r300/500 rant

[bridgman]

Yeah, I heard that a lot at the start of the project. Not from the developers, of course...

[admax88]

What really kills me is how much slower the open source driver is at 3D. Games that I could play on my laptop with fglrx I can no longer play in newer distros with the open source drivers, the framerate is just too fucking slow.

It's ridiculous that since support has been dropped for older cards, my laptop is now LESS capable with newer software.

[marek]

Either use fglrx or newer distros. You can't have both. What's there on newer distros you need so much that you *must* use it?

[chaos386]

my laptop is now LESS capable with newer software.

If your laptop is more capable with older software, then why aren't you running it?

Newer is not always better. The entire AMD/ATi graphics scene is undergoing a HUGE transformation right now, in terms of hardware *and* software. It should be no surprise that things are a little rocky at the moment. Complaining about it won't solve anything, because the reason it's taking a while is not because AMD isn't putting in any effort, it's because there is a lot of work to be done. If you really want to make things get better sooner, help out by filing bug reports and helping the devs find regressions in the driver. After all, the beauty of OSS is working together to improve things!

[pedepy]

One thing I don't understand -- the current 3xx-5xx drivere represent years of hard work by some very smart people, and yet you're obviously not happy with them.

If we were to stop working on new GPUs (particularly on getting initial documentation and support for new GPUs into the development community) I don't understand how there would be sufficiently high quality open source drivers by the time they were required for legacy support.

i have no beef with the open source driver and in fact i was very pleasantly surprised when i was "forced" to use it when catalyst support was dropped.

that said, i still bump into many limitations and bugs that seem to only occur with the ati open source option; mainly opengl and wine related, you will often see those application listed as 'working' or bug reports defered to "not gonna fix" because they simply stem from lacking features in the graphics driver.

i would just like these missing features to be addressed asap; because they seem to be present in all other manufacturer's drivers including ati's closed source drivers - the only ones missing out are those owners of cards that got deprecated last year. and like i said before, in my situation this is made all the more frustrating by the fact that i probably own one of the youngest cards to have had experienced support drop. i mean it's not like my gpu is 5 years old!

[DanL]

Reality and bottom line: Either upgrade your GPU, run a distro capable of using Catalyst 9-3, or wait patiently for the r300g driver if neither one of those options are feasible. Ranting won't help in this case. I suggest therapy or using a punching bag as more effective alternatives.

I'll post this gem again, just in case you didn't see its sparkle.

[rohcQaH]

i would just like these missing features to be addressed asap; because they seem to be present in all other manufacturer's drivers

in fglrx and nvidia, yes; both are based on a proprietary opengl-implementation.
Those feature aren't present in any other mesa-based driver either (i.e. intel), because the linux gfx stack is just plain outdated. Not AMD's fault, not AMD's responsibility.

But it's getting there, the solution is called gallium3d, and work is being done to port the r300 driver over. You can use the r300g driver if you want, probably giving you more features, but it's still a bit slow and possibly unstable.

If you absolutely need the latest opengl extensions (for wine games and such), stay with fglrx for now.

[bridgman]

Pedepy, sorry if you've answered this before, but are you already testing the Mesa-on-Gallium3D driver (aka 300g) ?

If not, there's probably a lot of progress you are not seeing...

[admax88]

If your laptop is more capable with older software, then why aren't you running it?

Newer is not always better. The entire AMD/ATi graphics scene is undergoing a HUGE transformation right now, in terms of hardware *and* software. It should be no surprise that things are a little rocky at the moment. Complaining about it won't solve anything, because the reason it's taking a while is not because AMD isn't putting in any effort, it's because there is a lot of work to be done. If you really want to make things get better sooner, help out by filing bug reports and helping the devs find regressions in the driver. After all, the beauty of OSS is working together to improve things!

I'm running it because I don't want to be stuck on the same kernel with the same drivers and the same X server until the open source driver is a viable replacement. My whole system shouldn't have to revolve around which graphics card that I have.

That being said I see your point about the huge transformation of the graphics stack. And believe me I really appreciate the the work being done on the open source driver. I think the whole gallium3d architecture can be really interesting. I intend to help contribute as best as I can.

My real beef is with AMD deciding to terminate support for the older cards before the open source driver is a viable replacement. I understand their reasoning for doing so, it still pisses me off though.

[squirrl]

My favorite article

To add some humor to the discussion.

http://excessive.wordpress.com/2007/07/29/why-linux-sucks-as-a-desktop-os/

using Linux can be categorized in any of these terms:

YouDontReallyNeedThatAnyway(TM)
BlameLiesOnOthers(TM)
DesktopsAreGoingAway(TM)
x86IsGoingAway(TM)
MicrosoftIsDying(TM)
YourStatsAreWrong(TM)
YouDon?tReallyNeedThatFeature(TM)
YouDon?tNeedTheLastVersionorLatestOfThatApp(TM)
It?sYourFault(TM)
It?sNotABugIt?sAFeature(TM)
It?s just around the corner(TM)
Linux Really Started Taking Off just 18 Months Ago (TM)
CouldHaveBeenWrittenYesterday(TM)
YouOnlyUseWindowsBecauseYouAreUsedToIt(TM)
JustThinkLikeLintards(TM)
EveryTimeYouReportBugsICommitMemoryLeaks(TM)
TheDailyThingThatWillTakeLinuxMainstream(TM)
YouCanSwitchToLinuxNow(TM)
LinuxThreadingIsAFeatureNotABug(TM)
MoveItIntoUserSpace(TM).
ILiveInaFantasyWorld(TM)

You can't trust these guys to do the right thing pedepy. OSS developers will rewrite critical sections of code. Distribution maintainers will ship beta to promote the newness of their product. This is a huge issue with Ubuntu. Mark is so poised on shipping 6 month intervals that he forgets how fast they are changing things. Good example, watch G3d be included in the popular distributions this year's release.

Two Golden Rules of Software Development.
1. If doing the right thing breaks support then do the wrong thing.
2. If you can't timebox it for release then don't do it.

I'm a software developer and I see the behavior patterns. There is a good book called Pragmatic Thinking & Learning. It teaches to access your skill level (Dreyfus Model).

Think about the way some of these guys are operating. Amateurs.
Release 0.5 → 10 reported bugs
Release 0.6 → 5 bug fixes, 15 reported bug ( 5 still left over and labeled as inconclusive )
Release 0.7 → 12 reported bugs 2 fixes ( 3 left over, 6 deleted, 8 new ones, 1 solved his self)

Recently Linus spoke about the Regressions going up for each release of the Linux kernel. He apparently pissed off Alan Cox on the tty driver. Doesn't matter your the best baller if you're not a team player your team will lose.

I don't even begin to believe I'm an expert. I'm more a modest moderate.

But Dan's advice isn't far off. There is nothing wrong with sticking with an old version, that is in the Linux community. 8.04 Ubuntu is a highly stable environment. I had no issues when I ran it. I should also add that it could be worse. Imagine yourself with an Intel graphics chipset. You absolutely have to run the latest distribution in order to get support.
Otherwise enjoy back-porting all those revisions.

To transition for a moment, I spend time in the win32 world as well. It's nice when they give you a driver for the card that is feature complete. I suspect your laptop with it's original Windows Vista was considered feature complete. Then you get to play the game of Linux. Maybe you got hardware mpeg decoders maybe you don't. Maybe you got shaders maybe you got OpenGL 1.2.

la la la