find out how they work or that someone else will build a better driver. This is the only part of the PC buisiness that is this large, yet this secretive. I thing that they are just overly paranoid.

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[morgan_greywolf]

Why would they open a spec when they can compete with the binary drivers?

Because they can compete with open source drivers. Otherwise, why would Microsoft fear Red Hat and Novell?

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[drinkypoo]

Because they can compete with open source drivers. Otherwise, why would Microsoft fear Red Hat and Novell?

The closed-source drivers are already competing with the open-source drivers.

So far, they are winning, for most users. (although those of us who still have machines with antiquated hardware like a Rage 128 receive no help from them.)

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[danomac]

Because they can compete with open source drivers. Otherwise, why would Microsoft fear Red Hat and Novell?

C'mon, we all know the likelihood of them doing that is slim to none. There's nothing pressuring them to do this. Last I checked, NVidia doesn't have open source drivers either.

As the poster above you indicated, the video card industry is pretty secretive. The chances of them opening the spec and revealing their "trade secrets" are extremely slim to none. Unless something else happens in the industry where they will have to follow suit they won't open the spec.

Even if they do open the spec, it sure wouldn't be for their most recent cards. It'll be for cards that were sold several years ago, so they can protect their designs.

Right now they can compete with binary drivers.

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[div_2n]

Or maybe they have some sloppy hacks to try to improve frame rates for certain games so that they score better in comparisons. Anyone remember the Quake 3 fiasco that ATI was involved with?

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[CastrTroy]

Really I don't understand it either. Unless there's things like the Quake.exe hack all over their drive code, to make the cards seem better than they are, I don't see why source code has so much to do with it. They are in the business of selling hardware. They should ensure that their hardware works as well as possible, on as many platforms as possible. If that means open sourcing drivers, then I don't see the problem. I'm sure that they could even get a performance boost if they let millions of hackers with tons of free time optimize things for them.

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[MightyPez]

Right, because no other vendor has ever been accused of that!

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[EvilRyry]

He said

"most people are worried about what they will lose...IP, etc...we're worried about what we can win."

That certainly sounds like he means open source. But as they say, words are cheap.

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[Shazow]

Actually, it's more likely that the reason all their software is locked away and kept secret is because it's probably infringing on numerous software patents. When Joe Sixpack can go down to the patent office and register a doubly linked list as his own invention, lots of possibilities for lawsuits open up.

I did some research into this for a course, but I don't have sources to cite off the top of my head. Definitely something worth looking into.

- shazow

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[Chris Burke]

I'd wager a guess they're going to fix the binary drivers only.

Fine with me as long as they actually do a good job of it. I'm sick of having only one well-supported choice for 3d cards, especially since some of the ATI cards are very good deals.

I love OSS and would prefer drivers with source, but I'm also pragmatic, I know it's not going to happen any time soon, and in the meantime would just rather have healthy support from multiple hardware vendors. I've been hoping that ATI being bought by AMD -- who was a big supporter of OSS especially when helping the linux kernel and gcc with x86-64 -- would help get the company on the ball with supporting Linux, and I wonder if this isn't evidence of that happening. In which case, yay, as far as I'm concerned.

Wait ten* more years when everyone is using Linux-based desktops, then we pressure the vendors to release open drivers and compete in part on that basis. :)

* may apply from the date you are reading this, not the date it was typed.

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[div_2n]

I thought we were discussing ATI, but I don't disagree with you. I've always felt the reasons many hardware vendors are reluctant to be more open doesn't solely revolve around "trade secrets" and such. Being open shines lights in dark corners that can make some people nervous about.

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they're so secretive because looking at a full spec or at the code to the driver would show clearly that they are infringing on each other's patents. I'm sure that (former) ATI and nVidia are infringing on several of each other's patents (not to mention Intel's), and it would be disastrous for one to find out and not the other. Actually, they both already know they're infringing, and know the other knows. But once the investors knew, they'd have to admit their own wrongdoing, or sue, or both. It's a tough position to be in - patent portfolio arms races are crap. Both companies are trying to stay ahead in the number of patents issued and behind on the number of infringements, so when it does blow up, they are better positioned. Or if they get far enough ahead, they can pull the trigger. It never ends.

Patent infringement is that much harder to detect when sealed up in an ASIC, and all the code is closed (similar to software license infringement in closed-source software).

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[MightyPez]

We are discussing ATI, but if we are going to start bringing up 5 year old driving fudging in Windows drivers regarding AMD (yes, they own ATI now) saying they will try to improve open source support, then it's pretty much fair game.

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[UncleFluffy]

Maybe they're so secretive because looking at a full spec or at the code to the driver would show clearly that they are infringing on each other's patents.

All the GPU manufacturers have cross-license deals with each other. You can't make a GPU without permission from all of the incumbents.

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[lordSaurontheGreat]

A bit of Cold-war tactics would do well here. It both ATI and NVIDIA are constantly analyzing each others technology, they'll be able to call each other out when IP infringement does occur. And by leaving the rest of it open they can leave the OSS community able to maintain drivers et cetera without needing to sink funds into doing it themselves, maybe even getting a few innovations from the OSS community in gratitude for the change of tactics.

Just a thought...

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[LWATCDR]

"I'm sure that they could even get a performance boost if they let millions of hackers with tons of free time optimize things for them."
I am not.
1. Millions of hackers? There isn't a single FOSS project that millions of hackers have contributed too.
2. There are very few people with the experience to write a good much less great 3d driver.
3. Even with the specs I am guessing that the majority of contributions will be security or code clean up and not performance optimizations.

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[anton_kg]

Not totally true. IBM released all sources for there own i810/i915 cards, for example. It's in xorg source tree and you don't have to download it separately.

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM? Surely you mean Intel.

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[Cal Paterson]

1. Millions of hackers? There isn't a single FOSS project that millions of hackers have contributed too.

Pedantic behavior rarely convinces anyone.

2. There are very few people with the experience to write a good much less great 3d driver.

You see, that's funny, you get a whole set of guys who are busy writing what many consider complex programs. Here's one you often see doing fairly well. Yet obviously, these same people are totally unable to write a working graphics driver. Even though they have written just about every other kind of driver between them, and had them overwhelmingly beat the crap out of the closed-source sector.

3. Even with the specs I am guessing that the majority of contributions will be security or code clean up and not performance optimizations.

So? Security in binary graphical drivers has been a real problem in the past. (note the 6th or so post down, with the link).

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[slaida1]

Right, because no other vendor has ever been accused of that!

This isn't kindergarten chat, buddy. Didn't your mom tell you that it's no excuse if others are doing the same? That logical fallacy has a name: Appeal to Common Parctice. Don't use it.

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[cortana]

I wonder how many people have contributed to the Debian project over the last 14 years since it was announced...

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[aquabat]

2. There are very few people with the experience to write a good much less great 3d driver.
3. Even with the specs I am guessing that the majority of contributions will be security or code clean up and not performance optimizations.
I have to take exception to these two points. There are many people in the open source community that have the skill to write a great 3D driver. I'm thinking specifically of the Mesa and DRI projects. I've been running the open source r300 driver on my FireGL X1-128 for about a year now, and it works just fine for most OpenGL based program. The current set of quirks are mostly texture based, and I believe these problems are a direct result of a lack of hardware documentation.

Look, I'm not saying you don't have a right to your opinion, but saying "it doesn't matter if we had the specs because we couldn't do any better than the 'experts' even if we had specs", doesn't fly with me, when the current reverse engineered driver I am using right now to reply to you is better in some respects than the binary alternative. If we can improve on the binary driver without documentation, I believe we could do even better with it.

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[LWATCDR]

I never said that it didn't matter. I said that I wouldn't expect it to preform any better. I could be more secure and may even be more feature rich but I doubt that it would be any faster.

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[LWATCDR]

A great reply from someone that sees only what they want to.
I never said that there wouldn't be any improvements if the driver was open sourced. I even pointed out that I would expect security fixes. Is a more secure driver a bad thing? Not at all.
So yes I do doubt that you would see any improvement is speed with a FOSS driver. Not impossible but highly unlikely. I would expect to see security improvements.
The reasons are simple.
Speed sells graphics cards. So the companies that make them have spent a lot of time, money, and talent to make them fast.
Security doesn't sell graphics cards, so a lot less time, money, and talent has been spent on security.
There are probably a lot more gains in security than performance.

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[Anonymous Coward]

If u win ur bet, I wager that ATI and AMD will disappear from the corporate world.

ATI forgotten the foundation of computer technology to allow users to program the chip. Some users are developers and they wanted the best of what ATI can do. Changing software to make a better use of the chip should always be welcome. ATI should publish their specification and allow users to program but not manufacture the chips, for the sake of their own survival.

Re:Likely binary drivers only.

[Cal Paterson]

I never said that there wouldn't be any improvements if the driver was open sourced. I even pointed out that I would expect security fixes. Is a more secure driver a bad thing? Not at all.

You strongly implied with your tone that these improvements weren't worth open sourcing for.

So yes I do doubt that you would see any improvement is speed with a FOSS driver. Not impossible but highly unlikely.

You should really read Linus' Law. Speed improvement isn't highly unlikely, as with the massive level of interest that graphics drivers recieve, I am sure there's a few talented people out there who are interested in working on them. Either way, opening the source code to the public certainly doesn't reduce the speed. Speed is not an arguement for or against the opening of code, it's actually a apoligist approach.

Does this mean .......

[Timesprout]

Why dont you ask ATI what it means. How is Slashdot supposed to be privy to ATI's roadmap?

So release source already

[Anonymous Coward]

Until ATI release drivers for their latest cards and start supporting the X.org Radeon developers again, it's all just talk. Releasing specs. for "older" cards would be a bonus, but source in the trunk X.org Radeon driver should be the bare minimum.

This is not news

[cyphercell]

If you read the original article that all of this questioning is derived from you realize the article summary has more content than the linked story. This means aproximately nothing. ATI pays lip service to open source software news at 11.

Re:This is not news

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

...service to open source software news at 11. If open source software ever makes news at 11, I'll be amazed. The traditional media doesn't understand that PC != MS.

