Insight Into AMD's Linux Driver Development

Cowards Anonymous writes "It's no secret that ATI Technologies has had a rough time in the past delivering display drivers that met the expectations of their customers. When ATI started out producing a FireGL and Radeon Linux driver they for some time were greatly behind NVIDIA's feature-rich driver. The early ATI Linux driver had lacked essential functionality such as PCI Express and x86_64 architecture support and was also affected by stability and performance problems — not to mention a great deal of bugs."

Comments

Not really surprising

[Endo13]

It's also no secret that ATI has long had problems with their drivers for Windows too.

No, this is not a troll. I use ATI cards almost exclusively myself and I prefer them over NVidia, but I do have to admit that Nvidia's drivers as a general rule seem much better designed and simpler to install.

Re:Not really surprising

[Scoth]

Not sure what kind of "supporting evidence" you might want, but I once bought a Radeon once to replace my aging Voodoo3. I forget the exact model number, but at the time it was about $175 or $200. In some games it was *slower* than the Voodoo3. I gave up and reinstalled Windows clean, but still had the same trouble. Took it back, got a GeForce 3 Ti 200 for about the same price, and it worked beautifully out of the box. Fast forward to several years later and I was looking to replace that card, and I got another Radeon. Installed the drivers, slapped in the new card - poof, blue screen on boot in the video drivers. Stuck the GF3 back in, removed it from the DevMan, and manually installed the VGA driver. Rebooted with the ATI, installed the drivers - back to Bluescreen on Boot. So, another clean install of Windows, and still got bluescreens on boot. Took that Radeon back and got a GF 6600GT again for about the same price, slapped it in, and it's worked ever since. I have a hard time believing I had other bad hardware in there to cause the troubles since in both cases the GeForces worked perfectly. Not to mention the GeForces worked much more nicey in Linux than the Radeons ever did. I genuinely gave ATI two tries now, and both times I was hit with troublesome drivers. I doubt I'll be buying another Radeon anytime soon.

Re:Nvidia is not the competition

[Mad Merlin]

You think you want a stable kernel ABI, but you really don't.

nVidia blob isn't crap.

[gukin]

I know that lots of folks are vexed that nVidia won't open their 3D driver, saying "If nVidia stops supporting Linux you're all doomed." Well just who do you think supports the open source nv.c driver? How about the nVidia SATA driver? Yes, it's nVidia, so even though the 3D stuff is closed source, they're still supporting OSS.

Next about the "Crap" drivers from nVidia, I've ordered a bunch of new Linux PCs, each will have a low-end nVidia video card added when it arrives? Why? Well I need dual headed support and that can be spotty with other video card vendors. I also need to run them in 8-bit color (don't ask, I just need to.) and my experience with the glorious wonderful OSS Intel video drivers is a nasty little box that follows the cursor around on the screen. I don't have ANY issues with nVidia's "Crap" drivers, everything looks great and works great.

I applaud ANY vendor who makes efforts at supporting OSS but I buy stuff from vendors who support Linux. Every system I own is either an nForce mobo with an nVidia video card or is simply sporting an nVidia card. When asked about what to buy, I recommend nVidia products. They have the best quality 3D support and performance of ANY vendor (which isn't much), they make it possible for me to play games under Linux that I'd otherwise have to play under Windows and that is worth a lot to me.