To the AMD people: Money wasted.

[Mr James]

an amd one.

the most interesting think for linux is the radeon OS linux driver.
but the 6970 is really new and a new gpu architecture.
the 6870 is the old architecture and no OS driver yet.
amd fusion/hd5870 is fine right now i think the 6870 support comes next month and the 6970 support needs more than 3months.

why not buy an amd card with OS driver support right now without waiting ?


the 5870 do have a price drop in germany 220? now.

To do that you got to have a distro like Arch or go Ubuntu to use the PPAs as no current main repo have the necessary kernel, mesa, and drivers that enable this stuff. That may not suit everyone. Especially since they are buggy.

[Mr James]

They could add 20 more developers and people would still complain. So why waste the money?
Unfortunately it's also the case of that sometimes, too many developers can be a bad thing - sometimes you need a small core group to bring cohesion to the project until it's in a more suitable state.
Then, of course, you need people who know what they're doing as well - but I'm not sure that's such a big problem for them.

Not saying any of that does or does not apply to AMD's open source drivers, just wanted to illustrate that it's not always as easy as throwing developers at the problem.

Ghee, I wonder why...

[mirv]

uh...often because people have different coding styles, different opinions to how things are done, are at different levels of training, may not be aware of what everyone is doing - should I go on?
There's plenty of reasons why you can't just throw developers at a problem.
But then, I'm aware you're just trolling and being childish.

[eldar]

the most interesting think for linux is the radeon OS linux driver.
but the 6970 is really new and a new gpu architecture.
the 6870 is the old architecture and no OS driver yet.

why not buy an amd card with OS driver support right now without waiting ?

I didn't quite get you, aren't both 68xx and 69xx a new gpu architecture, and the latter just being a bigger and more performant chip?

I don't want to go for 5xxx series simply because it's a year old, and there's no point in buying something that's been superceeded by a newer generation already. And I don't really want to rely on opensource drivers, because of their lack of proper OpenGL and OpenCL support. And things like KMS don't buy me at all, so I really want a good proprietary driver.

Wait a few months.

Well, again that's one more thing which may turn me away from ATI. NVIDIA has already released a driver for GTX 570 that came out a week ago. That's a level of support, that I would like to have. In 6 months AMD will already give us next generation of graphics cards and it becomes a joke to wait a few months for this generation to become fully functional. Please, correct me if I'm wrong.

[Mr James]

uh...often because people have different coding styles, different opinions to how things are done, are at different levels of training, may not be aware of what everyone is doing - should I go on?
There's plenty of reasons why you can't just throw developers at a problem.
But then, I'm aware you're just trolling and being childish.

1. You are reading my post wrong. It is sarcastic. I mean that everyone complains regardless of dev count because not one card works right and they only began serious work on drivers that older than I am not so long ago.

2. Sticks and stones...

[Mr James]

I didn't quite get you, aren't both 68xx and 69xx a new gpu architecture, and the latter just being a bigger and more performant chip?

I don't want to go for 5xxx series simply because it's a year old, and there's no point in buying something that's been superceeded by a newer generation already. And I don't really want to rely on opensource drivers, because of their lack of proper OpenGL and OpenCL support. And things like KMS don't buy me at all, so I really want a good proprietary driver.



Well, again that's one more thing which may turn me away from ATI. NVIDIA has already released a driver for GTX 570 that came out a week ago. That's a level of support, that I would like to have. In 6 months AMD will already give us next generation of graphics cards and it becomes a joke to wait a few months for this generation to become fully functional. Please, correct me if I'm wrong.

No. you are spot on.

[pingufunkybeat]

Wait, I thought that Catalyst supported HD6000 stuff?

What are you talking about? OSS drivers or Catalyst?

[eldar]

Wait, I thought that Catalyst supported HD6000 stuff?

What are you talking about? OSS drivers or Catalyst?

I was asking about Catalyst driver. I'm hoping that catalyst should support them very soon if not already. And since Catalyst on linux and on windows share the same codebase, that should be true of course. Any thoughts?

[eldar]

the windows release driver for the hd6970 is an alpha 2011.1 catalyst

means the linux driver get the same code base with the 2011.1 catalyst.

Well, ok, but the sales for 69xx has already started. How people are supposed to use the cards if driver support will only appear in January?

[eldar]

Anyway, even if drivers for linux will be released in January, I'm more than happy with that. My other questions still stand, will buying an AMD card(in particular 6950) be an overall fit for linux?