Open Source supporters within ATI

[plcurechax]

I know from talking to them at the Ottawa Linux Symposium a couple of years ago that the technical people within ATI were keen to support Linux the best that the could, but said they were mainly limited by management / legal to aim for competing with whatever nVidia offered the Linux community. If nVidia offered a complete open source driver, they would be pressured to do the same.

Re:Open Source supporters within ATI

[dpilot]

I have owned or made purchasing decisions for 6 3D graphics cards.
* 2 were Matrox G400s, based on their being the first mainstream card to get 3D hardware support under Linux. I even ran Utah-GLX on one.
* 1 was an ATI Radeon 8500LE, based on price/performance and the existence of the open source R200 drivers.
* 3 are nVidia cards, since there's no competitive contemporary open source 3D any more, and the quality of nVidia's binary seems to be better. There are reverse-engineering efforts on both, but it's unclear who will be the clear winner on this.

So I *have* put my money where my mouth is, and will continue to do so.

I also recommend hardware for friends and co-workers, and this is a factor. Even for a friend who is only going to use Windows, if all else is equal I would advise that he "reward" the company for its Linux support. Notice that in this case I said, "all else is equal," and let the friend know why I gave the advice I did.

Re:Open Source supporters within ATI

[krbvroc1]

So much for showing a little leadership? Basically, we will just follow nVidia. I've got 1U Supermicro rackmount servers that have ATI 'Rage MX' chipsets on them and there is not even a solution for these chips other than a very slow unaccelerated driver. They don't even have a working binary driver.

ATI's lack of driver quality and commitment has always been a problem for me. I went from 3dfx to Nvidia and have never personally purchased an ATI product specifically because of their poor Linux support.

Re:Open Source supporters within ATI

[h4rr4r]

Why do you have X installed on a server at all?

Re:Open Source supporters within ATI

[krbvroc1]

There are lots of reasons. Sometimes all you have room for is a 1U. Certain applications have limited space. I've developed GTK+ applications that run on the boxes that interact with other tasks running on the same box. Or using a rackmount KVM/LCD tray to switch between systems and interact. While doing development, its productive to use VNC and have a separate window for each server. I use these boxes for things that are in the realm of 'embedded development'--these aren't servers in the sense of running DNS/mail/ftp/www. These are just 1U form factor machines. Its also nice to have a common configuration across multiple machines for CM purposes.

Re:Open Source supporters within ATI

[crush]

no competitive contemporary open source 3D any more, and the quality of nVidia's binary seems to be better.

I'm not going to directly disagree with you because I'm unsure how you'd define the above. What 3D tasks do you want the card to do? Because if all you want is basic 3D acceleration good enough for e.g. TuxRacer or Open Arenaand the fun desktop effects with Compiz/Beryl then Intel has very nicely provided complete Free/OpenSource drivers for most of their integrated components (*) including the GMA X3000 integrated graphics chips. The latter chips apparently do T&L shaders and other good stuff which is actually better supported under GNU/Linux than Windows Vista.

Of course, if what you're talking about is CAD or something really GPU intensive then you may be more out of luck, but I'm interested to know exactly what that is?

* Intel are also a great bet for wireless compared to e.g. broadcom or marvell

Re:Open Source supporters within ATI

[scobiej]

Same problem here. I have waisted numberous hours trying to get an on board ATI Radeon Xpress 200 card to work dual head with no joy. Their aticonfig utility seg faults all the time and even when I can get it to work, it's just nonsense that it produces and the driver crashes upon initialisation. I'm not new to this. I've been hacking away at X11 drivers since they appeared on the scene. It's pathetic. You have an ATI card, you expect their drivers to work. I may not like NVidia's open source policy either but at least their drivers work, and work well. Unfortunately, they don't have low profile cards that do 3D like ATI. Matrox do but they charge silly money. ATI need to up their game. Trying to stay with NVidia should not be an option, not that they are even close with their drivers.

Re:Open Source supporters within ATI

[Deliveranc3]

All else Equal, actually means a lot. The mainstream segment (With the biggest amount of profit for GPU manufacturers) is currently split between the 7900GS and the 1950Pro from Nvidia and ATI both with almost exactly the same performance under windows (When taking overclocking into account). Since Nvidia has better open source drivers their card becomes more compelling.

This performance parity shows up in one level (low-Medium-High) each generation and the card with linux drivers will have far better longevity and flexibility.

Re:Open Source supporters within ATI

[LWATCDR]

Only problem is that I have never seen an Intel video board. They all seem to be integrated on the motherboard. So if you have an AMD system you are stuck.

Re:Open Source supporters within ATI

[LWATCDR]

"Since Nvidia has better open source drivers their card becomes more compelling."
Before the RMS/GPL police show up Nvidia has better Linux drivers for their cards. Nvidia doesn't have any open source drivers.
I understood what you meant and I to buy Nvidia boards because they have better Linux support.

Re:Open Source supporters within ATI

[crush]

Good point. I was being sloppy thinking about cards vs chips. However, for the price of some of the newer nvidia cards you could get one of the cheaper G965 Intel motherboards. Another $250 gets you a Core 2 Duo with virtualisation capability. I used to be an AMD partisan but Intel is really throwing down as far as Open/Free goes and their prices and power efficiency are excellent too.

Re:Open Source supporters within ATI

[LWATCDR]

Except I have a lovely Gigabyte Nvidia motherboard with an AMD 4200 X2 that does everything I need it to do.
A lot of people have better things to spend their money on than a new CPU and Motherboard. Now if I was building a new system I might be tempted but X2s are so cheap now and still bloody fast enough.
Yes Intel has some good stuff out but I have to mention that they didn't disclose all the specs of their GPUs and have not OSS their wifi drivers. They still have blobs. I don't have a lot of problems with that since I am not a FOSS purist but Intel isn't as FOSS pure as many believe.

Re:Open Source supporters within ATI

[crush]

I accept your point about your hardware being expensive ... but what I'm countering is the idea that there's no choice. You had a choice: buy older hardware with FOSS reverse-engineered drivers, or buy closed faster new hardware. And for someone considering buying new hardware there's a third option: Intel . Basically you're stuck without an option right now unless you can convince your hardware manufacturers to release FOSS drivers. Maybe it'll happen, but given the history of both ATI and Nvidia that looks like it'll be a while. have not OSS their wifi drivers I don't think that's true

Re:Open Source supporters within ATI

[dpilot]

What he (LWATCDR) said...

But I typically buy somewhere near the bottom, so "a little extra" to get the Intel board turns out to be a lot extra. Usually for graphics there's a "nutritionally complete" point where the card has full capabilities, though not as fast a clock or not as many pipes as the expensive cards, and avoids crap like TurboCache. My ATI 8500LE and nV 5700LE were both good cards, in that respect. Unfortunately I did a poor job on my current nV 6200, nor realizing that it had a half-width bus, when I bought it.

I'm not a hard-core gamer, but every now and then. Plus if anyone would ever get back into full 3D visualization/exploration like Uru Myst...

Or Intel could release their now stuff on a standalone video card.

Re:Open Source supporters within ATI

[LWATCDR]

Last time I checked they included a firmware blob. It isn't just the cost of the hardware it is the waste. I hate to think of all the old but perfectly fine PCs being dumped.

Re:Open Source supporters within ATI

[majoun]

Actually, NVIDIA do still commit updates to the open-source 2D-only nv driver in X.org, supporting their lastest hardware.

Re:Open Source supporters within ATI

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

GMA X3000

You lost me right there. The GMA X3000 isn't a horrible design, but it's not "competitive" in any sense. Even a $40 ATI X1300XT is 5-10x faster.

Now, if your "3D" usage consists mainly of older (much older) games and desktop composition (e.g. Beryl or Aero Glass), then the GMA X3000 is a pretty decent option. But it is by no means competitive.

Re:Open Source supporters within ATI

[Bert64]

Why would you use VNC?
What's wrong with the native remote display support built in to X? It's much faster, and the apps will integrate with each other and your locally running apps, without each server being isolated in its own workspace, but you can do that too using Xnest anyway.

Re:Open Source supporters within ATI

[krbvroc1]

If by native remote display support you mean 'setenv DISPLAY', that requires that the 'DISPLAY' always be the same machine and always be running. With VNC its easy to quickly 'login' to the X Desktop from any machine and monitor things and disconnect. VNC is on demand, while 'setenv DISPLAY' isnt'. 'setenv DISPLAY' will waste network bandwidth by generating traffic during times you dont care to monitor the server desktop.

You mentioned Xnest. I've never heard of that. I don't see any 'Xnest' command installed on my Centos 4 box either. Is Xnest available widely and is it stable? The man page I got via google said in the man page
'Won't run well on servers supporting different visual depths. Still crashes randomly. Probably has some memory leaks.'

Re:Open Source supporters within ATI

[crush]

There is a firmware blob: it contains stuff that the FCC says can't be open to users to modify easily. It's a way of getting around intrusive govt regulation. I would agree that just dumping your board would be a problem, but that's not what I'm suggesting. If you can afford to then you could sell it to a windows user (unlike you they have the advantage of support from Nvidia and ATI) and buy a new Intel based set up. No waste due to dumping and the power savings will reduce your carbon footprint. Or you can just ride out the present uncomfortable situation and then when Free drivers are released in a year or so you can use your hardware. Your call.

Re:Open Source supporters within ATI

[JamesGecko]

FWIW, I've gone dualhead on that exact card before without *too* much trouble. I'm using a two year old Toshiba M55-S139 laptop. Of course, the fglrxconfig utility didn't get things *quite* right the first time, but I doubt I spent more than half an hour googling around before I found a config that worked.

Bear in mind that this was six months ago using Ubuntu 6.06, and I lost my X.org config when I wiped to upgrade to Ubuntu 7.04, but I can testify that "It worked for me". I don't think things are quite as bad as you make them out to be.

...Of course, my card is also a victim of the infamous OpenGL firmware bug, so I should probably stop talking now.

