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AMD's New Card Supports Linux From the Get-Go
Michael writes "Back in September AMD had announced a new ATI Linux driver as well as opening up their GPU specifications, and today they have taken an additional step to better support the Linux OS. With the just-announced Radeon HD 4850 RV770 they have provided same-day Linux support, and the Linux driver is now shipping alongside the Windows driver on their product CDs. In addition, they are encouraging their AIB partners to showcase Tux on the product packaging as a sign of Linux support. Last but certainly not least, AMD is committed from top-to-bottom product support on Linux and they will be introducing high-end features in their Linux driver such as MultiGPU CrossFire technology. Phoronix has a run-down on AMD's evolutionary leap in Linux support along with information on the open-source support for the RV770 GPU."
Most of us dual-boot, especially for games. For everything else, there's Linux and it's good to know that driver support isn't half arsed for once (barring the fact that it's probably the binary only driver on the CD).
Why does my post history abruptly stop? I want to laugh at the stupid things I posted as a kid.
This sounds like a complete about face from a few years ago. I stopped completely using ATI products a few years ago when the fire drivers did funny things with the frame buffer object, and the official line was that there was no plan to have it ever fixed in the Linux drivers. I will have to reconsider my position now.
Quake 4, Doom 3, Quakewars:ET, just to name a few. In recent years (particularly from id), we've seen huge increases in developers supporting Linux natively, or at least with a WINE wrapper, the way EA does it. Now with more than half of the video card market supporting Linux, developers won't be so hesitant to make a native Linux client for their games. Plus there's those Linux users who need a decent video card to use Blender. Now they're not restricted to nVidia cards.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
It's time finally there is some HW accelerated H.264 on Linux. Intel is def. on it, I read something on FFmpeg mailing list maybe this or around http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2008-February/042269.html post.
My choice in the last 5 years were cards by Nvidia only. The reasons are obvisouly. Their drivers work (on Linux).
I also prefer cards without active cooling and ATI ist known for many cards with passive cooling which consume low power.
So, if the drivers they made are pretty good, especially the OpenGL implementation (i write simple OpenGL programs and i use Blender),
they could be a very good choice for me. But after years of bad experiences with ATI on my Linux-powered notebooks,
i'm sceptic and wait until the responses to their drivers are positive.
I don't want slow, errorneous and CPU-intensive 3D-support through DRI again.
After AMD bought ATI and make claims that they were going to go full bore and fully support Linux I said. "When I see it, I will believe it."
Well, today I make the shift from Nvidia to ATI. I stuck with Nvidia because I had didn't have much trouble getting OpenGL apps to work in Linux and I hear horror stories about ATI and Linux.
Well, I am one of the Linux users who has been avoiding ATI as well, mostly due to the horror stories. I have live some myself (thx Atheros wireless), and now I do check how well is the support of the hardware in Linux before make a purchase.
Until now, at least the NVidia drivers works fairly well, so NVidia has been my choice.
But, if ATI is really opening up like this, and NVidia doesn't open up, most likely ATI will be my next graphic card when I get a new comp in the next months.
I dunno if this is a point or not, but apparently there are people running Age of Conan and Team Fortress 2 under Wine (and a host of other games I a certain); I imagine they will be happy that they can get better (hopefully) drivers for their graphicscard.
The Long Now Foundation
Nvidia uses basically the same driver for every card they've made, and a lot of times new drivers will give more performance to older cards(within reason of course). It's these optimizations they don't want seen, not the hardware itself.
I have to admit that the nicest thing about it as a developer I can actually throw a kernel and some library's on a CD and the end user can boot it since at its lowest level it is compatible with almost every hardware architecture (086-present) I can run my code on any computer out there. Now with native Java on its way and real 3d drivers I bet I could challenge any MS box as long as I get driver support, and that's the way it's looking.
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
Do you get HD acceleration offloading computation from the CPU? If so is it supported by the likes of ffmpeg etc.?
Lots of folks using the XBMC Linux port have had NOTHING but problems with ATI, meanwhile NVIDIA is damn near PnP using ENVY to load their drivers. Frankly I do not care wo's card I buy, I want it to properly support my HTPC setup and right now that is NVIDIA even though it's not got hardware acceleration working - I've got the CPU to decode it instead.
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