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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."
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
You might have missed these ones:
Unreal Tournament 2004? Check
The upcoming UT 3? Check (Even the level editor will run on linux, yay!)
Doom up to Doom 3? Check
the Quakes? Check
We got one. There's a new open G/L spec that could very well compete with direct x.
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
Yea? What about UT2004, Nexuiz, Sauerbraten, Cube, BZFlag, Quake3, ZDoom, Battle for Wesnoth, Enemy Territory, Quake4, Doom3 as am example of quite good quality linux playable games.
Buy some here http://www.tuxgames.com/, or search google for open source ones. You were kidding, right? Shina...
:)
Yes, there may not be a great need for 3D acceleration to play games on GNU/Linux, but 3D acceleration comes in handy elsewhere. It will be nice to have it next time I am looking at a surface plot of some scientific data. Or perhaps I want to visualize a model in real-time with OpenGL.
Here is a more concrete example, let's say I am an aerospace engineer and I am using FlightGear to model an airplane I am designing (my aerospace engineer friends actually do this). If I want to see and control this model in real-time that 3d acceleration is important here. Right now if you want to do this in GNU/Linux without an Intel video card you have to install proprietary software, which many people find unacceptable.
How about Blizzard explicitly altering their anti-cheating stuff so that Linux users can play WoW? That's probably indicitive of at least a few hundred users.
Heck, I've played both WoW and EVE in Wine under FreeBSD. Only problem I had with either is that the galaxy map doesn't work properly in some modes in EVE.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
It seems ATI/AMD's new professional graphics cards are going to perform a lot better than Nvidia's current offerings.
They would need good Linux drivers for these cards to eat into NV's pro/workstation market share.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=42127
http://www.techpowerup.com/index.php?38812
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GTA:SA is reported to work under Cedega when you use nocd to get around their copy-protection (I love "copy-protection" that only serves to support Windows PC gaming monopoly... grr).
Chances are the source code to their existing drivers have a lot of 3rd party licensed libraries, and may be covered by NDA. They'd probably have to pull a move like what Sun did with Java: release whats not covered, and let the open source developers fill in the missing (encumbered) pieces with a clean-room implementation.
So in short, no, they probably don't have driver code that they can just give out.
"Unless the game companies start designing games for multiple platforms to begin with"
Both the Unreal 3 engine and the Tech 5 engine can/do use OpenGL. In the case of Unreal 3, a lot of games are already based on this engine. In the case of Tech 5, a lot of games will most likely also use this engine, especially as its got a lot of cross platform support.
A lot of games companies have moved away from rewriting the entire game including a use once 3d engine, every time they want to write a new game. So they have their own 3d engines or they use engines like Unreal 3 or Tech 5 etc...
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
WINE on OS X disables Direct3D/OpenGL because of problems with Apple's DRI. Crossover for Mac includes its own X server, so you might have better luck with that.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Game developers (especially EA) are already targetting multiple platforms: PC, Mac (sometimes), Xbox 360, Wii, PS3, PS2, DS, and PSP to name the main platforms of the present. Only a grand total of two (which combined make up a small percentage of the market) use DirectX APIs while the rest use OpenGL or OpenGL-like APIs. Hell, combine the PS2, Wii, and DS, and you've already covered an enormous amount of the market, and none of them use DirectX at all.
By the way, PC gaming is practically a niche when it comes to gaming, especially now that Nintendo released the Wii which appeals to many non-gamers as well. Of course, that might be why Linux rarely gets PC game ports due to being a niche of a niche so to say.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
I ask what thousands others have asked: Why not use cross-platform technology in the first place? DirectX is limited to XBox and PCs running Windows. Everything else is OpenGL. Things like SDL handle both just fine.
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
Yes. Its called OpenGL/SDL. Fancier sound requirements might want to look at OpenAL. Between those the entire range has been covered, and covered for Win/Mac/Linux.
About the only parts of DirectX that anyone ever uses any more are Direct3D and DirectInput. Almost everything else has been almost fully deprecated by Microsoft. This began with DirectX 6 or there abouts.
OpenGL, OpenAL & SDL are a perfectly good replacement for DirectX, with the added bonus that your code is portable.
run linux with fb support. you can run almost any bps and pixel size.
They are not only giving out their specifications for free (not under an NDA like it was with the R200 OSS driver), but according to Michael Larabel from Phoronix they will release complete 2D driver code with the new driver early next week, and a 3D skeleton driver will follow later. From that moment on, the complete Radeon lineup from the 7xxx to the HD 2xxx will be supported out-of-the-box by Linux.
This will put a lot of pressure on Nvidia. They will have to open up too or become the new stepchild of the Linux community.
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
The joysticks and audio and shit libraries exist too, and work well with OpenGL.
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!