Re:Open Source supporters within ATI

[LWATCDR]

I am not a FOSS purist so the firmware blob of frankly even Nvidia's closed drivers bother me all that much. I do agree about the firmware blob not being a huge issue. But how I got flamed for saying it by the FOSS or die faithful. I hope that ATI does open up it's drivers or at the very least makes them work as well as the drivers from Nvidia. My next box may be an Intel system if there GPU will run FSX and is open sourced. If not I hope that ATI steps up.
I will take what good support for Linux I can get and keep encouraging better support.

Marketing?

[markov_chain]

an ATI marketing spokesman said, from the stage, that ATI knows it has a problem with open source and is committed to fixing it.

There goes the good old problem solving by marketing. Wait until their developers hear about this :)

Re:Marketing?

[CaptnMArk]

Marketing is not a problem. Lawyers and managers are.

Re:Marketing?

[Svartalf]

Oh, never question that the developers know that there's a serious problem. Trust me on that one. It's just I seriously doubt that middle and upper management have a single clue as to how to honestly fix it.

Re:Marketing?

[rbochan]

Someone who does marketing is incapable of telling the truth. At least a lawyer can try.

Nothing to see here

[Anonymous Coward]

Too many questions, please move along.

I'll believe it when....

[wowbagger]

I'll believe that AMD/ATI is fixing their problems when I can have a driver that:

1. Supports XvMC
2. Supports the tuner on my All-in-Wonder, either via XVideo or Video For Linux
3. Has reasonable 3D performance without locking up (GoogleEarth will kill my card dead in seconds, requiring a hard power off to fix it.)
4. Has reasonable 2D acceleration.
5. Runs on the current release of the kernel - on i386 and i386-64 AT LEAST.
6. Supports PCIe cards

This is *the* limiting factor which has prevented me from buying a new computer - any new machine would be an i386-64 with PCIe video, and right now the only real choice there would be Intel graphics.

Re:I'll believe it when....

[Anonymous Coward]

> Supports the tuner on my All-in-Wonder, either via XVideo or Video For Linux

That would be video4linux (or, really, v4l2); the gatos project supports some of this. Xvideo support for this is through the Xv/v4l extension which is part of xorg.

Re:I'll believe it when....

[drinkypoo]

This is *the* limiting factor which has prevented me from buying a new computer - any new machine would be an i386-64 with PCIe video, and right now the only real choice there would be Intel graphics.

First the nit: i386-64? Are you on crack? If you want to call it something cutesy, call it AMD64. The 486 was the last non-RISC CPU either AMD or intel made. Everything since has been internally [mostly] RISC with an x86 decoder glued onto it.

Now the meat: Why is nvidia not an option?

And actually, a better question: why all-in-wonder? For little more money you can get dramatically more quality.

Re:I'll believe it when....

[billcopc]

I'm not criticizing any of your points, as I've butted my head against them many times myself. My question however, is this:

Which graphics cards are the developers using ? We have all these frameworks and APIs for graphics acceleration, video capture, etc, and yet hardly anyone can use them with mainstream hardware. We can blame the manufacturers all day long, but who's to say the open-source "glue" is not the source of some of these problems ?

Here's my view, and I'm horribly outdated when it comes to driver development so bear with me here. What if we just let NVidia and ATI do their binary drivers, and instead of pressuring them into releasing crippled open-sourced versions, why not work WITH them to come up with an ABI layer that's suitable for both parties ? I don't give a damn about politics, I just want my $600 video card to work with X and decent 3D performance. Instead, I have a 2nd little "linux box" with pathetic hardware because anything newer/faster makes X blow cores. Clearly, we can't convince ATI/NVidia to release pure open-source drivers so maybe it's time to give up that doomed battle and try a new strategy.

Re:I'll believe it when....

[CastrTroy]

I made the mistake twice of buying an integrated TV tuner. First it was an ATI TV card that only worked with other ATI Video cards, and then it was the Voodoo 3500. I now have a hauppauge 150, and I am happy to know that I won't have to buy another TV card for a long time to come. It's also nice to know that if I replace my video card, that I don't have to replace my TV Card.

Re:I'll believe it when....

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's my view, and I'm horribly outdated when it comes to driver development so bear with me here. What if we just let NVidia and ATI do their binary drivers, and instead of pressuring them into releasing crippled open-sourced versions,

Why would they release crippled open-source versions? It's their code along with their hardware specs. They're in the best position to write the best drivers for their respective hardware, so there really is no excuse to release a "crippled' open-sourced version of their driver. Secondly, and this has been said many times, OSS developers don't even care whether Nvidia or ATI release drivers, they just want the hardware specs to the cards so that they can write their own drivers.

Re:I'll believe it when....

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no ABI layer that would be suitable for the Linux kernel, so that is no solution. Bottom line is that support for Linux means an open source driver, or huge amounts of effort. The video card companies don't want to do either.

Re:I'll believe it when....

[RobertLTux]

i have a 7500 AIW and my only quible is the phantom KM module (required to do capture)

if you have the packages for gatos (or the ati dkms set)
you should be able to get both avview and xawtv to work (both programs may not auto set to sane values but..)

Re:I'll believe it when....

[wowbagger]

Nope - I cannot get the tuner in my 9600AIW working. I can get composite in working just fine, but the tuner won't see anything.

It's really a shame - the idea of the tuner and video capture being on the video card makes a great deal of sense, but the implementation of the software bites small rocks.

Re:I'll believe it when....

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

I'll second the "Google Earth" thing - I rarely have a need for accelerated 3D (the open-source radeon driver does 2D just fine for me), but the one thing that I'd like to run that would need it is Google Earth...

...which just plain stops at the splash screen when using ATI's accelerated drivers. (The "fix" involves forcing it to software rendering...)

That, and being able to work with the current kernel version are my only serious complaints, though I haven't even tried the TV-out on this laptop yet.

Re:I'll believe it when....

[wowbagger]

I am in the process of trying to get TV out working - and having no luck so far. The GATOS site is waaaaaaaaaay out of date, the Freedesktop site seems to have nothing, and I cannot get a reasonable hit on Google.

AND I cannot really get TV in working, either - while composite in works fine, trying the tuner just gives me a black screen.

Re:I'll believe it when....

[Morrigu]

I'll bet that your new computer purchase is infinitely prolonged. :)

Re:I'll believe it when....

[billcopc]

There is an excuse to release crippled drivers: intellectual property. According to the bigwigs, there's some arcane magic in those 90mb software downloads that must not fall into the hands of their enemies. I highly doubt the validity of such claims, but what's far more likely is that pure open-source drivers would expose all the cheating that's been going on under the hood, tweaks that skew benchmark results for better reviews, or dumb hacks that mess with a card's performance or features for marketing purposes. NVidia has the Geforce and Quadro lines, which are pretty much identical except for the PCI IDs. Having an open-source driver means any twit with a text editor could "transform" their $99 Geforce 7300 into a $600 Quadro. That's not so bad, until the Quadro buyers find out and start aiming their lawyers at the company.

People tend to say OSS support ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... when they only mean 'Linux support'. And personally, I don't consider closed source binaries OSS support at all. AMD has been good about making the information available for open-source programmers so their chips can be supported. Perhaps their purchase of ATI will force a shift in the corporate culture there too. Well, we can hope.

Re:People tend to say OSS support ...

[TheRaven64]

Mod that post right up. Intel are doing it the right way, by releasing DRI drivers. Any operating system that wants to support DRI can then use the Intel DRI drivers. Once the DRI code is running on a kernel, it's just a matter of porting the small glue layer for each card (or card family) and then the bulk of the driver can be compiled and used whatever the underlying architecture is.

Even the nVidia binary drivers have wider support than ATi, since they work on OpenSolaris and FreeBSD as well as Linux.

Current State

[scubanator87]

I am currently running the *newst* ati binary drivers and although they have added the Catalyst Control center (improvement ofer the old fglrx control center) mine (and a few other people i know using the same driver) cant seem to get dual monitor to work. And with the Opensource ati driver atleast AIGLX works but still no dual head display.

          ATI needs to step up the quality of their coding and there is no *good* reason why ati does not support AIGLX and why their 8.35.5 is having problems with dual monitors. Because my laptop uses ati and i was so displeased with its state of drivers forced me to go with nvidia when i built my desktop a year ago. Im sure many people using Linux stay clear of ati when possible for the same reason. When and if they get their stuff together it will receive a warm welcome...if they do it right that is.

Also why is it people need programs like envy to install their drivers. Hopefully ATI and nvidia will pick up the slack hear and make it easer to install the drivers.

Re:Current State

[metamatic]

You're lucky having something as sophisticated as dual monitors broken. On FireGL T2, the proprietary ATI drivers don't load textures properly. Programs like Second Life become a total mess and eventually lock up the system.

Re:Current State

[MMC Monster]

I am unclear why envy is needed at all in Ubuntu Fiesty. Doesn't it already contain nvidia and ati drivers?

Re:Current State

[SirTalon42]

And I say you're lucky. On the X300 in my laptop I can't even log into SL (it seems to run at around 1 frame a minute on just the login screen while spamming that it failed to allocate memory, a similar error message to the one with regards to /dev/shm not being mounted, but completely unrelated to (/dev/shm is mounted perfectly fine). Because of my horrible experience with ATI cards, and pretty good experience with NVIDIA cards I've already been responsible for multiple people going with nVidia over ATI, and if I buy a new laptop theres no chance in hell it will have an ATI card in it unless they DRASTICALLY improve the support for the x300 in my laptop before then (and even then I probably wouldn't touch it).

The sad thing is, their windows drivers aren't much better...

Re:Current State

[jmorris42]

> On the X300 in my laptop I can't even log into SL

Have you tried the Free Xorg driver? I'm not into SL but I have watched it run on an X700 with the Xorg driver, seemed to work just fine. You get the 3D bling bling desktop also.

Everything up to the X850 is now supported, still marked experimental but it seems pretty stable. Granted it won't perform quite as fast as the closed driver, but would you rather a Free and increasingly stable experience that gets updated cleanly with your distro's normal update methods or futz around with the slightly faster but unstable closed driver?

