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AMD To Open ATI Specs
Several readers tipped us the followup of yesterday's AMD/ATI news, the new development hinted at by Phoronix: AMD has announced they are releasing the specs for all new Radeon chipsets, and will be working with the open source community to develop a fully functional 2D and 3D graphics driver. An anonymous reader opines: "AMD appears to be following in Intel's footsteps with upcoming releases. If AMD is successful NVidia will have real competition in the GNU/Linux gaming arena. While past support by ATI was unsatisfactory the new AMD buyout appears to be having some effect."
Since this was just an announcement and nothing concrete has been released yet, the "Nothing for you to see here, please move along" was very appropriate. Bravo Slashcode!
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Lets see, ~2% of the users run linux. What fraction of those are actually gamers?
Seems like a move more for the high-end workstation market.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Has something to do with this news, read Red Hat and GNOME developer blog post for more information http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=302
"Steve Jobs invented the world" -- Bill W. GATES
That GNU/Linux gaming arena is *super* cut-throat, I'm not sure what NVidia is going to do after hearing about this! Those Tux Racer benchmarks are going to totally blow everyone out of the water! And I don't even want to mention how fast Life and KAsteroids...totally ridiculous!
I guess this development will have an effect on my fanboyness towards nvidia . . .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_2
okey-dokey. time to put our money where our mouth has been the whole time. let's get coding :)
(do i want to know what sort of NDA the specs are going to be under?)
They are going one step further than nVidia (good binary drivers, documentation lacking). This looks like it is aimed more at redressing AMD/ATi's current shortcomings vis-a-vis Intel: with a 3D-accelerated open-source graphics driver, the only thing missing from an AMD-on-laptop equation is reliably-open Wi-Fi.
And no, Atheros does not count. I refer to the pre-n fiasco, which took months before the only open-soure developer with NDA access was able to come up with specifications. Perhaps AMD should come up with a wireless NIC next?
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
People with ATI / AMD video cards are reporting that they can not use DRM video and HD-DVD or BLUE RAY disk in vista any more. They are also reporting DRM and errors and DX 10 games are not working.
M$ may try to pull something like that.
How long before we drivers for mac that work with any ati / amd video card with out a EFI rom in a x86 mac?
Drivers for mac os x 86?
Could this be becuase ATI might be falling behind nVIDIA technologically, rather than the AMD purchase of ATI? They might feel they don't have so much IP to protect any more. Just guessing.
Does everything include nothing?
There really isn't any substance behind this rumour, only another rumour. Anyhoo, I hope it pans out since high end graphics is used a lot in the field I'm in and this will make Linux deployment much easier and possibly cheaper.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I hope they release info on the video capture and TV out features of all of the ATI chipsets. It would be great to be able to support all of the features in the "all in one" chipsets. Especially the new HDTV tuner / capture cards.
If quality Linux drivers actually materialize and they have a fully open spec, I'll jump ship from nVidia in a heartbeat. An open spec will help a lot with gpgpu projects. I'd love to be able to take full advantage of my otherwise idle GPU while say . . . transcoding video . . .
I think these news might have different implications than we might suspect. While we may think "that's cool, although so few gamers are running Linux", I think this move might have other repercussions than just help the Linux PC game market.
In this day and age, we've got Open Source Anything, handheld consoles, cell phones, toasters, anything. Now if we imagine that some people somewhere decide to make a gaming console to rivalize with the Xbox 360 and the Wii, an Open Source Console, running Linux, or even some Open Source AppleTV-like box, which GPU will the makers choose? Obviously the most FOSS/Unix friendly, and that would be AMD/ATI.
They might be feeling that a large market might open up soon, and that's why I think they chose to do this move, while they can easily become the first ones there.
You just got troll'd!
I know everybody asked for this, and they're finally giving in but.
More important than open graphic drivers is open disk controller drivers, open USB controller drivers, etc, etc, etc
Still, a great step.
And even though I would be one of the first to say "talk is cheap, show me the specs", someone further behind the curtains told me some companies knew (and possibly working with) it already.
how long until
very sweet!
i know it won't happen over night, but it will still be nice to apt-get my ATI updates.
Ralink drivers were open sourced, and are in the same stage as AMD is going to put their drivers. "Here you have the specs, write good drivers, goodluck!"
Support Eachother, Copy Dutch Property!
I read this, then the comments, and realized that a lot of people see vid cards as just gaming accessories. This couldn't be further from the truth. Look at industrial graphics and video workstations! nVidia is dominating there, and AMD is hungry for a piece of that pie. Open up docs, get the geek that the office keeps in the closet to get excited, he sends the list of the part upgrade to the boss for the graphics workstations, bada-boom AMD market share of ATI video cards grow.
