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AMD Promises Open Source Graphics Drivers
MoxFulder writes "Henri Richard, AMD's VP of sales, has promised to deliver open-source drivers for ATI graphics cards (recently acquired by AMD) at the recent Red Hat Summit. A series of good news for proponents of open-source device drivers. In the last year, Intel, the leading provider of integrated graphics cards, has opened their drivers as well. But ATI and NVidia, the only two players in the market for high-performance discrete graphics cards, have so far released only closed-source drivers for their cards. This has created numerous compatibility, stability, and ethical problems for users of Linux and other open source OSes, and prompted projects like Nouveau to try and reverse-engineer NVidia drivers. Hopefully AMD's decision will put pressure on NVidia to release open-source drivers as well!"
I don't think their driver source has anything in it that discloses AGP specifications. They've been using Linux apgart code for a while, in a manner that may have already been violating the license.
It sure is nice when GLX works and you can do CAD, modeling, simulations and 3D programming(OpenGL) on a Linux box. So there are practical uses beyond gaming for those fancy 3D cards.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Look into the new "modesetting" branch of the Intel driver, currently moving towards the default. It moves all the work of modesetting and other related hardware manipulation from the video BIOS into the driver, and avoids the video BIOS entirely. This does indeed give the benefits you describe in your post. Some of this modesetting code also moves toward sharing between drivers, to support modesetting for all Xorg video drivers. (Some of it consists of driver-independent code, such as dealing with funky monitors.)
Pixel and vertex shaders are a whole new ball game. There's a lot of text on my screen. All of it drawn from truetype fonts. A truetype font is basically a series of bezier curves. Microsoft Research released a paper a few years back where each of these curves was approximated to a triangle. A vertex shader program then inspects each of the rendered triangles and corrects the error between the triangle and the bezier. This allows an entire font to be uploaded to the GPU and rendered at any resolution with very little CPU load or RAM usage (compare this with Apple's hack of just storing a table of glyphs in the video RAM, which doesn't scale very well).
Pixel shaders can be used for a lot of things. With pixel shaders you can perform a lot of convolutions in hardware, giving some nice effects. You can use a pyramid algorithm to perform a number of things, like bi-cubic filtering, blurring, etc in a fraction of a second.
Sure, you could do a lot of these on the CPU, but the GPU is going to do them a lot faster, and probably use less power (important for mobile users).
Even without needing the 3D support, it's useful to have all of the features working correctly. Power management is a big one, since the kernel needs to be able to save the state of the GPU somewhere before turning it off, and Linux uses a lot of hacks to try to avoid needing to do this.
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I'm sorry, but that's a really stupid attitude, since you're a *consumer* of their products. You benefit from your favorite company's *innovation*, not from their sales figures.
Hoping that your favorite company's competition continues to fail basically ensures that your favored products start to suck... without NVidia and Intel at nipping at its heels, I can assure you that ATI cards would stagnate.
For example, I am an AMD fan when it comes to processors. I like the value of their mid-range offerings, I like HyperTransport, I like their innovation in the 64-bit area, and I consider them more friendly to open source. But does that mean I want Intel to suck? Far from it!! I want Intel and AMD to fight each other tooth and nail. I rejoice at the low-power Core 2 Duo processors, knowing it will force AMD to come up with something better. I delight in the price wars that have forced AMD to discount its processors, allowing me to buy a dual-core 64-bit Socket AM2 processor for $60 from Newegg.
The way I see it, I want my favorite products to encounter incessant and BRUTAL competition... and to triumph through innovation.
My bicyles
Loki had a lot more problems going on than the lack of a Linux market at the time. They tried to be too big, too quick and go for too many AAA titles at once. Between having to pay large upfront license costs to port games (often six figures or more) and royalties from every sale on top of that, they just didn't have a business plan that met their market. They would have been much better off as a porting house rather than a self publisher (much like Ryan Gordon/icculus does now).
On the other side of the scale, LGP is working on a lot of B grade games. Some of them are very good but they're very, very slow and methodical in their porting. I've beta tested games for them which took more than a year to release after I got the first beta. They need to get stuff out the door if they want to be serious. Throw in Tux Games charging $50 for the exact same box you can buy in the discount bin for $15 (ok, here's $18.82 at walmart and you might skew the numbers because people aren't buying from them so they "don't get counted" as a Linux sale. In fact, you can pick up NWN, Quake 4 and Doom 3 from Walmart for the price of one game from Tux Games with shipping.
IMO, a lot of the problem is simply the game industry not understanding the linux market properly. A market exists but you can't go at it Loki style or you're doomed to failure, not because of the market, but because the business plan doesn't add up. Software houses should look toward portability when they design a game and the cost of a single developer to handle the Linux port of it would be pretty cheap in the overall development of the game (I haven't exactly done a poll but I wouldn't be surprised if you could find Linux geek willing to work for less than the average game coder just for the privilege of being able to get paid to program a game for linux). Another part of the problem are the publishers who dictate to the game houses what they're going to release so even if they want to do a linux version, it may not be possible.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
I'm not sure why you seem to think that undermines the previous posters point.
As they said, the console market is far larger than the PC market, and that console titles outstrip sales of PC titles significantly (and that they sell for more). World of Warcraft and Linage don't change that. Selling a million plus copies of a game in the first year is expected of a half decent console game (games EA's Madden do that and more in their first couple of weeks - games on the PC don't sell that well with anything like that frequency (nor do they tend to retail for as much).
Added to that, is of course the risk factor.
You might imagine that releasing an MMO is a better way to make money than a console game, but that's not borne out. MMO are far risker projects, requiring many times the capital investment, much longer development cyles (years longer), a more complicated business structure and business plan and have massive monthly outgoings (rather than just paying a small amount for a tiny helpdesk team and letting the staffers go once the game is out). When the risk is higher, you of course keep less of the return (and again, there is a lower return when you have high on-going costs).
As EA has discovered, it's a lot more economical to stick to releasing incrimental upgrades of existing tiles (from Madden and Fifa to the Battlefield series) than to take risks with PC MMO's, which ultimately fail far more often, and bring in less profit as a percentage of both investment and revenue even when they are successful. EA have even shut down 'successful' PC MMO's down, because they were not successful enough by their standards - there just wasn't enough of a return on their investment, that is, they were better off spending that money in developing a new console title, because it was almost certain to give a better RoI.
The overall numbers of gamers for Lineage 2 and WoW is large, but it's probably not as profitable as many think - a third of WoW subscribers are in China, and they pay just a fraction of the amount US and EU players pay. Several million more people in the US, EU and AUS have played the likes of Halo 2 on the X-Box than have played WoW on a PC or Mac.
All the above is is why there are so few MMO's, compared to console titles, as a business MMO's are simply less profitable (because they bomb more often every n attempts, and when the do go wrong they do so more spectacularly, in that a bigger hole is left in the publisher and/or developers wallet).
Maybe it's the other way around, or more for the novelty factor. I visited a friend yesterday, and his theme made it look like he had switched to Vista, but he's actually been running that theme for two years, and it's just an unforunate coincidence that vista looks like that.
No. Open Source is about making stuff work. Free Software is about ethics and freedom.