are graphics detail and color the same with Open Source ATI as with Official ATI ?

[germlin]

I'm curious as to what reasons one might choose offical ATI over Open Source ATI drivers for say, a FireGL V7200. If one driver gives say, better colors, or graphics color for 2D (photos and desktop use) under Ubuntu 8.10, i'd like to know which, so i'd only use that one.

thank you

[TechMage89]

The closed drivers have complete power management, crossfire, and faster opengl performance. Also, currently the open-source drivers only support OpenGL 1.3, and only on r500 or older (although the support should be vastly improved in the next few months.)

The gap between the two drivers should close in the next year, but due to ATI having more resources to put into their OpenGL stack, it will likely always have a noticeable 3d performance advantage (probably 10-20% on average once all the optimizations planned for the open-source drivers are completed.)

For photo-editing and other general 2d use, the open-source drivers will work better, but bridgman has said that the next step for the closed drivers will be 2d improvements.

Color management is still something that doesn't work all that well in general on Linux, but I don't know much about that, save that there doesn't seem to be a lot of interest in developing more advanced color management outside of Hollywood (which created CinePaint.)