On my machine at home I still have to use the closed driver though. The free radeon driver and VIA chipsets have hated each other for a decade now. :(

Re:Current State

[scubanator87]

envy is/was pre-feisty and envy also has the ability to compile the newst drivers for you instead of using the older prebuilt drivers in the repos.

Re:Current State

[Anonymous Coward]

That's precisely the point. The last 4 computers I got for home were with NVidia graphics cards. I won't touch ATI with a stick. Why? Because I've read online that their Linux drivers are difficult to install and don't always work well. I'm a big fan of Linux so that means that ATI is out until they start supporting the software that I use.

Re:Current State

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully ATI and nvidia will pick up the slack hear and make it easer to install the drivers. Don't know what you mean, how could nvidia be any easier? You just run the installer as root and keep hitting enter until it does it's magic. Yes you need the kernel headers, but that's it.

Does this mean hardware hacking is dead?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

So far I'm hearing "commercial company hasn't written Linux drivers for their card". That's a legitimate complaint, but if the OSS community's reaction is to whine about it on cheesy blogs rather just hack the hardware...?

Re:Does this mean hardware hacking is dead?

[fruey]

Hack the hardware? Have you any idea how complicated graphics cards and 3D acceleration is when you have no specification on the hardware at all?

Re:Does this mean hardware hacking is dead?

[the_humeister]

Uh, people have been working hard to understand how the hardware works in order to write open source drivers. See here for example. The problem is that ATI doesn't open up the specs for their recent cards so there are very few and tedious avenues to having open source drivers (eg. reverse engineer the binary drivers, probing hardeware settings, etc). As far as I know, there's practically full opne source 3D drivers for R100-R200 based cards, somewhat full 3D drivers for R300 based cards, and no support for later models. So the OSS community is working on the driver issues, it takes time without documentation.

Re:Does this mean hardware hacking is dead?

[geekoid]

Now who said hacking was supposed to be easy. Pfft...If you have the specifications you are not hacking, your are writing code to specifications.

Re:Does this mean hardware hacking is dead?

[Ruie]

So far I'm hearing "commercial company hasn't written Linux drivers for their card". That's a legitimate complaint, but if the OSS community's reaction is to whine about it on cheesy blogs rather just hack the hardware...?

No, it is not, but it is strictly for pleasure only.

You see, 3d cards are complicated. On top of that the hardware itself if often finicky with lockups to the point that they should really be considered bugs. So, you can only start once your got the hardware in your hands (which means after release) and with lots of work, at best you will have something semi-working a year later. It will be at least another year before the drivers mature so everyone can use them mostly without lockups. In the meanwhile ATI will release a few more variations and, if you are aiming for comprehensive support, you are back to square one.

If ATI wants to be nice to Open Source it means releasing partial specifications (at the very least) before the card is ready so that all their cards work with 2d, Xv and multi-monitor/multi-card when they are in stores (or a couple of months later) and having full specifications no later than 6 months after release.

Anything else and we are back to scrounging for older well-supported cards - which also happen to be a good deal cheaper and have less of a margin for ATI.

The latest card I have is Radeon 1600 - and given a choice I would gladly go back to R300 (or better yet - Rage Pro) if only those cards supported the resolutions I need and PCI express.

Re:Does this mean hardware hacking is dead?

[TheRaven64]

Apparently (rumour alert), the newer Radeons are very similar, in terms of interface, to earlier ones. Porting the drivers over requires about a 100-line diff; most of the changes are register locations, the actual semantics are similar. Unfortunately, the person who wrote the diff did so under NDA, and ATi didn't allow him to release it.

Re:Does this mean hardware hacking is dead?

[jonnythan]

These things aren't ISA modems or parallel port scanners.

Graphics cards are immensely complex.

Re:Does this mean hardware hacking is dead?

[Ant P.]

Trying to write drivers for ATI hardware is like trying to write a HD-DVD player program without knowing the keys. Or the encryption algorithm. Or the video data format.

It's hard to do anything other than whine about it when ATI are such a bunch of tight-fisted assholes.

Re:Does this mean hardware hacking is dead?

[jandrese]

Oh, they'll be hacked/reverse engineered eventually if the companies don't come through, but by that point all of the cards they figured out will be so old you won't be able to buy them in stores anymore.

Re:Does this mean hardware hacking is dead?

[Svartalf]

In reality, they're not. The API driving them IS. They're just multiprocessor stream engines these days. Pretty much little more than a 4, 8, 16, etc. way SMP machine for all intents and purposes. I should know, I worked on driver work for one of those "complex" beasties- the driver's feature set is what is really complicated and much of that has been done by the DRI crowd and just needing refining.

Re:Does this mean hardware hacking is dead?

[crush]

Fuck "hacking the hardware" and "whining about it". The "Open Source Community", specifically Dave Airlie, have already written Free drivers for the ATI cards, that ATI WILL NOT ALLOW THEM TO RELEASE. Note that that blog entry is from the middle of last fucking year.

At this stage, to buy anything except an Intel GMA X3000 is madness. Intel are delivering fully Free/Open solutions that are powerful enough for anyone except hard core gamers (and said games don't exist on Linux anyway) and CAD people.

They're also significantly cheaper and more power efficient than the stuff being put out by Nvidia and ATI.

Re:Does this mean hardware hacking is dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hack the hardware? Have you any idea how complicated graphics cards and 3D acceleration is when you have no specification on the hardware at all?

Sure it may be hard if you have never done hardware hacking. Hacking radeon cards is pretty straight forward once you get the hang of it. Back in the days when R300 development was running hot, it wasn't uncommon to come up with support for 2-3 opengl features in one hacking session. Nouveau is exacly in this state right now. Hacking 3D drivers is great fun when most of the features haven't yet been discovered. R300 driver doesn't attract developers as much anymore because it simply isn't fun. It might take days/weeks to get one "hard" problem solved.
Hacking may quickly become very difficult though if you have some bad luck. Some harware features might for instance lockup every time you try to utilize them. This can get really bad if you can't find reasons as to why it's locking up. Prime reason(some register) might for instance be in DDX, and be completely out of the context. Radeon cards have hundreds of active registers so finding the one that magically makes everything work can be difficult or near impossible. In some cases you might also have to write 3-5 registers to get a "stable state" where everything works. Having two DDX drivers that setup same hardware differently and you are looking for a needle in a haystack. R300 driver currently has 3-4 this kind of problems that limit hardware support.
R300 chips were actually instable for couple of years until the register that caused this instability was discovered.

R300 driver itself has not been under major development for an year now. Most of the original R300 developers have left the project and maintance of the driver has started lacking. Couple previously hardware accelerated features have also been dropped because developers have not bothered to keep with Mesa's changes. Driver needs constant attention to keep Mesa changes from breaking features. On it's prime days r300 driver has been able to run ut2k4 as fast as ATI's binary drivers. Xgl and others still perform very well if you don't look at Firefox performance(needs pixel buffers or FBO's).

R300 - R481 hardware itself is pretty well known and theres nothing stopping from adding support for FBO's and GLSL.
You have to understand that huge parts of R300 driver would have to be rewritten just to get FBO's. This has nothing to do with having hardware specs. ATI guys also planted little tricks in their drivers that make reverse engineering harder. Truth however is that AMD/ATI can put an end to all reserse engineering efforts if they want to. It may need some help from hardware but they can do it. Combine this with couple difficult problems and ATI's attitude torwards open source drivers and it's not surprise that no one wants to invest in the driver.
It amazes me how people think that having some specs would magically fix everything. Continuity in projects like this is important.

Of course, this all might start changing when processors and video cards are bundled together. I don't think AMD can afford not to publish specs and some development time on these as Intel will do that.

Dell ....

[taniwha]

suddenly Dell is shipping boxes with Linux .... a big customer to ATI .... and Dell is talking to Ubuntu .... "How do we know which of our boxes work well for Linux, will cause us the least amount of tech support grief' ... Ubuntu guy says "well these drivers don't work so well .... they're not well supported by their manufacturers" ..... Dell guy starts crossing boxes with ATI cards off the list .... and tells ATI marketting who start worrying that Dell will start to not buy ATI at all .....

Re:Dell ....

[LWATCDR]

That was my thought. But it gets worse. Dell is also a big and relatively new AMD customer. Intel's integrated graphics solution works very well under Linux. So for the low end Linux solution Intel maybe the system of choice. The Dell guys might start crossing ATI and AMD off the list. Intel offers easier on stop shopping and a more politically correct FOSS system.

Re:Dell ....

[locokamil]

Ain't competition grand?

Re:Dell ....

[Anonymous Coward]

This ..... isn't Digg ..... Please stop posting ..... like it is.

Re:Dell ....

[radish]

It's not only ATI, I have a pretty recent nVidia card and I can't make it work with Ubuntu. Well, I should clarify that, I wanted to try the live cd and it doesn't work, I'm lead to believe that it can be made to work with a full install but I don't have the time to tinker right now. Still - I'm a little surprised that the brand new version of Ubuntu won't work "out of the box" on a pretty common card.

Re:Dell ....

[Anonymous Coward]

An Ubuntu live CD won't tell you anything about your graphics card or monitor support under Ubuntu. You'll have better luck searching the Ubuntu forums, or Googling for "[video card make and model] xorg.conf" and "[monitor make and model] xorg.conf" to see what comes up.

Re:Dell ....

[wimdows]

Hi mate - all you need to do to get your Nvidia card to work (DRI enabled) is: sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx and change your xorg.conf driver from "nv" to "nvidia", restart X and voila...

Re:Dell ....

[radish]

Thanks for the tip, however (at risk of taking this even further offtopic) I can't even login - the initial boot screen is totally garbled. I did find a few forum posts which suggest a way of running the full installer and substituting some drivers at some point, but as I said I was really just looking to run the live cd and try out some stuff. When I get a chance maybe I'll install a blank disk and do a full install.

Re:Dell ....

