Nvidia renames old stuff again

[misiu_mp]

bridgman, I thought you already learnt that no matter what you or AMD does someone will always complain

Simply pointing out that one should not rest on his laurels. There is tons of more to do.

[misiu_mp]

That's why we support open source driver development as well.
Relative to our size I believe we have as many developers working on the free drivers as Intel; possibly more. Is that not enough ?

I wasn't aware of that. Sorry for my misjudgement. I can only see that intel provides high-performance open source drivers and amd does not. Of course the intel hardware is in a different segment, so its hard to compare the two. It will be interesting to see how things will develop when they will start competing with amd and nvidia in the high-performance segment.

In some markets I believe the free drivers will make the closed ones largely obsolete. In other markets binary drivers and cross-OS code sharing are still a hard requirement in order to meet feature and performance expectations.

If you're in the first group - ignore the binary drivers. If you're in the second group, ignore the open source drivers

You might want the proprietary drivers for 100% performance. I want the free drivers to be as good to make 90% of users (even gamers) not need them. Not many will care for say, 10% of performance when the drivers are in-kernel, work out-of-the-box, well supported, well featured and you can count on major mishaps to be fixed (more) quickly.

If that is the *vision* amd has for its linux graphics support, then you deserve all the prising in the world.

If the *aim* is to only give open source support of old hardware, then well, as much I am grateful for the commitment of amd (its way better than most others), it is at best 'good enough'.

[energyman]

'high performance drivers'? Where? Have I slept? I remember a nice Phoronix article lambasting the sorry state of current Intel drivers.

[bridgman]

If that is the *vision* amd has for its linux graphics support, then you deserve all the prising in the world.

That is the vision. It has not been a real popular vision during implementation (everyone feels cheated when we spend time on something a different user cares about ), but I think it will prove to be the correct one in the end.

If the *aim* is to only give open source support of old hardware, then well, as much I am grateful for the commitment of amd (its way better than most others), it is at best 'good enough'.

Nope, we're aiming for consistent support across both old and new :

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=fedora_r600_3d&num=1

@bridgman

maybe you need a 3rd group: those who does want that everything works - no matter what driver is used. I don't think that the oss vs. binary discussion is really useful for new 3d hardware. There the features are more important. For gamers of course opengl speed, for others watching movies is more important - and when you want to watch hd movies then you can get into trouble with both drivers.

I think we have to satisfy that group with both drivers.

[misiu_mp]

They (Intel) had some serious performance regressions after the driver architecture overhaul, but they seem to have fixed most of them (as of fedora 11). I cant tell how much of the optimal performance they provide (after all they are not for performance anyway), but my gut feeling is its quite high. All I know OpenArena runs really smoothly and AlienArena also is playable at lower settings (with the 960 chip).

[misiu_mp]

I think we have to satisfy that group with both drivers.

Absolutely.