The help for gaming is just incidental, AMD is keeping its eyes on the real prize, the industrial market.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
FTA:
Does this mean they don't have them yet?..
May Peace Prevail On Earth
*** If AMD is successful NVidia will have real competition in the GNU/Linux gaming arena. ***
For what, all 3 games? Sure you can still use Wine, et. al., but still.
Not that it matters - they are doing this to try and drum up some sales - because the performance of their cards, even the newer ones, lags behind the current set of NVidia cards by quite a bit....
too little, too late, if you ask me.
This reminds me a bit of the OS/2 days when I would hunt around for hardware whose vendors provided good OS/2 drivers. I think that maybe AMD's decision has more to do with more big company support and demand for Linux, like Dell and Google, and perhaps a good number of those hardware hunting geeks of old are now the decision makers for major purchases. In any case, they don't want to lock themselves out of potential sales from big customers. It would be nice if this really was something to do with wanting to support Linux gaming, but alas, it is probably just business as usual. And given AMD's current set of woes, they definitely don't need to lose any more business.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Ignoring the large market for 3D artists who currently use linux, we're moving into the age of accelerated desktops. When I think of 3D, games are not even on the list!
You can currently only use ATI and NVidia drivers on windows to off-load decoding of h264 video, this makes playback under linux of HD DVB streams almost impossible (you get frames dropped even with top of the line CPU's).
Hopefully this will mean we can get XVmC support for ATI cards to do h264 decoding, this would be awsome, and a big boost to the media centre community. I look forward to seeing the developments, maybe soon I can put an ATI card in my Freevo Media Centre and actually be able to view HD content - woot!
If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let'em go, because, man, they're gone.
...for Linux, they're getting my money soon.
nVidia's hardware is great and they have very high quality linux drivers, but when you hit a problem with them you're in for a fun ride. I had it happening on me once or twice in the past. ATI's driver for Linux (hell, even for Windows) were always a joke.
Um... ever hear of a game called World of Warcraft? or how about a game called Doom or Quake? Transgaming, the makers of Cedega / Wine, have had deals with EA (you may have heard of them before) in the past, for their Mac software sure, but to say that Linux is still completely off the map is a bit short sighted. I still prefer Windows for gaming, sure, but Linux gaming has come a LOOOOOONG ways from even a few years ago.
:P
Now if someone would find a way to get FFXI running under Linux, me and the other 3 people on the planet that care about that would be quite happy.
..... I think I know what make my next graphics card might be.
(Although, to be perfectly honest, I've never actually had any trouble using nVidious graphics cards with the free nv driver. Yeah, I know, no 3d support; but as I've only got a 2D monitor, it hardly matters.)
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I think this move might have other repercussions than just help the Linux PC game market.
... honestly, its a few FPS's and then WINE. And most games under WINE have issues ... )
Simulation and Visualization are both huge. Projects like OpenSceneGraph, etc. Lots of people are using Linux to do graphically intense development work - I used to, back when I worked for the Army. nVidia seemed to be the preferred video card by a long shot because it was so well supported. They are probably trying to crack that market.
nVidia also had the advantage of using a unified codebase - 90% of the driver code is identical between Linux and Windows. That's something AMD hasn't been doing (at least back when I kept up on things, they may have changed in the past few years).
So as you say there are markets above and beyond linux desktop gaming (which is pretty minimal
Demand the older 3D specifications as well!
Read the notice... they're only intending to release the hardware specifications on new cards. This is a ploy to sell more equipment.
What about all those cards that are already out there. Let's hold these people to a higher standard. If they WANT us to buy their new cards they are going to have to give open access to their old hardware specifications. It's that simple.
For the time being I'm delighted to have modest 3D support with Open Source INTEL drivers on a pre-release of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbons.
-Joe Baker
Digital Communications Research, Inc.
I have voiced several rants about ATI here on slashdot. Do you suppose they are reading them?
I mean it ... DirectX is pretty slick. Some of the big-name developers who swore it off (including John Carmack) are giving it a second look.
The nicest thing I've seen recently is Irrlicht, which runs atop either OpenGL or DirectX, with backup software renderers. But again, you still lose a lot from DirectX, like sound and device support, etc. and the ability to port quickly and easily (relatively speaking) to XBOX 360.
To play proprietary video games from major publishers on a Mac running Mac OS X or on a PC running GNU/Linux, try using an external gaming accelerator. This comes in two pieces sold separately: a "TV tuner" that you put in an internal slot, and an external "PlayStation 2" unit that you connect to the TV tuner and your sound card. Then you use xawtv to connect to the gaming accelerator. I did something similar a decade ago, by running a "Nintendo 64" unit through the TV tuner of a Macintosh Performa 6230.
