Originally posted by tball
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Back to Ati, its weak(er) points in the consumer market are Compiz and video. Note that tearing in Compiz is actually a Compiz "feature". There are patches that fix this issue, but the developers have refused to apply them. I personally find this ridiculous - we are in freaking 2009, it's absolutely ridiculous to avoid glXSwapControlSGI on the merit of performance. If the performance hit is that large, ship with swap control and disable it by default. Or enable it automatically when framerate > refresh rate.
Video tearing is another matter entirely and I hope it will be fixed at some (not too far away) point. OpenGL for video output works if you have a beefy system, but it's rather inefficient.
However, the real weak spot of Ati is its OpenGL support. It's pretty good nowadays and most things work as they should, but when something breaks you never know when and if it will be fixed (like framebuffer blits of depth attachments that's been reported since last year). It's pretty eye-opening when you compare this to Nvidia, whose representatives post on opengl.org: "ah, yes, this bug was discovered and fixed two days ago, try drivers 185.81."
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