[tanguyr]

Force quit X (alt-ctrl-backspace)
switch to a virtual console (alt-ctrl-F1)
do as suggested above ( sudo apt-get yadda yadda, sudo vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf, ...)
startx /t

Fast track?

[huckda]

I doubt ATI will fast track anything for OSS...

they may eventually solve SOME problems but I sincerely doubt they'll be throwing a team on resolving all of the issues resulting from using one of their cards with Linux.

Give ATi some credit

[digitalderbs]

In some areas, the closed linux binary driver maintains feature parity with the Windows counterpart.

Re:Give ATi some credit

[gmack]

If the driver worked most of the time I would have less to complain about. As it sits they have a driver that is known to reintroduce bugs into the system and to make it worse won't even compile on several recent kernels while in x86_64 mode. NVIDIA at least compiles so after buying a mid range then a top of the line ATI I've switched to NVIDA. It still annoying

Re:Give ATi some credit

[Fujisawa Sensei]

First off some and parity parity; is BS. There's some parity in features between the vesa driver and closed source driver; the both present graphics on the screen.

Unless your idea of parity is like a Java Boolean: true, false, and null.

Re:Give ATi some credit

[Slashcrap]

In some areas, the closed linux binary driver maintains feature parity with the Windows counterpart.

Meanwhile the 3d performance is consistently between a third and a half that of the Windows counterpart. Even the top of the range ATI parts consistently get hammered by mid-range Nvidia cards.

Have a look at this page from the Phoronix ATI Linux year in review :

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item =611&num=6

You would think that having released that many driver revisions, the performance would have varied a bit in one direction or other simply by accident. But no, absolutely static with perhaps a slight downward trend. Feel free to look up the benchmarks for more recent releases if you honestly think there will be the slightest difference.

Combined with the fact that they have obviously diverted a great deal of development effort into producing a shitty control panel applet that nobody wanted and which does fuck all, while ignoring the demands for GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap support, the only conclusion one can draw is that ATI's Linux support not only sucks but sucks deliberately.

ATI IS committed to fixing its OSS problems

[Anonymous Coward]

But AMD is not.

Does this mean .......The new and improved geek.

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny you got modded troll. Guess geeks aren't like they use to be. Yes back in the day we'd do research. Now you have these new-fangled inventions like the Internet, and E-mail and people still don't do research.

Two words

[geekoid]

Omega Drivers.

More words:
Thats what I used for my ATI card. If he is still maintaining them, I highly recommend them.

Re:Two words

[Anonymous Coward]

few more words:

Omega Drivers = Windows != Linux = OSS

Re:Two words

[Anonymous Coward]

Omega is simply Catalyst + Registry Tweaks. It's nothing that you can't get identically from ATI Tray Tool on the stock driver. They're certainly no more stable than ATI's craptastic catalyst drivers. And they're not open source either.

Oh Oh!

[shking]

A friend of mine recently had his dog "fixed". What, exactly, does ATI intend?

Re:Oh Oh!

[Anonymous Coward]

That looks like an Oh-face to me.

Consumer point of view

[keko_metal]

I own an ATI 9800 PRO graphics card. It's a great piece of hardware. But "I need a good driver", which is translated to: If they don't release an outstanding driver in the next few weeks, my next card will be nVidia. Or better... If they don't release an outstanding full open-source driver in the next few weeks, my next card will be nVidia. Yes. I know that nVidia drivers aren't outstanding, and aren't open source. But I've been stuck in the bad side so long, that I won't be satisfied with "just the same as the competition".

Re:Consumer point of view

[taniwha]

same here - I'm up for a new (probably Dell) high-end laptop this month and honestly, because of the drivers, ATI's getting the shove (and I'm a fan, I used to work for them) - if I'm spending $3000 for hardware I want some that will suspend and resume, shutdown without freezing etc etc simple things - though WoW would be nice too

In other news

[diegocgteleline.es]

Announcing free software drivers for the new Intel 965GM Express Chipset

ATI, NVIDIA: fuck you. Open source graphic drivers are possible, period.

Re:In other news

[the_humeister]

Open source graphic drivers are possible, period.

People use that term a lot, don't you think, question mark.

Re:In other news

[Aladrin]

Not 100% related, but I ordered a 965-based motherboard because Intel has open source drivers for the X3000. This is going to be my Linux-only system. I have previously been an nVidia person, and my current 7900 works well for Wine/etc, but I heard that Beryl works -very- well on a Mac Mini, which has an Intel chipset.

Maybe my purchase (and post here) will help nVidia and ATI realize that they -are- losing customers by not open sourcing their drivers.

I'll even go so far as to say that the first of the 2 that open source their drivers will have an definite advantage in a year's time, assuming the other doesn't do the same within that year. It's not just about customers at that point, but about geeks making your drivers better. Obsessively.

It may even happen that neither goes OSS and Intel manages to get a serious foothold on the GPU market.

Re:In other news

[keko_metal]

Nobody said that open source drivers aren't possible, they just don't want to make it happen.

Re:In other news

[Dan Ost]

Make sure you contact ATI and nVidia and explain to them what you did and why you did it.
The more detailed the explanation, the better. This is how we educate manufacturers.

Re:In other news

[Splab]

Shouldn't that be question mark? question mark?

Re:In other news

[Aladrin]

That's a good thought, actually... A nice, calm, this-is-why letter wouldn't do any harm at all. Especially to nVidia since I've spent thousands of dollars on their products in the last few years... They should miss me.

Re:In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

Except don't say "open sourcing" in your letter. It makes you seem uneducated. "Open source" is an adjective, not a verb.

Re:In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

intel are way better than nvidia and ati, but I was caught out on the missing xvmc-support when I built a G965-based PVR.

it is scheduled for this year, but i'm not sure i would have bought the g965 3 months ago, if i had known xvmc was missing.

Re:In other news

[SuluSulu]

Announcing free software drivers for the new Intel 965GM Express Chipset

ATI, NVIDIA: fuck you. Open source graphic drivers are possible, period.
It seems to me that ATI/Nvidia have very different markets than Intel. Intel benefits from open source drivers because they produce low performance integrated video chips. People who choose Intel do so because they are cheap and/or because they need low power consumption (think servers, cheep computers, and laptops). On the other hand, people choose ATI/Nvidia because they want better 3D performance. This means that good drivers that work better than their competition are more important for ATI/Nvidia. Furthermore, while I know that there are good games for Linux, they are a LOT more of them for Windows. So windows divers are far more important to ATI/Nvidia than *nix drivers. Intel only has to worry about stability and not having truly crappy drivers; open source works well for this.

Secondly, if ATI/Nvidia were to open up their drivers it could expose them to litigation from each other or from patent trolls that happen to have a patent on some miniscule technique used in their drivers.

As far as IP goes, I think that the biggest risk for ATI/Nvidia is not from them copying each other but from some other small company copying them and releasing only binary drivers so that they will never know that they were stolen from.

Re:In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought an Intel mobo with the X3000 for exactly this reason, that and I've been plagued by bad caps on cheaper boards.

Now the bad news, it doesn't support my monitors 1440x900 native resolution. There's a modesetting branch of the driver but no plans to merge it into XOrg.

With my old NVidia card, X was unusable and would completely hang when scrolling a GUI element requiring me to alt+SysRq out. This seems to be a known problem with the image copying code (?) effecting both ATI and NVidia cards (even with NV driver), nobody seems interested in fixing it.

So Intel did good but not brilliant and the status of OSS graphics drivers is still set to "SUCKS".

Re:In other news

[pc486]

There has been no modesetting branch of the Intel driver for some time now. Oh, and it is merged into XOrg. Get up to date with XOrg server 7.3, xf86-video-intel-2.0.0, and Mesa 6.5.3 and try again.

Re:In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

> Get up to date with...

Says Mr PC486:P

Thanks, I didn't know it had been released. I'll also build it later on the otherwise serviceable NVidia box and see if it fixes the freezing bug.

Re:In other news

[LWATCDR]

Well sort of. Intel didn't release all the specs of the chip because of DRM restrictions. They work well enough but Intel didn't provide full documentation.

Re:In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

ATI and nVidia do not support open source drivers for any model of card of any vintage.

Technically you can still buy an ATI Radeon 9250 which has full open source drivers, but the drivers were written with previously NDA specifications that ATI has since revoked entirely. They are hard bitches when it comes to giving open source a fucking break.

Intel may not have a GeForce 8800 GTX class card, but nVidia doesn't have open source support for even its older GeForce MX cards. I have a 9250 for now, but my next PC will have Intel graphics unless the situation is corrected.

Re:In other news

[bfields]

Not 100% related, but I ordered a 965-based motherboard because Intel has open source drivers for the X3000.

Yup. I bought a new machine recently for work that's Intel-based (essentially this, minus the monitor). I mainly use it for kernel development. My criteria were:

1. I want the fastest kernel compile I can get for cheap. (Turns about to be 3.5 minutes with my kernel config, for about $700 spent. Not bad.)
2. I want to boot the latest kernel out of git and have a fighting chance that everything will Just Work.
3. I want to know that number 2 will still be true in a few years.
4. I don't care about top-notch video performance but, hey, I enjoy the wobbly windows, and maybe the occasional game of tuxracer or something.

It turns out the gigabit ethernet and the video both needed kernels more recent than the first distro I tried (they're fine in the latest fc7 betas), but otherwise it's worked out well. So when the student interns came in this summer and needed machines, we ordered five more. I'm considering another to replace my again home machine, too, if I can get an idea how loud it is. (My office has too many noisy machines, so it's hard to tell.)

Re:In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

ATI and nVidia also run the risk of some Chinese or Russian company learning about how their GPUs work from the drivers and creating some illegal knock-off. I think that's probably an even bigger risk than patent trolls.

Just do it! Show us the results!

[antdude]

I will believe it when I see the results. I am not trusting ATI/AMD.

What's really needed

[Anonymous Coward]

Is a law. Basically, so that no hardware can be sold unless the full specifications are included.

Re:What's really needed

[jimmy_dean]

Then we'll have them post a law that says you have to login to /. before making such a stupid comment. Seriously, why don't you go live in a dictatorship if you can't handle personal liberty.