You can continue to play Free video games using the hardware already in your PC.
"Hello? Is this the Daily Gazette? I'd like to report a story!" ... A**hole!"
"There were five of them! Pink! Well, one was kinda yellow. I think it was a pot-bellied one."
"What? No! Pigs! Outside my window!"
"Maybe in a farm it ain't, but I live on the 10th floor in the City."
"Yes, that's right! Flying pigs!"
"The wings? White."
"Yes, like an angels I guess."
"What? No, I haven't been drinking..."
"..or taking drugs."
"Look I'm not kidding! There were 5 flying pigs outside my window Oinking at me!"
"Hello? Hello?
Hmmm. This is awesome news. The last 40 or so systems we purchased were all Intel based purely because of the fact that they were so much less trouble due to being supported with Free drivers. This changes the equation though. It sounds from the announcement that we'll be getting better quality drivers because AMD/ATI will be releasing the full specs and not merely documenting through the use of code (which is cool and still makes Intel supportable).
Some things I still wonder about are whether or not the comparably priced AMD/ATI systems will have good Free drivers for other integral components such as wireless (which Intel have also got a lead with due to their IPW3945ABG). Intel have also got some very important work underway with PowerTOP. The upcoming Fedora 8 will be benefiting from the results of extensive testing with PowerTOP (which is written by ex-Red Hatter, now Intel employee, Arjan van de Ven). This allows monitoring of the major drains of power in laptops and can also be a major factor in server rooms.
I'm delighted by this whole move and it means that I can now make recommendations which include ATI cards as part of the specifications to purchasing. In terms of whether the AMD/ATI platform as whole will be a competitor that depends on whether the AMD motherboard chipsets will also be as open, Free and supportable. Intel have an incredible headstart in this area and possibly this will prevent them from moving into the stand-alone 3D card market (which is what I thought was going to inevitably happen). It looked as though AMD/ATI were headed for extinction, but I guess the reality of sales started to catch up with them.
All in all good news that opens up some more options for us. Perhaps we'll be seeing some interesting Dell machines soon!
From the link:
I wonder why that should be. You'd think a company like AMD would have the specs in electronic format already. Why not release them right away, all together?
This is exciting news, and stands to change my graphics card buying habits. But I'm going to wait until I see those 3D specs released and deemed useful.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Back in the day, DirectX drivers were the only way to get good 3D performance in Windows games. OpenGL existed back then and exists today, but from what I remember, OpenGL was somehow expensive to implement and/or difficult to write code for... it was a long time ago... back when Quake was new. (OpenGL cards were *very* expensive in those days too...)
So now all Windows games are DirectX and are at the mercy of Microsoft's supporting of selected hardware. But with more open-sourcing of ATI drivers (and the obvious-to-come mirrored action by nVidia) what benefit will Windows users see? Will OpenGL become less expensive to implement and code? Will games running on "older" hardware be able to perform in spite of the limitations of not having DirectX 10.2 or whatever support? Will game coders give thought to supporting OpenGL (further easing the porting of code to Linux and Mac)?
I have a different interest in this. With documentation, even SVGATextMode can be enhanced to run at higher geometries, and adjust modelines to better fit various displays ... on the new ATI hardware. But someone will have to hack it, given the many years that SVGATextMode has been stagnant, and that may end up being me.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
If ATI actually follows through with this, and I see the documentation, and it has enough of the important details, then it looks like my new computers (2 of them) will be dual or quad AMDs. But they will need to hurry, since I'm planning to buy those machines within the next 30-60 days.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Great. Better ATI drivers for Linux - but for their "NEWER" chipsets? What about me with my 9800 and my friend with his 9600? I've been waiting YEARS for some decent drivers. Will these new drivers only be for their newest chipsets/cards? ATI making newer drivers, but not making them for most of their cards is the same as them not making drivers at all for those who have unsupported cards.
Wow, a hardware producer is opening up the specs of their graphics chips. There's a longtime gripe solved. Tomorrow on Slashdot ...
... same thing, but for NVidia.
... same thing, but for all wireless chipsets.
... the RIAA will give up on lawsuits and DRM, realizing that both are ultimately ineffective and bad for their business, and promote a prepaid, peer-to-peer approach to music distribution. They will also rename themselves the Recording Industry Cartel of America.
... President Bush will sign the Software Patent Invalidation Act, which will have cruised through the House, Senate, and Ways and Means Committee overnight, effectively ending patent protection for software ideas. A small town in Texas will immediately go bankrupt.
... Having signed the act and finding nothing else important to do, the president will resign.
... Microsoft will cave in and adopt ODF for Word. Features in OOXML that they want to keep will be carefully documented and formally submitted for inclusion in the ODF 2.0 standard.
