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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?"
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.
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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.
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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.
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?
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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 .....
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.
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?
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".
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.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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...)
Even the nVidia binary drivers have wider support than ATi, since they work on OpenSolaris and FreeBSD as well as Linux.
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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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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).
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.
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:
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.)