Is ATI really on par with NVIDIA now?

[Vighy]

Kano the pessimist, well know as "ATi's public enemy #1"

If you don't like fglrx, why don't you help the FOSS driver?

[Kano]

I did, I have found the 4 pipe too much error (only 4 not 8) of my X700 SE. I patched it differently than the final patch commited, but found it:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/151974

[some-guy]

Within a few weeks I'll buy a new computer and it will contain a new 4xxx series AMD gpu. I'm confident that within a few months you're better off having an AMD gpu then a nVidia gpu.

That will be a stable DRI implementation, DRI2/gallium(in radeon and radeonhd) will most likely come to distros in at least a year

[yoshi314]

http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/06/nitty-gritty-shit-on-open-source.html

it may look trollish but i think tha author has a point there, about one more reason why nvidia doesn't feel like opening their driver.

[bridgman]

The general reaction from X devs was "yeah, it's all true, but it's also almost fixed". Now that work on memory managers is going ahead it should be possible for DRI2 and RDR work to start moving again... and once that happens most of the issues covered by the article can go away.

Gallium is not on the critical path to the same extent -- it is not a pre-requisite for GL 2.x functionality, but most devs feel that it is "sufficiently better" than the current driver model that it's not worth implementing significant new functionality on the old driver model. The main pre-requisite for things like pbo's is better memory management.

[Vighy]

Mhh reflecting on the question of this thread, we can make a lot of comparisons and discussions, but what's for sure is that ATi is following nVidia, I mean on the closed sources drivers.

nVidia had SLI, AIGLX (and so on), much time ago.
ATi is close to Crossfire but has still to provide it, AIGLX was gained more than year late than nVidia... etc etc.

If really ATi is on par with nVidia, why don't they try to anticipate their competitor?

Would it be nice if ATi could start being on the bleeding edge instead of nVidia.

Obviously bugs need to be fixed, but nVidia is now having a good period too

so why don't you ATi guys put some killer features in your proprietary driver?
One that could be done, without waiting for Xorg to improve, could be kernel-based mode-setting.
or instead are you already woring on it?

DRI2 and EXA may be not suitable now, but kernel-based mode-setting seems to be "doable"

[yoshi314]

If really ATi is on par with nVidia, why don't they try to anticipate their competitor?

ati is behind on the driver but ahead on the mindset ;-)

DRI2 and EXA may be not suitable now, but kernel-based mode-setting seems to be "doable"

i wonder about licensing issues here. linking a binary driver against gpl2 kernel is already pretty hairy issue and people still haven't decided whether it violates the licence or not. kernel modesetting proprietary driver might be legally difficult.

[deanjo]

http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/06/nitty-gritty-shit-on-open-source.html

it may look trollish but i think tha author has a point there, about one more reason why nvidia doesn't feel like opening their driver.

Excellent link with some more good follow-up here http://lwn.net/Articles/288098/

[lenrek]

...
i wonder about licensing issues here. linking a binary driver against gpl2 kernel is already pretty hairy issue and people still haven't decided whether it violates the licence or not. kernel modesetting proprietary driver might be legally difficult.

Does NVidia develop the driver based any GPL's code? If none, then there is no issue.

NVidia had also made it clear:

... NVIDIA’s Linux graphics driver kernel module is structured so that all the code that is Linux-specific is provided in source code as a kernel interface layer. When customers upgrade their kernel to get the latest from kernel.org, they have everything they need to rebuild and even patch, if necessary the NVIDIA driver’s kernel interface layer...

Link: http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=2588

Hence, the part where code should be open sourced has been released.

[Max Spain]

I did a little comparison here that pretty much validates what yoshi (and others) said.