From the one and only linux/ati/amd source:
= 826
AMD will be providing NDA specifications, an open-source library, and there is a new open-source graphics driver as a result.
NDA???? Read the rest: ttp://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item
xer.xes -- 4181
Hmm... real world ascii, is that anything like the A-Ha Take On Me video?
With the sudden acceptance of linux all over, including Dell, HP, and others, AMD/ATI is currently at a disadvantage against Nvidia. Buggy-low performance drivers will only cause the big computer sellers/retailers to divert from ATI chipsets in order to minimize support costs.
While the FS comunity has long touted this lack of support, it had never been important until just recently that Ubuntu began to be bundled in new computers.
Unfortunately for ATI/AMD it is probably late already.
UgaBuga!
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&ite
With so many folks declaring switch, I just hope other vendors (read: NVidia) are reading this and scratching their heads right now.
FFXI barely runs under Windows. I think we should quit hoping it'll work under Linux and maybe just wait for something that does.
My opinion is that SE's milking FFXI as long as they can, until they release their next MMORPG (forget what it's called)
Who're the other two?
--
"Rumors and speculations have been flying around for months about ATI/AMD opening up the source-code to their Linux display driver or providing their GPU specifications to community developers. This for the most part had started after Henri Richard's statement at the Red Hat Summit earlier this year. Well, those rumors can finally be put to rest. AMD will be providing NDA specifications, an open-source library, and there is a new open-source graphics driver as a result. AMD will continue producing a closed-source proprietary driver; however, they are opening the source-code to a critical library with accompanying GPU specifications for X.Org developers. To get the ball rolling, AMD is also funding the development of a new open-source R500/600 driver." http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=10979
Let me know when I should be impressed.
Work has been underway for quite a long time. R200 specs were released quite awhile ago and R200-based cards are somewhat workable with #D-accelerated desktops. R300 specs until now were not released and a substantial effort was underway to reverse-engineer the platform. The same goes with NVidia--the Nouveau project has been very active in the past year adding Free 3-d acceleration support to their drivers and has collected a lot of data for reverse engineering purposes.
The money's ALWAYS been where our mouths are, it's just that reverse-engineering these cards is a pretty monumental task (many orders of magnitude more work involved than what was involved in reverse-engineering the entire IBM PC platform in the 1980s). For reasons completely unrelated to technical issues or even market demand, we end up having to settle for using previous-generation hardware on Linux systems because of the time it takes to wade through "trade secrets".
This news from ATI is great news for the entire community. Perhaps with NVidia being the last holdout of the big graphics hardware players they'll finally succumb to "peer pressure" and drop their unreasonable stance regarding the release of specs. I've seen the remarkable progress made by the Nouveau team despite NVidia's stonewalling. With ATI actually showing signs of cooperation I think Free ATI driver development will advance extremely quickly. Furthermore, this may have implications beyond the Linux community--in everything from embedded uses to the Windows community. If the interface spec for ATI hardware is public it means that the quality of open AND closed drivers for all platforms has the opportunity to improve, as those outside ATI will be able to give more constructive input on found bugs.
Hopefully this is an early sign of an overall trend towards opening hardware. I've been worrying lately that as open software gains traction that big companies will try to cling to their old business models by making hardware more closed.
If I'm curt with you it's because time is a factor. I think fast, I talk fast and I need you guys to act fast if you wanna get out of this. So, pretty please... with sugar on top. Code the f***in' driver!
I'm hoping that the big client rewrite they're doing (if your really curious, go read the interview on ffxiclopedia.org or w/e it is) that will allow it to run in a window will fix this. Updating it to Dx9, so here's hopin...
:-(
And I made up the other 2 ppl, I don't think they exist
ATI has been a failure in the graphics driver area for as long as I can remember, I swear they have 4000 hardware/engineer/designers and 2 guys and a chimp writing drivers. It's not that just the Linux drivers are bad, that is the best they can do...
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Dell probably had more to do with this than Redhat.
whoohoo! thanks AMD! :-D
The last 4 graphics solutions I have made the purchasing decision for have been nVidia, based on functionality, in spite of the closed-source nature.
The graphics card before that was a Radeon 8500LE, based on the existence of open-source R200 drivers.
Before that there were 2 Matrox G400 cards, the first decision as the Utah-GLX work was taking off, and the second after GLX had been incorporated into XFree86.
The big problem now is that I don't have any need to buy a graphics card. On the other hand, I made a poor decision on the graphics card in my main system at home, despite having tried to shop carefully. By the time this information release comes to fruition, maybe I'll spring for a replacement.