Re:What's really needed

[Bert64]

What's wrong with hardware makers having to disclose their specs?
Shouldn't consumers have the right to know how the products they`ve bought work?
Even if each individual consumer doesnt know what to do with this information, having the information out there means that *some* people will work out cool new things to do with it. Look what people have made the C64 do compared to what it was originally intended to do.

Re:What's really needed

[jimmy_dean]

What's wrong with hardware makers having to disclose their specs?
Shouldn't consumers have the right to know how the products they`ve bought work?
Even if each individual consumer doesnt know what to do with this information, having the information out there means that *some* people will work out cool new things to do with it. Look what people have made the C64 do compared to what it was originally intended to do. The problem isn't having this available, I'm all for that. The problem is forcing vendors to do this! Vendors have a right to decide to keep what they made, what is theirs, secret...as much as you don't like that. It's called freedom...they don't have to sell you anything. That's on the law side of things at least. Personally, I'd love for vendors to release detailed specs about their cards for driver-writers, but this is their decision.

Drivers need a lot of work

[AaronW]

Unfortunately at work I am stuck with an ATI X1300 card with Linux. I have to put up with text in my editor getting constantly corrupted, my mouse cursor corrupted and lots of other weird quirks. I tried to fire up Google Earth and that just hung. All of these things work perfectly on my nVidia cards at home, and over the years I've used nVidia (since the Gforce 2) I've only rarely had problems.

Even ATI's installer sucks badly. It took a week before I could finally get the ATI driver to install on the computer, in part because it had integrated graphics (which did not work at all with X). The Vesa drivers for the ATI card are far too slow to be usable.

Too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry but I already jumped ship back to nvidia (last used them with TNT2 Ultra). I'd been ATI only from the first Radeon until the recent cards but poor driver support after waiting years for good drivers mean nvidia is the best game in town.
Vote with your $, don't buy ATI until they sort out their poor drivers & and/or open source them.

An operating system MUST be license neutral

[iamacat]

How do we feel about Microsoft's decision to exclude open source drivers by requiring signatures on everything in XP/Vista? Would we want them to rule out GPLed software based on MFC and .Net? It's no better for Linux to enforce a particular license for drivers or impose license restrictions on KDE/Qt apps. An operating system should be license-neutral for any applications and plugins it supports. A user should not be limited in what kind of hardware he can buy for his Linux computer.

Re:An operating system MUST be license neutral

[Hal_Porter]

How do we feel about Microsoft's decision to exclude open source drivers by requiring signatures on everything in XP/Vista?

Admins can install unsigned drivers on XP and Vista. Even on Vista x64 it's possible to use them, if you're developing them for example -

http://www.vista64.net/forums/drivers/9351-unsigne d-drivers.html

Re:An operating system MUST be license neutral

[towsonu2003]

How do we feel about Microsoft's decision to exclude open source drivers by requiring signatures on everything in XP/Vista? Would we want them to rule out GPLed software based on MFC and .Net? It's no better for Linux to enforce a particular license for drivers or impose license restrictions on KDE/Qt apps. An operating system should be license-neutral for any applications and plugins it supports. A user should not be limited in what kind of hardware he can buy for his Linux computer.

1960s called, they want your head out of your ass as soon as possible ;)

Re:An operating system MUST be license neutral

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called "use the BSD/MIT license".

Like all of X11.

Re:An operating system MUST be license neutral

[pinky0x51]

I disagree. Being neutral is one of the worse behavior in todays society.

environmental pollution? Is it ok or not? Maybe we should be neutral.
discrimination? good or bad? Maybe we should be neutral.
enslave people? good or bad. Maybe we should be neutral.
starting the Iraq war? ok or not? Maybe we should be neutral.
etc.

People like to be neutral because than they don't have to think about (complex) subjects. They think by being neutral they keep them self out of politics. That's not true. Also neutral people influence politics and not to the good. Already Edmund Burke said: "If the good guys are doing nothing it will be enough for the evil to succeed".

Also Free Software and the digital age raises questions and people should think about it. Free Software exists for a special purpose. That's because people believe in freedom in the digital age. Allowing or supporting non-free software would not help this movement but would make it more difficult.

Everybody should think about the topics which are important to us and our world. Of couse everyone is free to form his own opinion but just being neutral is a really bad attitude. Not everything is good and not everything is bad, so we can't say everything or nothing (GNU/Linux requests Free Software? Than we also have to allow MS to forced people into digital chains? This would be a stupid implication).

Ok I am stupid ...

[maxm]

But would it not be possible to use windows drivers for *nix?

I naturally do not mean that they would be plug and play. But the Windows driver API must be pretty well known, and they run on the same hardware. So it should be simpler to reverse engineer.

A thin wrapper around the windows drivers could perhaps make it work and hold us over for the short term? Something like Wine for graphic drivers.

I had decided to buy a 14.1" notebook purely for Linux, but i decided against it as it is pretty much impossible to guess if it will run. Trial and error is a bit expensive ...

Re:Ok I am stupid ...

[644bd346996]

Short answer: no.

Long answer: No. X11+GLX is very different from GDI+DirectX. In almost all cases, it would be easier to reverse-engineer the hardware, rather than wrap the driver api. Also, it would probably be impossible to use windows graphics drivers in a secure manner. And the extra translation layer would kill performance. If you are going to reverse-engineer the drivers, you might as well look at the hardware info, and not the software api.

Note that in some cases, it is possible to use Windows drivers on a *nix operating system. The NDIS network card driver api is well documented, and is supported by projects for Linux and FreeBSD.

Re:Ok I am stupid ...

[julesh]

The NDIS network card driver api is well documented, and is supported by projects for Linux and FreeBSD.

Not to mention orginally having been designed to be OS-independent, so that vendors only had to supply a single driver for MSDOS, OS/2, Netware and Windows. OK, so MS have extended it since then, but it still builds on that original base.

My experience with ATI Radeon Cards

[zukinux]

My recommendation is : BUY NVIDIA if you're a linux user like I am.
Their support is just so much better and the seems to actually care for their linux users.
As ATI user you'll have to invest hours in configuring your /etc/X11/xorg.conf files to fit your ATI card, and in the end it wouldn't work the way you expected. With NVIDIA card, these stuff are just much easier (including configuring your TV OUT or any other stuff).

If you're a Windows user, buy whatever you think of, if you're Linux user, do yourself a favour, buy NVIDIA.

Again?

[Anonymous Coward]

They promise this every 18 months or so. I fell for it once.

HTPC use *better* get them motivated

[TheGratefulNet]

right now, as much as I dislike it - nvidia IS the linux owner for HTPC use.

all the howtos talk about the nvidia binary (sigh) driver and how it helps (but isn't a full solution) to mpeg motion accel. in hardware.

but with ati, there IS no solution. "don't use ATI" if you use linux and want fast video for home theater use.

I bought an ati card for the windows side of my htpc design - but I won't be buying them again until they show an xvmc driver for linux.

its just a shame they ignore unix like that; especially in the days when HTPC building is really starting to get popular.

Re:HTPC use *better* get them motivated

[Anonymous Coward]

The nice thing is that the 8xxx geforce cards don't support (and won't support) xvmc either.

Thanks ATI

[MetricT]

While everyone is harping about ATI's past sins, I'd like to thank ATI for committing to fixing those problems. We should commend (and purchase from) companies that make our lives easier (I'm looking at you, Broadcom...)

To all the ATI complainers

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you using an ATI card in linux? Everyone knows the ATI support under linux sucks, so you buying ATI and then complaining doesn't let ATI know that they suck. I love my nvidia card under linux. Sure, they're binary only, but everything works well (including xinerama mult-monitor).

Re:To all the ATI complainers

[Anonymous Coward]

I love my nvidia card under linux. Sure, they're binary only, but everything works well (including xinerama mult-monitor). Not everything works so well, really. The only things that's really good about the Nvidia drivers is the really fast OpenGL performance. Their Xrender implementation is half-broken (e.g. QT sub-pixel rendering problems), the new Geforce 8XXX cards will not support XVMC anymore (so the only way to get hardware accelerated video decoding now is with Nvidia's proprietary Purevideo.. unless someone starts doing a video decoder that uses OpenGL shaders already.. anyone?!), the famous tty switching freezing/screen corruption, memory leaks, various problems with AGP and _many_ other issues you can't really check on because Nvidia doesn't have a public bugtracker which also means you can't even check on the bugs you submitted yourself.
But yeah, other than that the drivers are really good. ;-)

not that ATI Cares

[Anonymous Coward]

I also purchased a intel/nvidia notebook because of ATI linux driver issues that I had experienced. Not that ATI is reading this form but if they are... its time to open source your drivers (or at least provide specs) ~ your losing more and more customers to intel/nvidia with your closed broken proprietary drivers. My next graphics card is going to be nvidia and I am recommending Intel integrated for all the low end systems that people ask me about buying so when I install ubuntu for their web surfing (to remove the spy-ware) the graphics are responsive and not corrupted. ...

Fuck ATI

[Anonymous Coward]

All that matters is their current "sins".

Read reviews... helps a lot

[Anonymous Coward]

I have 2 notebooks with linux, both have nVidia discrete graphics, both work well (Toshiba Satellite P10, Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo M3438), Slackware, SuSE, and Ubuntu were tested. Just be sure to read reviwes by people who has bought it, www.linuxlaptops.com is a good place to start. Be sure to check chipset and peripherials before you buy, for compatibility.

If I know ATI at all

[towsonu2003]

Or is ATI only concerned with fixes to its binary driver to maintain feature parity with competitors?

Yes, they do NOT care about the open source stuff.

and FUCK broadcom too

[Anonymous Coward]

I even own one of their damn cards.

Put on the cheerleader uniform

[fo0bar]

I attended the Red Hat summit last year. Lots of good information (there were a ton of talks about Xen, a good one about the finer points of LVM, etc), but the price wasn't worth making it a yearly thing.

