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Open-Source 2D, 3D Drivers For ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series
An anonymous reader writes "AMD has now rolled out open-source 2D and 3D drivers for their ATI Radeon HD 5000 series graphics processors. As described at length over at Phoronix, it's taken nearly a year to complete but there is now public code released that enables 2D, 3D, and video hardware-acceleration for this latest generation of ATI GPUs. For now this code is intended for developers and enthusiasts but with time it will make its way into stable Linux distribution updates. AMD's open-source developers are also beginning to work on ATI Radeon HD 6000 series support, which is hardware not to be released until late in the year."
Whoops! I was on my NVidia box.
Be relentless!
waaaaaaaaaahhhhh
I prefer to buy based on pragmatism, not zealotry. I own a 5870 actually (and a 5850m), because it is a good card for the money. However I'm not about to go out and buy products because the company is "Doing something right," or whatever.
In the case of the Linux driver I will say "Go and buy a 5000 series if you feel the driver offers you a level of functionality and stability that is useful to you." If not, don't. For one it is a waste of money to buy a product just to "support" a company if that product isn't useful to you. However a bigger reason is that you shouldn't reward something unless it deserves it. If the driver makes the hardware useful to you, then ATi deserves to be rewarded with a purchase. However they don't if it is some future promise of usefulness.
ATi makes solid hardware, currently a better deal in most performance segments than nVidia's hardware for the moment, and on Windows their drivers are quite good. However you should evaluate their hardware base don your needs, your uses, and then determine if you want to buy it or not.
These days, I pretty much only buy motherboards with intel graphics, simply because I don't want to have to deal with the hassle of installing NVidia's closed drivers, and for the life of me I can't figure out what I am supposed to do with an ATI card. There seems to be half a dozen open source driver projects always on the go, with no clear indication of what cards work and what cards don't. Add to that the constant complaints I see over their own closed source drivers, and that's another brand I simply won't consider. Someone tell me I'm wrong and point me to something that can clarify the situation.
So difficult. $ sudo apt-get install nvidia-....amd64.deb. The torture is unbearable.
Intellectual property from other companies generally has to be stripped from the code base and those algorithms reimplemented in a different way.
And they should better not implement it in a driver. Ex: winmodems.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
It is selfish to keep information to yourself which can benifit all of mankind (or a substantial portion).
Only in the case of drivers for hardware, it benefits the hardware maker for those drivers to be as widely available as possible... They can pay to have drivers developed whereby the developers get paid for their time worked, and the result is useful drivers that encourage sales of the hardware.
Hardware is certainly not imaginary, it is perfectly reasonable to sell that, and actual effort has to go into each and every unit sold.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
See, that's the huge fallacy with the argument that intellectual property has no owner, and therefore no financial value to any entity as it should be distributed without recompense
Those aren't the only two options. According to the US Constitution copyrights are supposed to be for "limited times", making the copyright holder more of a temporary steward than an owner. Which is fine by me, someone gets some benefit, then we all get benefit, win/win. Except Congress isn't living up to their end and defines "limited times" as longer than any of us expect to live.