In the meantime, I need to get the Neuveau stuff and see if my card is already in the database, or if I can contribute information.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Does anyone sense a "perfect storm" brewing? OOXML is delayed (but not quite derailed, yet) and many want to standardize on ODF. Vista adoption is crap--moving requires a rewrite of all your business apps, anyhow, and the hardware drivers aren't stable yet, so if you're going to transition to something else, now is the time. Ubuntu is proving itself usable by the computer illiterate. Now we have the potential for good graphics drivers, not to mention major retailers selling Linux machines. Microsoft is bogged down with anti-trust suits everywhere and they're chasing Google's advertising dollars now, because growth is nearly impossible for them to find.
Don't get me wrong: Microsoft won't just implode suddenly. But it's pretty amazing that their lock-ins are weaker now than they've ever been and that they're only getting weaker, not to mention that they're trying to compete on so many fronts at once while their two profitable divisions, Office & Windows, are suffering.
Anyone else suspect that we might possibly be seeing the start of the slow decline of Microsoft's empire?
..did I hear the Final Fantasy "victory" music playing in my head when I first read this.
Only one word can fully describe this situation. w00t!
Hopefully the new drivers will support remote direct rendering like the NVidia ones do. This will accelerate remote X connections too!
I've heard this before from ATI, but have yet to see any real progress. Okay, I just bought an ASUS motherboard, and they were kind enough to include the Linux drivers - in binary. But a Google search for "ATI Radeon Datasheet" reveals no datasheets, only sad commentary on how ATI has failed to live up to its promises.
From this article comes:
The second main cultural difference we would like to point out is the lack of more in-depth technical information on ATI products written in clear language available to the public. On a press presentation held on September, 2005, ATI spokesperson said that from that date on all ATI would fully disclosure all the technical details (like block diagrams and in-depth explanations, for example) of their architecture, but this never hit the web, what contrasts with AMD philosophy. AMD and all other microprocessor manufacturers always made available their datasheets with in-depth information about their products. For us that work in a highly technical media, not having access to the technical information right away is really bad.
As someone who has ported Linux framebuffer drivers to different ARM platforms, I would not have much of a problem writing Linux drivers for the ATI chips. I could probably do it in a few weeks of part time effort (at least as far as the FB is concerned), maybe a little more if I wanted to include special features. (Read: reinvent the 3D rendering wheel.)
The problem is, though, that I bought this ASUS motherboard thinking that it was open; that I could write the drivers for the video card if need be. Now that I can't get a datasheet, I'm dependent on the good graces of ATI.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
- "they can't open their specs (even under NDA) because they'll give away trade secrets"?
- "they can't open their specs because the Chinese will make cheap clones"?
- "they can't open their specs because they'll get sued for patent infringement"?
Reality. It's a bitchslap sometimes.
Contrary to what most posters seem to think it is doubtful that this has anything to do with games. It's more likely that ATI wasn't to sell professional 3D editing cards, for wich Linux is becoming an increasingly important platform. Ditto for embedded devices like PVRs and other video appliances, many of which run Linux. Better drivers would lead to better performance of these devices,l particularly for things like H.264 decoding. I also know know one video vendor that is developing a MacOSX-like "dock" interface with expanding icons that would require 3D.
I guess my next graphics card will be an ATI, unless the opengraphics project comes up with something first.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Screw 3D and gamers... I just glad ACPI developers will finally have the docs they need to get ATI video cards to come out of S3/Suspend successfully.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Most Linux boxes will never have a game instaled on them. But today graphics cards are being used for things like image processing and other computationaly expensive operations. And don't forget 3D desktop effects. Take a look at what Apple has done with Core Image. Doing this on Linux would be much easier if the hardware were opened up.
Things like photo editing and color correcting video can take advantage of graphic chips
Do you have any idea what people pay in a years time just for lunch alone?
This simple math, even I can do it:
aprox 52 weeks in year, assuming each has 5 weekdays (perfect distribution of weeks).
estimate average $6.50 daily meal cost.
yearly_cost = 52*5*6.5
yearly_cost = $1,690.00
Now that is a significant chunk of money I put in my mouth each year!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Fair point; and now I think back, my post really isn't a safe assumption at all. Comment withdrawn!
You can still get tons of free mods for a computer game, some of which don't have an equivalent on a console. It's also possible to set up and maintain your own server for games like Counter-Strike, and mod the hell out of it -- again, not possible with a console.
And there are other things which can be done in Windows, which is why some people end up using it, even though for absolutely every purpose other than gaming, they would rather be using Linux.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
That might be why yours is slow -- WoW can, in fact, be configured to run in OpenGL mode, even the Windows version, meaning there's no translation to run.
If it'd been done right, maybe. It's possible they are running into problems supporting X, which is entirely different than the Mac GUI.
