Ubuntu 9.10 Gets Unreleased Catalyst 9.10 Driver

[Threedays]

Really AMD. If you have to do this thrice, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.

What about tracking upstream development a little closer, so this doesn't have to keep happening?

The ATI developers are too busy typing on TWITTER and other social networks to get A1 quality for the company they work for.

Linux is the future and if they don't get in now they will lose too much ground.

Every Thing Is Happening On Linux !!!

[bridgman]

Really AMD. If you have to do this thrice, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.

What about tracking upstream development a little closer, so this doesn't have to keep happening?

Not sure I agree with that.

We could have spent relatively more time on upstream compatibility (shortening the delay between new kernel versions and support) and relatively less on game compatibility and other consumer issues. I think what happened was a reasonable division of effort.

Now that we have picked off a lot of the consumer issues it should be easier to choose where to allocate time, but I think the last six months was too soon to shift effort away from consumer fixes and spend it on faster upstream support.

The ATI developers are too busy typing on TWITTER and other social networks to get A1 quality for the company they work for.

Huh ??

Linux is the future and if they don't get in now they will lose too much ground.

Every Thing Is Happening On Linux !!!

... except PC GPU sales (so far). All indications are still that Linux is between 1 and 2% of our market, and closer to 1 than 2. Linux is making great progress in a lot of other market segments, particularly embedded systems and servers, but progress in mainstream PCs hasn't been so fast. Current thinking seems to be that a round of enterprise desktop adoption will be needed before we see a real spurt in consumer usage. I think PC vendors could accelerate that by offering Linux on the right consumer platforms (aimed at users who mostly work online and don't have to think about application compatibility) but we're not quite there yet.

[chithanh]

This may be true, but then again hardware reviewers are much less than 1% of the market. However hardware manufacturers do almost everything to look good to reviewers. Why? Because other users turn to review sites to find out which hardware they should buy and which one not.

The same can be said for many Linux users, these are in many cases more knowledgeable about computers than the average (exceptions prove the rule ). And more often than not, they are who their friends/acquaintances turn to for purchasing decisions.

Saying Linux sales don't matter because they are less than 2% is like the (proverbial) statistician drowning in a lake of average depth six inches.

[kernelOfTruth]

... except PC GPU sales (so far). All indications are still that Linux is between 1 and 2% of our market, and closer to 1 than 2. Linux is making great progress in a lot of other market segments, particularly embedded systems and servers, but progress in mainstream PCs hasn't been so fast. Current thinking seems to be that a round of enterprise desktop adoption will be needed before we see a real spurt in consumer usage. I think PC vendors could accelerate that by offering Linux on the right consumer platforms (aimed at users who mostly work online and don't have to think about application compatibility) but we're not quite there yet.

that's perhaps because you don't offer feature-rich enough drivers (yet)

your drivers seem to lack important openGL extensions / support compared to nvidia from what I read and also suffers somewhat in the stability and new kernel area

if those three are solved/support on a continued basis I'm sure there will be much more users or even big companies using AMD/ATI cards for their linux-systems

I'm not sure whether it's only gossip but if I remember correctly the animation movie "Cars" was rendered on Gentoo boxen with nvidia GPUs

so if there's no argument which speaks against usage of GPUs from AMD wouldn't it be nice publicity (especially among gamers and geeks) that the new Pixar, Disney, {insert Animation studio of your choice} movie was rendered by AMD GPUs (which by the way are more accurate in floatingpoint calculations and therefore make the movie look even better) ?

[DanL]

I'm not sure, should we say thank you amd for making a card we bought from you actually work?

On Linux? Yes. If you bought an ATI product and expected it to work perfectly on Linux, you're either foolish for not doing research on your purchase or unreasonable.

[bridgman]

Saying Linux sales don't matter because they are less than 2% is like the (proverbial) statistician drowning in a lake of average depth six inches.

Sure, except that's not what I said. I was just qroviding another side to the "everything is happening on Linux" comment. In the PC graphics market, a bit *more* is happening on Linux and I expect that growth to continue, but we do need to strike a balance across the whole PC graphics market.

that's perhaps because you don't offer feature-rich enough drivers (yet)

your drivers seem to lack important openGL extensions / support compared to nvidia from what I read and also suffers somewhat in the stability and new kernel area

Sounds reasonable, but the "1%-ish" numbers I was talking about were for all PC graphics vendors, not just us.

If the problem were our Linux support I would expect us to have a disproportionally low Linux market share compared with what we have on other OSes, and the Linux market would presumably do just fine without us. In reality, though, our market share in Linux seems to be quite close to our share in all other OSes.

[m4rgin4l]

Not sure I agree with that.

We could have spent relatively more time on upstream compatibility (shortening the delay between new kernel versions and support) and relatively less on game compatibility and other consumer issues. I think what happened was a reasonable division of effort.

Now that we have picked off a lot of the consumer issues it should be easier to choose where to allocate time, but I think the last six months was too soon to shift effort away from consumer fixes and spend it on faster upstream support.

AMD could provide more frequent releases giving the impression of faster development. Maybe having a few stable releases (like now) and a lot beta releases to get early bug reports.

... except PC GPU sales (so far). All indications are still that Linux is between 1 and 2% of our market, and closer to 1 than 2. Linux is making great progress in a lot of other market segments, particularly embedded systems and servers, but progress in mainstream PCs hasn't been so fast. Current thinking seems to be that a round of enterprise desktop adoption will be needed before we see a real spurt in consumer usage. I think PC vendors could accelerate that by offering Linux on the right consumer platforms (aimed at users who mostly work online and don't have to think about application compatibility) but we're not quite there yet.

Maybe the netbook sales might fuel the adoption, but Intel has that market cornered.

The problem with desktop PCs is that more and more people is switching to consoles (I thinking about it), which cuts the market even further.

[AdrenalineJunky]

On Linux? Yes. If you bought an ATI product and expected it to work perfectly on Linux, you're either foolish for not doing research on your purchase or unreasonable.

i've had all ati cards since ~6months after the AMD buyout and they've worked...

besides, as of late i've seen waaay more nvidia problems popping up on web forums then ATI ones.

[L33F3R]

im afraid I am not one to share that and find your statement to be contrasting to my experiences.

ati cards will "work" however my experiences with building my friends PC had been less then stellar. ATI 9850 and he wanted to be like me and use linux but the bugger worked so poorly i actually told him to use windows. "working" is not the same as "working well". I am rooting for better drivers but at the current time its a no for L33F3R. I will investigate this release of the driver more.

Side Note: have 2 linux PC's running nvidia cards and they run as well as they would on a windows machine, if not better.

[Ranguvar]

The fact that a desktop distro has to use unreleased beta drivers to get a reasonable consumer experience is sad...

I still think that the open source Intel video drivers will be nigh-perfect in a few months, and the open source AMD ones perhaps in two years. Maybe by then we can focus on NVIDIA. Obviously the crappy proprietary drivers (*cough*AMD*cough*) and the fresh new hardware (Intel) will be tackled first, but I'd like to see Nouveau get some love after.