That being said, I think the conference has the potential to quickly degrade to LinuxWorld-level, and this announcement doesn't surprise me. Companies will come out of the woodwork and start screaming "Yaaa, we like Linux! Hooray for open source!" for a week, but then not do anything until the next conference/expo rolls around.

(On a related note, the last notebook I bought came with Intel graphics. I specifically chose this because I didn't want to deal with the headache of ATI and Nvidia's binary drivers. Intel is no saint, but at least having full 3D drivers in Xorg is nice.)

Open? Does not play with DRM, so forget it.

[Bearhouse]

Ever heard of, "Certified Output Protection Protocol (COPP), Protected Video Path Output Protection Management (PVP-OPM),
Protected Video Path User Accessible Bus (PVP-UAB) and Protected Broadcast Driver Architecture (PBDA..."

All lovely things that Microsoft and ATI (will/do) use to piss you off, and make connecting all of your expensive new PC & AV kit virtually impossible.

Better binary drivers? Maybe.

Genuinely 'open' architecture that would enable the OSS community to bypass (more easily) current and future DRM, while still being able to view the result on the lastest hardware? No way.

Huh?

[Synn]

Drivers don't have to be a particular license for Linux, Nvidia has been doing their own drivers on Linux for years now just fine. It's just that ATI's drivers suck.

Also you aren't restricted to using a particular license for QT. You can purchase a licensed version of QT and use any license you want. You're only required to use a GPL license for QT if you use the free version of QT, which is GPL'd. But if you want a free lunch you can always use GTK which is what GNOME uses.

BS

[Anonymous Coward]

I had an Ati Radeon Moblility 7500 which I used on Ubuntu Edgy Eft. I used the open-source drivers and it worked fine. 3D support was kinda iffy in some places, but it worked all right. That being said, I now own an nVidia Geforce Go 7300 and using the restricted drivers, it works like a champ. I don't give a rat's ass if the thing is closed or open, if nVidia is committed to releasing a high quality driver for Linux, I'm going to side with them. I can't speak for the Ati binary driver, but given that my old video card wasn't even supported by the binary driver, I'd have to say to hell with Ati...

ATI? Who F**cking cares ATI.

[Delifisek]

They don't give any f**ck to Linux drivers. More than 5 years, oss people begging them to do something for Linux drivers.

So ? DONT BUY.

Thats simple.

Re:ATI? Who F**cking cares ATI.

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people don't have a choice. When the IT department at work buys you a laptop with an ATI chipset in it, if you want to run Linux on it, what are you going to do? Suck it up and deal with it, that's what.

Thanks!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow - thanks for posting that! I was completely unaware of this, and was looking to build some new systems.

They will all support the 965. As will any future systems that I build/buy. The heck with ATI and NVIDIA.

ATI??

[snotrash]

Haha, ATI ceased to exist a long time ago. They changed their name to AMD.

Sick of fglrx

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm with you. I just want support for xorg because I'm sick of running fglrx drivers, they suck.

Marketspeak = bullshit

[Thaelon]

Tons of companies say they're committed to lots of things. It doesn't mean anything.

Wait until they produce something that fixes the problem.

So I just called their presales

[shaze]

You know, cause complaining to their Linux department has accomplished jack-shit in the past 2 years. The peon transfers me to his manager, and his manager says "I'm really sorry, I have some very exciting news to tell you, but I can't under our NDA". I asked him if he could generalize the news, to see if it maybe fixes the problems I'm having. He says he will liaze with me to ensure I get a proper response from their Linux team, that will somehow keep me from selling my (STILL) $650 X1900. Anyways, I would kill to be able to install Beryl as easy as I do on my Dell D610. It's the slowest crappiest laptop alive, and yet with the new Intel drivers, Beryl runs awesome! Anyways, I'll keep everyone posted, but like we've been doing for the past 2 years or so, don't hold your breath.

Uh huh.

[pak9rabid]

I'll believe that when my shit turns purple and smells like rainbow sherbert..

More lip service

[einer]

ATI has proven itself to be unreliable and basically dishonest. Additionally, there is no money motive to do this. Linux users are such a tiny fraction of the graphic card buying market that there is no reason for them to do this work.

Sure would be nice to have open source drivers for any decent 3d graphics card under linux. But it's all about money. Corporations are beholden to their shareholders, and board members can even get sued for pursuing a non-profitable course of action. This would most certainly fall into the non-profitable category.

Please please please vote with your dollars (it's the only vote you have that counts in this country). Even if that means not buying another video card. You're only supporting crap buy purchasing ATI.

Re:More lip service

[garutnivore]

Please please please vote with your dollars (it's the only vote you have that counts in this country). Even if that means not buying another video card. You're only supporting crap buy purchasing ATI.

I'm about to buy a new laptop. I'm going to make quite sure it does not have an ATI graphic subsystem. My current Dell laptop does and it's been nothing but trouble trying to get 3D working (works but is unstable), or the TV out (have to go through hoops) and other stuff....

I'll switch back

[SanityInAnarchy]

Here's how it works: I currently buy nVidia, because they're powerful enough to handle things like Quake 4, and because they have Linux drivers that mostly work.

If I didn't care so much about performance -- like if I just wanted something that can do Beryl reasonably well -- I'd buy Intel, because they have open source drivers that rock.

I know ATI can give me competitive performance. If they can also give me an entirely open driver, missing no functionality, and as solid as, say, the Intel drivers, I'll switch to ATI. If Intel comes out with something that has performance that blows away ATI and nVidia, and keeps up the same level of quality drivers, I'll switch to Intel. Otherwise, I'll stick with nVidia.

Until Intel get a separte graphics card

[Anonymous Coward]

then you'll have a fully open source graphics card that performance-wise is about the same as the bottom-of-the-range-but-still-latest ATI or NVidia cards.

Rather than get a NVidia 7300GS for £50 I'll get the Intel GMA950 for £50.

Re:Open? Does not play with DRM, so forget it.

[The Warlock]

I don't see what the problem is. They're never going to make a Linux player for hi-def discs that use those protections anyway.

Heh... Guess you'll wait a while...

[Svartalf]

They're a small team working on the drivers, the OpenGL group as a whole. And they're laying off 5% of their workforce to placate the stock market on dismal earnings- do YOU think they're going to carry through on that commitment in the next 6-24 months? I don't. I'm not commending anyone for anything until I see results- while Matthew Tippet's team (small one- very small) has done amazing things for us (I wish the man's team was PROPERLY staffed up!!) he's hamstrung by the upper management's insistence on DirectX over everything else (If you talk with the DevRel people, unless you're on Linux or MacOS they will try to talk you into DirectX over OpenGL, even if you state plainly that you're gunning for cross-platform on a title or other application.), they do NOT get applause yet from at least myself. They're only slightly better than Broadcom.

Future-Ex-Consumer point of view

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the same configuration, and I just stopped using 3D, as ATI's support/install is just a pain in the *ss. And I'm not talking about dual screen, Beryl, or other fancies. Only the good old 3D thing to play Scorched3D, or whatever. This all led me to interesting conclusions:

Fact 1: I paid for a card that is not supported for my chosen OS. But, given the choice, I'll keep my Ubuntu Linux.
Paradox 1: ATI's just succeeding in making me realize I can live *without* 3D.
Fact 2: My next graphic card *will* have opensource drivers.
Paradox 2: ATI's marketing are apparently succeeding in NOT selling me their products.
Fact 3: I'll be somewhat richer, without all that money spent on hardware or games.

Radeon 9600

[Quill_28]

Does it mean I might be able to get better resolution on my radeon 9600 than 1024x768 on Ubuntu?

Installing any other drivers causes the system to hard lock upon the log in screen.

interesting

[snotrash]

considering ATI doesn't even exist anymore. Do you mean AMD?

ATI is pulling your (our) leg

[fudgefactor7]

Read my Journal for the scoop, but it works like this: they (ATI) know their OSS/Linux support is "teh suck," but choose not to fix it. Why? The answer is simple: why should they? In the 3D realm, you have two choices ATI or nVidia. That's it. Linux isn't where the bread-n-butter is, Windows is where the revenue is. As a business, you go where the money is, not where your heart may lead you.

What's more, it may not be just one component that's truly sucky: All I know is that ATI's FGLRX + 3D + Xorg = failure. Their driver may be fine, there could be an issue with Xorg and ATI together, or some unseen combo that nobody is looking at--or it would have been fixed. So, as a result you have, really, only one good choice for Linux 3D, and that's nVidia. Nvidia knows this and loves it. ATI chooses to chase the other guy rather than fix things and gain new converts.

In a month or two when nothing has come of this, at least you'll know why. Pay no attention to the flapping heads of ATI until they actually DO something.

Re:ATI is pulling your (our) leg

[Anonymous Coward]

ATI is making a big mistake if it thinks that there is no money in supporting Linux.
More and more games and graphic designers use Linux these days... and with the money saved on software, it gets spent on hardware.

Therefore, a serious linux box will have a higher chance of dual monitors and a performance video card.

I tried hard to be a ATI supporter, but my last few cards were nVidia, precisely beacuse of ATI's poor linux support.

Commercial uses

[madopal]

We've been using OpenGL and Linux on ATI cards for our arcade game for over a year now. We're facing a major hurdle, though. AGP hardware is getting harder and harder to find in quantity, and the fglrx drivers don't correctly support vblank in the PCIx cards they have. We're trying to use the commercial end to get pressure on them through the buyers, but it's slow going.

When they can't be bothered to get their drivers to pay attention to vblank properly, you know it's not their top priority.

IP

[pedestrian crossing]

They have already sold the card, so it doesn't matter as far as revenue who writes the best driver. Good open drivers might help sell cards. I would sure choose a good card with a good open driver.

I think it's an IP issue. They've bought into some fundamental patented IP, the license forbids releasing driver source (or it's something they have patented and it is counted as an asset on their Balance Sheet), and the patent covers something so integral to their design that it isn't worth the R&D it would take to get around it.

Re:IP

[Cal Paterson]

They have already sold the card, so it doesn't matter as far as revenue who writes the best driver.