What's more, right now, they cooperate very nicely with the Wine people to make sure everything works, but they aren't required to actually support it. If they were to release a native Linux client, that means they actually have to give it the same level of support that they give Windows, which is more than just "churning out" a client.
I wouldn't mind a Linux port, but I don't think it would actually be much better than what we've got now.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Fully open source 3D drivers blessed by the company producing the cards? Bye-bye, NVIDIA.
[ home ]
Now we just need AMD to buy out Creative Labs and I can finally use my X-Fi. 3D video and sound, on Linux, WOW!
I always give it time, enough to know if, for example, nVidia is actually going to open up, or if the open source ATI drivers are going to be any good anytime soon.
For example, consider the things that ATI likely is under an NDA not to disclose -- I remember there being something about a texture compression technique.
If ATI/open is even close to nVidia/closed, I may buy them, just to reward them for their effords, despite having an SLI motherboard (nVidia only, I believe), meaning I'd have to buy a new motherboard to support ATI's CrossFire.
But I generally buy things on bottom line, modified a little for Linux/OSS friendliness, but not much. Recently, for instance, I've been wanting to support Intel for finally offering competition, for generally being OSS-friendly, and for having OSS drivers -- I was thinking of buying an Intel processor. However, it turned out that AMD had a MUCH cheaper platform for what I wanted (dual-core 64-bit). The motherboard was slightly cheaper, and the cheapest CPU was literally half the price.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
in the gaming industry... That as games for DirectX and the windows platform come on order of 10's of millions of dollars, that F/OSS could be the game developers' way out of the MS monopoly and bring down game development costs (by using F/OSS dev tools and platforms) on desktops? As well as for consoles (even though some are using Linux, they've locked up the hardware aspect of the market compared to PCs).
will there be some drivers/firmware for ati's tv tuners, too? (namely the tv wonder 650)
I'm not a fan of Ubuntu (and although I'm registered on them, I don't browse their forums) but your comment about WoW on Wine is right on the money. I have a friend who, to make a long story short, needed a new OS but didn't want to spend money on it. I told him about Linux and gave him a Knoppix disk to play with (the LiveDVD, which includes a ridiculous amount of software). He tried it out, really liked it, had no problems getting the desktop programs he liked to use running (mostly because many - Firefox, VLC, Gaim/Pidgin - are already open-source) and said he thought the included games were great to. He asked if he could install it, and as we were discussing distros he might want to use, the topic of WoW came up. "I guess I'll cancel my subscription for a while, until I can get Windows again" he said. I directed him to winehq, checked the app database, and told him I'd help him get it running.
A few hours later, after repartitioning and installing openSuse, doing basic configuration stuff, and running the installer (it turns out he didn't need any help getting wine configured) he started WoW. (At this point, we were stymied because the Blizzard downloader doesn't work well at my university - bittorrent-style traffic is firewalled to hell - but he got the standalone patches). It took some tweaking to get adequate framerates, but again, nothing my friend (a Mech. Eng. major) couldn't do himself.
In the end only two things really took any help from me: getting his WiFi working (needed ndiswrapper) and fixing his X11 configuration after a broken nVidia update dropped him into console mode (that failsafe X mode would be really nice). The first took some walking through and a little black magic but works fine now, and his was one of a very few card models not yet supported. The second made me really glad that Yast (Suse's fantastic configuration tool) runs in terminal mode (ncurses-based interface) and has an automatic X configurator (SaX2). The first problem will work itself out in time as driver support improves. The second it sounds like a solution is already in the works.
Moral of the story: Linux is already desktop-ready for many people... as long as they know about Wine. The way I see it, projects like Wine and Mono (more specifically, Mono's re-implementing of things like WinForms) are some of the best things in the world for Linux adoption.
(Now, if only Wine would stop breaking EVE Online in 3 of every 4 revisions, so I could stay in Linux for more than a few hours a day without rebooting back to Windows...)
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Actually, ATi's video drivers for Vista are light-years ahead of nVidia's. As somebody who has been using Vista since beta 2 (and loving it - I won't touch any other version of Windows now, given a choice - but I also dual-boot Linux) using ATi video, and switched to nVidia just before Vista was released (largely because ATi's Linux drivers were such utter shit) I must say that ATi's Vista drivers of a full year ago were vastly better than the best nVidia has today. It's gotten to the point where I consider the two seconds it takes to recover the userspace portion of the driver from a crash to be a standard part of the login delay - no joke, it crashes EVERY time. Also about 30% of the time switching in or out of the Secure Desktop. To top it off, I'm using a gimped driver that gives at best 60% performance and won't handle LCD scaling properly (I'm on a widescreen, I don't WANT my 4x3 games stretched to a 8x5 aspect ratio).
