AMD Publishes Evergreen Shader Documents

[RobbieAB]

WTF are you smoking? They can't even do that with their own proprietary drivers!

The only half-way decent X drivers that I've ever had were the nVidia proprietary ones, and more to the point th eonly useful GPU drivers I've ever had were nVidia drivers on ANY OS...

Oh, and let's not even talk about their weird OEM arrangements under windoze where they can't publish generic drivers... but then again nVidia and Intel don't compete against their own OEMs...

ATI is a joke, and their spec release is a soporific for linux users who are not institutional users, nothing more. Although I will say that ATI's best hope of survival is to provide OSS drivers since they're dropping arch support like flies...

You are completely right, no one other than nVidia can make usable graphics cards or drivers. What can I be thinking being satisfied with the ability of the Intel card in my laptop to display Firefox, Pidgin, and Skype?! I have been so misguided! </sarcasm>

At least 90% of the world doesn't care about openGL, FPS, or any of that stuff, what they care about is cheap flights and package holidays, their daily viagra bidding wars, and the ability to edit wikipedia to prove their world view. For those, even the nv drivers are adequate. So describing nVidia as the only company producing usable GPUs + drivers is, frankly, comical. Intel are the biggest selling graphics vendor for a reason: they are dreadfully boring graphics that just work fine for everything but the gamer/enthusiast market.

On the subject of ATIs FOSS drivers... IIRC, bridgman has said they are surprised at some of the performance they are already seeing from those drivers. To describe them as a sop is, again, laughable, as where they work they are, for the average user, far superior to nVidias offering, because, you know, they are just shipped by every distro with no legal issues.

I am, currently, still holding off on embracing ATI drivers for a while longer, because I want to give them a bit more time to mature, and also because I'm not shopping for a new laptop or desktop. I think we still need to give the ATI FOSS drivers time, they have come a long way in a short time, and the graphics stack is changing around them...

Maybe in another year it will be "Why did we ever doubt nVidia?", it could also be "There is only one high performance graphics option on Linux, and it's ATI". It really depends on performance of the FOSS drivers, and how close they an get to fglrx on the FireGL cards. As they say "We live in interesting times".