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ATI Announces Open 2D/3D Linux Support
RareEYE was the first to point out the
press release from ATI announcing their official support for Linux and endorsement of Open Source. As part of their support, they will be "...releasing 2D, 3D and multimedia programming specifications for its industry-leading
RAGE graphics technology." ATI also mentions their current/past work with the XFree86 group, which they will be ramping up to an even higher level now.
3DFX: not open, suffering because of it
Matrox: partly open, enjoyed a big boost in popularity
S3: completely open, enjoying a resurgence in spite of underperformance on early chip sets
RIVA: mostly open, sitting pretty
Rendition: completely closed, no longer in existence (although their design lives on)
ATI: opening up today, seeing the light
Anyone have corrections/more to add for this list? It sure does seem at this point that there's a connection between openness and success for hardware makers.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
> Oooh, about as long as it takes them to
:-)
> release a full OpenGL driver...
Hehe. Seems to me like these two things could be related: as a wild guess, the time between releasing hardware specs and someone writing a full OpenGL driver is probably significantly less than the time taken for the original manufacturer to write that same driver
Personally I have to go with NVidia as far as graphics hardware is concerned, on grounds of general helpfulness and quality of drivers. Matrox are equally helpful to Linux people, but their Windows OpenGL implementation is way behind the NVidia one, which is an issue for people like me who have to work on both platforms...
Great news! ATI were top on my list of "uncool people who hide their specs", so it is great to see that they might finally be seeing how stupid that is.
So now we have open source drivers for Matrox and NVidia cards, and ATI starting to look more promising. This leaves 3Dfx as the only major 3d accelerator manufacturer who insists on hiding all their hardware details, which is kind of paradoxical since they actually have the best current support under Linux! How long do you reckon it will take them to realise the advantages of being free as in speech as well as just beer?
I suppose this is a good thing, but I have to compare to people like S3. When I couldn't get my S3 Virge GX2-based card to work, I went to S3's site, filled out a form and 2 days later got a 3-inch-thick specification book in the mail. They didn't even ask if I was working on an Open Source project.
Good to see another company smartening up, though. Eventually I look forward to the day they all write their own XFree86-4 module....
On the other hand, based on the schedules quoted, it is still reasonably likely that with the rapid deployment of video cards these days, cards can go from "initial release" to "retirement" before XFree86 supports the card.
On the gripping hand, at least the graphics cards should eventually be supported, which is the important thing...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
A friend of mine has a Dell laptop (Inspiron 7500) with the ATI chipset with a 400MHz processor (Celeron, I think). The 3D acceleration is actually slightly slower than the software renderer ! Things like Half-Life demonstrate this. You do get certain texturing benefits when using hardware acceleration, but I prefer the framerate. I don't see any reason why any X server which supports this chipset would be any different. Geometry setup has to be done by the CPU anyhow.
Unfortunately, you won't see much in the way of overkill until you can get a laptop with that new NVidia chipset ! :-)
-- Steve
As much as I hate the RAGE chipset, I have to applaud ATI on this move. Note that ATI is the absolute market leader for OEM based graphics - and they do very well in the retail market as well.
Some people may say that this is just an ATI ploy to be the market leader for every operating system out there. ATI cards could very well be the Microsoft of video cards - but there isn't too much evidence to support this, yet. They are just releasing their specs at the moment, and supporting the development of drivers.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
This is good news, and i hate to rain on the parade, but "supporting" Linux is not enough. Handing us the specs and telling us we have their *permission* to write drivers is not nearly enough. Do hardware vendors just hand over specs to Microsoft and tell them to go at it if they want? No, they write their own drivers for Windows, and distribute them with the hardware.
What we really need is for vendors to write their *own* drivers for Linux (hopefully, Open Source), and distribute them with the hardware just like Windows. And i don't mean sticking it in a file cabinet on their web site behind a page that says "Beware of the leopard"... i want to go to Best Buy, pick up the latest greatest video card, see a penguin logo on the box, and find a CD inside with an XFree86 server (with source!), pushbutton installation for all major Linux distributions, and a bunch of throwaway programs, gizmos, and game demos to show off the capabilities of the card. That's what Windows gets (except for the Source, of course), and what Linux deserves.
Are you listening, ATI? You want bragging rights? They're right there for the taking, if you have the courage to reach for them.
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Maybe that's just the price you pay for the chains that you refuse.
Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
I've got an ATI Rage 128 chip set, and it works very well for a desktop under the beta XFCom driver by Suse. 1600X1200X16M resolution works fast and well.
I can't run 3D games on it in Linux yet, but it runs Half Life with noticeably better framerate than my Nvidia TNT in Win'98 used to. I've also upgraded from K6/300 to P3/450, but I don't think that's the whole story.
I've had trouble with ATI in the distant past, and am not a big supporter of theirs. But it seems like they are improving and maybe I'll give 'em one more chance after this news.
It is true that the driver was not picked up yet by the community. nvidia released some specs, but obviously nobody could make use of it.
End of September, there was a brief discussion on the glx developers list with someone from nvidia about it. Problems were acknoledged and it was promised to try to improve the situation by providing us with their RM.
Alas nothing happened, at least on the glx project. Maybe they released it to the XFree86 team, I have not checked lately (no time right now).
This means that all the laptops using the ATI Rage Pro LT will get Linux 3D support !
That's gonna be very cool ! A linux laptop is already a cool thing but a linux laptop with 3D is just overkill !
Why on earth would you hold back programming information on a piece of hardware anyway? The only effect (as far as I can see anyway) will be that you limit your market. Software protocols are a bit different, if you allready have marketshare you actually gain something from holding that information back from the competition. But hardware? Are they afraid the competition's gonna start writing drivers for their cards?? welcomme to the real world guys.
but don't get your panties in a bunch. A friend of mine had a laptop with a Rag LT Pro, and he had to wait till just a few weeks ago for the 2D Xserver for it, so increased support is definitely a good thing. But the Rage Pro is a very out-of-date chipset -- it was already pretty slow at this time a year ago.
I have yet to see a laptop with even acceptable, let alone cutting-edge, 3D support.
FWIW, we have ATi cards on our machines at work here, and the XFree drivers are pretty solid under Solaris x86; much better than Solaris's drivers! However, 3D support is going to be needed to get the best from the cards.
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onward indeed...I hope other hardware companies join the bandwagon
all Linux soliders and solderers prepare...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
We need only make sure that hardware vendors are aware of the demand, in order to have their support. They are more than willing, trade secrets aside, to give in to numbers, and ladies and gentlemen, we have numbers.