I don't know how, exactly, nVidia managed to fuck up so incredibly that their drivers, so long after release, are still so worthless when ATi had stable and fully functional drivers more than half a YEAR before Vista's release. At this point, however, I have no plan to ever give them my money again. If ATi's drivers for Linux pull through, I'll switch over without a second thought the next time I upgrade my hardware.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
The discussion here is seriously missing something.
THANKS!
A big thanks to all the people who worked their asses off, both within AMD and in the open community, trying to negotiate with manufacturers and patent holders to make this possible!
FYI, this isn't just about games. A lot of graphics researchers, render farms, and schools are making sure their video cards are NVidia only because of ATI's bumbling. When all the high-press research papers keep mentioning their nVidia hardware, and sometimes the fact that they were forced to switch from ATI, that's baaad press.
I cursed ATI all the way to the counter trying to forget the 4 Meg 3D RAGE II that I played MechWarrior on as a child. I swore I'd never buy ATI again and tried to forget about the time I killed a fan on my $400 Geforce4 Ti4800 (I had to be the first kid at the LAN party with it - when I got there everyone else was sporting either another 4800 or a slightly more modestly priced 4600. Those jerks!) in high school, and it made this horrible clunkiddy-tick-whir sound. ATI and I were through!
Well, I'm in college now, and I've matured quite a bit since that Best Buy incident 3 months ago... I guess I'll be taking ATI back again. NVidia - we're through! I'm not even going to buy the second card to complete the SLI I had decided to do! I guess I need a new motherboard. Crossfire, here I come!
*Sorry for that, I'm the only one left in the building at work and I have to debug a legacy Access frontend that's been modified every year for the last 5 years... by someone else... caffeine run!*
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
As a pleasant side effect for my /.'ers, desktop support will rock too. But I don't think that's what this is about.
"This mission is too important to allow you to jeopardize it." -- HAL
"If AMD is successful NVidia will have real competition in the GNU/Linux gaming arena."
Competition in what market? Linux claims less than 1% of the overall market share, I'd say less than half of that entails gaming. Does anyone think NVidia really cares if > 1% of the market goes for ATI? Probably not, they extra profit is barely worth the effort. If anything, this is a sign that AMD acknowledges that they're WAY behind Nvidia.
And come on, a Linux gaming market? How can you even type that up with a straight face?
Yeah, yeah, -1 flamebait/troll, whatever. It might come off as such, but it's reality isn't always pleasant.
Hacking the Radeon driver: So easy, even a Caveman can do it!
I have been buying nvidia cards for many years. I have avoided ATI primarily because of the driver situation. Among the two closed source drivers, nvidia seems slightly better most of the time. But both vendors had a totally unacceptable policy with respect to openness, documentation, and drivers.
If AMD/ATI follows through and truly does enable a first tier, full featured, fully open driver, you will see all my nvidia cards on ebay, and I will become an ATI customer that same day.
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
Does anyone care to predict what affect this will have on Windows? Will people create their own complete driver sets for Windows? The hardware specifications can be used to make more than just software for Linux.
Is it just way too much effort to develop a Windows display driver? Or might we see projects to develop an open source Vista driver for ATI hardware? Might ATI even open source their Windows driver?
It's hard to see what their downside is. The upside would be that they may wind up getting better drivers without having to do all the work themselves.
I suspect the majority of Linux users are gamers, and many of them will be grateful for better 3D support.
Furthermore, the new 3D desktops require it, too (do they count as games?).
Most importantly, however, many Linux users are in science or engineering, and they really need good 3D support.
We have SDL, OpenGL, and DRI. It's a joy to develop with, and, in addition to gaming, it's used for a lot of visualization. SDL and OpenGL are also popular for game development on other platforms.
The only thing that's holding back 3D gaming on Linux is more widespread support for 3D graphics hardware. Right now, you still have to make a special effort to get good 3D hardware/software combos on Linux.
If I find a way to make SDL do something better, faster, cooler or just plain different, my choices are to either let all my competitors have access to it or not to use it myself.
You only have to share your changes if you modify SDL itself. Since you can't even modify DirectX itself, that situation never arises for DirectX at all.
So, overall, SDL removes none of the options you have with DirectX, but it does give you an additional option.
Interesting... I'm going to start ordering the parts to build my next system on about the 10th (which I believe is when AMD's new quad core is out so I can see if it's worth buying). My problem with going AMD/ATI for the GPU on this system is that no good drivers are out at this time, and I am going to be cautious and wait to make sure they're really going to release enough information.
I don't really feel like buying an AMD/ATI GPU based graphics card and then waiting and waiting and waiting until some decent drivers come out.