This shows a complete lack of understanding. These cards are sold in a massively competitive market purely on their speed. ATI (and Nvidia) feel that by keeping their drivers obfuscated they can prevent competition from stealing their performance boosts.

While I would agree that this is short sighted, it's fairly obvious why they believe that keeping drivers closed would give them a competitive advantage.

They're not stupid, they're just wrong.

Meaningless

[Anonymous Coward]

Means nothing - ATi announce they are going to improve open source support about every 6 months, and nothing ever happens. I'm surprised even slashdot bother reporting it any more.

R300 opensource drivers

[DrYak]

There are open-source R300 drivers that cover the 9500 up to x850 range of cards. I've used it for on old 9600XT AGP card (AGP chip) and HIS-overclocked X800 AGP card (PCIe chip with PCIe-to-GP bridge). The performance seem to be acceptable for my needs - which is surprising, knowing that R300 driver was completely developed from reverse engineering.

Recently the driver has been included in the official DRI tree. Most distro use it to provide open-source 3D acceleration. It is the default drivers for near every GPL-compatible Beryl/Compiz LiveCD (like Kooraa, for exemple) and function well enough with them (the same can't be said for official binary drivers).

As usual you should stop focusing on the hardware maker - who doesn't { have the possibility to / want to } throw resources at an OS that represents only a smaller fraction of their market share.
You should instead seek what has been produced by the OSS community - through large-scale collaboration they often manage to put out some marvels.

There no way one could except ATI to open-source drivers. They may have problems with code in their drivers that wasn't produced in house and that can't be opened cheaply.
BUT what AMD/ATI realy need to do is to help the DRI/FreeDesktop guys develop their own driver, and for that they need to document a little bit their chips. The best thing could do to the OSS community isn't trying to make their BLOB drivers less borked. The best thing would be to provide list of registers and samples so the community could write a R500 driver.

Wrapper

[DrYak]

But would it not be possible to use windows drivers for *nix? [...] A thin wrapper around the windows drivers could perhaps make it work and hold us over for the short term? Something like Wine for graphic drivers.

It depends on /what/ you call a wrapper and what you call /windows driver/.

If you mean "Using some variant of wine to install the Windows Catalyst Drivers and then use the Wine variant to map calls to the windows API" : No it won't work, because as the other /.er pointed out the Windows' GDI+Direct3D is fundamentally different from the X11+GLX+OpenGL you find on Unices. ...BUT...

If you mean "both could share a great deal of code because, technically, the Windows Catalyst *HAS* to provide OpenGL API, and *has* to talk to the same hardware" :
Yes, it could work, and in fact that's how it is done.
nVidia and ATI binary drivers for Linux consist of a open-source shim and a BLOB (as in Binary Large OBject. Not as "the blob that ate san fransisco" horror movie).
The BLOB shares a lot of code with windows Catalyst (nVidia's BLOB is a little bit more different to Detonator) and is used to provide OpenGL API and all the nasty low-level work to transform "higher-level" openGL commands into a series of low-level instruction to send to the card.
The opensource shim is a small piece of code, that can be compiled for you current kernel and that serve as a gateway to send the low-level instructions (secretly made by the BLOB) over the bus to the actual hardware.

The only subtle difference between nVidia and ATI, it that ATI tries to leverage the existing DRI architecture (their driver is just a closed source DRI+libGL) whereas nVidia uses its own proprietary architecture.
ATI driver sucks even if it re-uses most of the same Windows code, because of "small" differences between the Linux and Windows world that causes the driver not to react quite exactly the same and would require some additional hacks to avoid crashing under Linux.
nVidia's is much more customly built for Linux.
On the other hand, improvement in the Catalyst are almost immediately available on Linux (the feature list of the Windows and Linux drivers is very similar, minus the crashes), whereas newer feature get a little bit more time to get back ported from Detonator to Linux drivers.

So it should be simpler to reverse engineer.

What could be reverse engineered is the function of the BLOB itself.
Either using some debugger under windows or under Linux with binary drivers, try to guess to what undocumented hardware register/low-level commands do higher lvel 3D commands correspond. (ie.: try drawing a triangle in OpenGL and intercept and analyse the undocumented commands that the drivers sends to the hardware).

R300 drivers (for r300 / r400 chips, from Radeon 9500 to X850) have been developed like this.
But it is a hard and slow method. It would be much more faster if AMD/ATI helped by documenting some more their chips' registers. No need to actually release their über-secret patent/copyright-problematic code opensource. Only give the tools to make the creation of equivalent drivers easier for the OSS community.

Meanwhile, Intel's i9xx series of chips has a good opensource support for Linux, enough performance for Beryl/Compiz eye candy, and available on a lot of laptops.

R300 opensource drivers

[DrYak]

Try R300 opensource drivers. Work well enough on my Radeon 9600 XT at resolutions up to 1920x1440.
R300 is integrated in most current Linux distro. If not, you'll have to either upgrade your distro OR recompile the DRI modules.

Up to R4xx not afterward.

[DrYak]

Apparently (rumour alert), the newer Radeons are very similar, in terms of interface, to earlier ones. Porting the drivers over requires about a 100-line diff; most of the changes are register locations, the actual semantics are similar.

Up to R4xx (Radeon X8x0. The R5xx family (X1300 and up) is radically different. It's still called radeon, but it doesn't share the radeon core. In fact it doesn't have a 2D core at all. It is a purely 3D chips that use triangle operation and similar to do 2D blits.

The open source R300 driver had been adapter to function with R400 cards too (up to X850) (and has been included in the mainstream DRI on freedesktop since then) - it works well, that's what I use.
But an R500 driver would require writing a new (3D-only) driver from scratch. Which is difficult and slow because ATI doesn't provide any documentation at all for their hardware, not even under NDA.

Re:Up to R4xx not afterward.

[Anonymous Coward]

False. R5xx cores do have 2D engines. Some r300 developers have considered using 3D engine to do blits entirely because it would be a better long term solution.

Re:Up to R4xx not afterward.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not so, the r500 3d core is very like the r300 3d core, the same driver should mostly work... the 2D core is quite different, but I wrote ~600 lines of code to do basic CRT/DVI setup and it isn't rocket science by any means..

- airlied

ha ha! too late!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=6m&s=AMD&l=on&z=m& q=l&c=INTC

Money talks evert thing else is BS

[Diskwizard]

If Dell had released it's announcement that it was going to sell laptops with Ubuntu on them a couple of days earlier my daughter would be running around college with a Dell laptop instead of a HP laptop. if you want to get good ATI drivers go to Dells website and buy a Linux computer. When Dell calls ATI and says they want a box car of hardware with a option to buy 40 more but only if they have fully functional LINUX drivers ATI will a lot more interested in Linux OSS drivers. Money talks everything else is BS.

Whichever

[smchris]

Competition is inherently good. Just wake me up when they succeed.

It's all in the street cred. Linux, I use nvidia. When I ran OS/2 it was Matrox. As long as ATI realizes PR is cheap but it's places like /. where results are broadcast.

Ati + Dell = headache

[A_Non_Moose]

I can only speak from the windows side, but suffice it to say it is "difficult":

Typing this on a Precision 450, with a Fire Glx1 and use dual monitors:

Problem1) Ogl screen savers will run on only one monitor and freeze on the other.
Solution: Omega Drivers for fgl. remove/reinstall .net 1 and 2...don't use .net3, at all.

Problem2) Display properties don't reflect current state (mirror/one big display/etc):
Solution: drop the refresh rate/size and check again.

Problem3) Dell PW 410/420's have weak PSU's.
Solution: Sort of. Got a 9800pro (agp 4/8x only, despite specs' claim) for work machine and 9500 for home machine
(agp 1-4x correct, wonders never cease). Stealth upgrade, 410/420 had a 230W PSU, min rec was 300W...thing
would only boot after power up and reset shortly thereafter, and system specs listed Agp as 2x, max.
So a PW 4x0 got a 9500 and sort of worked. Luckily this box had months of uptime and a warm reboot was
fine as long as the card had power applied.
350W PSU in home system worked well with 9800. Worked *very* well (SEG).

Problem4) Dell drivers are *YEARS* out of date for even the most mid/current of cards. Laptops are locked
out as are workstations. Cats won't install on dell systems, hence the omega and other driver releases.
Sadly this is on Dell systems still under support contract, gets worse when you need the latest drivers
(on say CAD/CAM/GIS) for a system/software to work properly.
Solution: ignore the "void the warranty" in order to have a working machine. {hurmph}Nice.

Problem5) All Ati's fault: video acceleration software for DVDs can't always be installed.
Solution: nlite driver forum. Now have the 9800pro and x800pro. installing the s/w with 9800 disk works
for both cards. See, never registered the 9800 (wonder why?) but did the x800.
Ati's number check takes the 9800's #, but not the x800's #. However I can use the 9800's # for both
and both work splendidly.
Nlite forum has the steps that works, so long as your card is supported. (9500pro or better, IIRC)

In a nutshell (TLDR version) Ati, like HP, makes excellent hardware, software almost always sucks rocks.
Dell is just the opposite and sometimes the same (all things considered).
Nvidia: I lost track, what month is it?

ATI is lying

[Anonymous Coward]

Spokesmen of ATI is lying. Remember when they in an interview said they don't cheat in benchmark, and the day after Toms Hardware released an analysis (comparation between hardware and software implementations) in which Microsoft confirmed ATI wasn't following the DirectX specification.

I can afford to wait....

[wowbagger]

I can afford to wait....

Commitment means everything when $$ is on the line

[monkeyboythom]

Dell sells a buttload of Ubuntu machines. With what? Certainly not ATI cards.

ATI sees nVidia touting Linux friendly lifestyle with their cards to the newly awakening non-Windows groups (parents, teachers, *egad* politicians) and will then be more responsive. But by then, too late?

By the way, how hard is it for a company to spend the money on five or six Linux developers anyway?

Damn!

[z-j-y]

I wish I saw those complains about ATI 2 weeks ago. I spent days trying to make an ATI 1300 work on a Dell/Ubuntu, finally had to give it up.