But this is awesome news, and it looks look I know what my next desktop and laptop will have...
Not all Nvidia cards even have Vista support yet. I have a laptop with a GO 7900 GS, and Nvidia has released no Vista drivers for it (not even beta). Nvidia claims that they don't support laptops and that you need to get a driver from the laptop maker, but that is clearly not true since they offer drivers for 2000, XP, Linux, Solaris x86, and BSD. And I can confirm that the Nvidia XP driver is much better than what Dell provides.
If they had a true unified codebase, my card would be supported. Unfortunately, Nvidia doesn't support Vista on of their laptop cards, and no word when such support will finally arrive. (Pisses me off because I paid good money for the "superior" Nvidia graphics to play games with, and I develop Windows code that requires I use Vista, and now I can't play many games unless I dual-boot.)
ATI/AMD's New Open-Source Strategy Explained says that the specs will actually still be kept secret under NDA's. Does this really qualify as "Open"?
I'm sure others mentioned this but I read a ton of comments before finally posting because I didn't see it mentioned - so sorry if it's redundant.
Lots of posters keep joking about how there are no real games out there for Linux - now that's only partially true (the UT series, the Doom and Quake series, for example), but did it ever occur to you that perhaps there are relatively few games for Linux because Linux drivers from the big 2 have been sub-standard to terrible?
Why design your game to be compatible with Linux if it'll just drive your support costs through the roof because Linux users will come whining to you when their graphics drivers don't work?
If we see quality graphics drivers for Linux from ATI we'll likely see equal drivers from nVidia soon (I know nVidia's have been alright, but they certainly aren't perfect by any means). If we see that, we will see LOTS more games designed to be compatible with Linux.
If you build it, they will come.
sorted... you don't have to shut Linux down to boot into windows for one of those games that doesn't run in Linux... in fact leave both running and just switch with the little button on the KVM... sorted...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I think I just shat myself.
While I'm still against the ATI merger (I doubt they will ever compete for long with nVidia with performance cards again) at least there is a consolation prize. ATI just became the premiere UNIX card. It might even be possible that Intel will license ATI technology. Intel and AMD go back and for on patents all the time so it wouldn't surprise me if they did a deal for the ATI tech.
The Intel support for Linux is truely great. They work in the open source arena instead of hiding in their own corner and doing code-drops and/or binary-only drivers like many others. Though saying that AMD is "following in Intel's footsteps" is surely not true! Intel has never released any specs and it's not even officially stated that AMD/ATI will make any larger internal effort at producing good quality free/open code. They have instead stated that they will rely on the community to do the work (something which is not possible for Intel since there are no specs for those in the community who are not employed by Intel or have access to their internal documents in other ways like NDA). One can only hope those specs will be good ones that actually describe the hardware (as many specs apparently are more initial thoughts about how the hardware where supposed to work rather then how it actually turned out in the end).
... *If* something actually turns out to be not just hot air and good quality free drivers for currently sold hardware from AMD/ATI becomes available, that will be the day to celebrate - not today. //fatal
Anyway, Any change in this area will be great but I won't be holding my breath
Excellent. We need more companies who understand they can do well by doing good.
(We just got a Netgear WG602T wifi access point yesterday. It includes a note that the product includes GPL and LGPL code, a URL to get the source code, the full text of the GPL and the source code on the driver CD. I'll be emailing them a happy customer note congratulating them on their good taste and good behaviour. I'm sure they're far from perfect, but you get good behaviour by being encouraging when it happens.)
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I'm currently playing WoW... But I do care. I played the FFXI beta way back when and the job system was great. I would be playing it now if my real life friends didn't all play WoW... But I am tempted to switch anyway.
About half of the ppl I have seen leave XI for WoW have returned, myself I got bored with WoW, although I think that's just my style moreso then a slam against it. Plus like you, most of my friends are already entrenched in one of the games, and it's the ppl that make the experience I say.
If you decide to join XI, you can chose servers now, so feel free to send a tell to Killataru on Remora and I'll help you get on your feet!
FB does not work the same. With a frame buffer, the text has to be re-rendered every time the virtual console switches. It would probably be just as costly to save the entire pixel contents and copy them around in the buffer as well. Also, the scroll rate becomes limited with FB. Sometimes you just need to let some commands flow through their massive output, and for a given geometry, text will flow through a whole lot faster than pixels because of scrolling. Maybe a whole new FB implementation might help. Nevertheless, even with frame buffers one needs to know the register structure (the specifications AMD will supposedly release ... I'll believe it only when I see it) to implement complete control (e.g. precise modelines, etc). The current FB implementation does not have this level of control and depends on BIOS modes, which are a limited selection.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Phoronix says it will be an NDA.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars