AMD's opensource lies exposed

[glxextxexlg]

this thread's gone completely nuts. Next up, aliens are involved in [company X]'s design process!

No need to go fantastic. We're just making the day of the people waiting for good amd open source drivers. Making sure they have a good time while waiting.

Coz I was one of them once. Waiting for 2 years to get support for my r580 gpu. And guess what? Still in 2011, blender, unigine sanctuary-tropics and many more applications including very important ones like maya and houdini don't work with r300g driver. Its perfectly understandable, because thats the best 2 main independent developers and other developers working on the graphics stack could do, and I appreciate their work.
After 2 (two) years of waiting, thanks to Intel's (not amd's or independent developers') glsl compiler my r580 was finally (hardly) doing glsl rendering.
Even 6 months is too much to wait. But 2 years is a shitload of a lot of time to wait in computers bussiness. So... Here is a SitRep of the present situation:

AMD's closed source driver still sucks in terms of tearless 2d, webgl stuff, new kernel and xserver support, various show stopper bugs etc., and is hardly usable.

AMD's open source support is basic and their opensource developers don't deal with 3D support, just the modesetting and power management bits and its independent developers' (and intel's) job to bring OpenGL 3.X, 4.X support to these drivers (roughly another 2 years time to wait for this taking into account the huge work to be done on the glsl stack)

And amd can drop their lackluster binary support for select hardware anytime, so its a serious risk.

Now its up to you to choose. I chose gts450 as my gpu update and guess what:

IT WORKS

[mirv]

Well, good for you.
My radeon3650 works perfectly fine with the closed source drivers from AMD, so good for me.

...but, I should point out that nvidia can drop their lackluster binary support at any time, and then you're left up the creek without a paddle, so it's a bit more of a serious risk.

[glxextxexlg]

but, I should point out that nvidia can drop their lackluster binary support at any time

http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux-display-amd64-71.86.14-driver.html

Take a good look at this page and have an idea of when nvidia will drop support for my Geforce 400 series hardware. In other words: In your dreams mate

[glxextxexlg]

On that page you'll see under supported products tab: riva128. Which was released in 1997 and still supported by legacy drivers.

[mirv]

Exactly. Legacy drivers. Didn't they stop supporting newer xorg versions with those?
Yes, nvidia does stop supporting things after a while too. Only with AMD, you do have an alternative, even if it has taken a little while to bang things into proper shape (the whole Linux graphics driver stack needed an update first, btw, which is not the sole responsibility of AMD).
What's your next shot?

[D0pamine]

What if don't choose linux as my kernel - perhaps hurd instead who will support this? If I have the source code and I am free to modify it I have the opportunity ( perhaps not the ability ) to support it myself.

[deanjo]

Exactly. Legacy drivers. Didn't they stop supporting newer xorg versions with those?
Yes, nvidia does stop supporting things after a while too. Only with AMD, you do have an alternative, even if it has taken a little while to bang things into proper shape (the whole Linux graphics driver stack needed an update first, btw, which is not the sole responsibility of AMD).
What's your next shot?

Only the oldest of the old have nvidia stopped supporting newer versions of Xorg. Legacy in nvidia land does not mean dropping support. Everything that has been manufactured for a better part of a decade has had several xorg bump updates done to it.

You are presenting a Henny Penny argument.

[deanjo]

...but, I should point out that nvidia can drop their lackluster binary support at any time, and then you're left up the creek without a paddle, so it's a bit more of a serious risk.

Translation:

"They sky is falling, the sky is falling......"

[pingufunkybeat]

I'm amazed at all these people who have never ever had any problem with the nvidia closed drivers.

No drivers are perfect, and people have different use-cases. Personally, the highly experimental OSS radeon drivers have worked better than the nvidia blob ever did. And unlike the nvidia blob, they have never left X in a totally borked state without an explanation.

If you don't need OpenGL 3+ (and most people on Linux do not need it, because there is virtually no software for it), the OSS drivers are really really good, albeit considerably slower than the blob. Video decoding is unfortunately missing, but this is not the OSS devs' fault, and it doesn't matter on a modern computer anyway.

Still fast enough to play Doom3 and OpenArena and Nexuiz on high settings with a recent lowest-of-the-low-level graphics card.

As decent as the nvidia blob is, this doomsday atmosphere is extremely bizarre. The nvidia blobs did break gvim, did break many threaded applications at one point, totally fscked up KDE on numerous occasions (well, the OSS drivers did this too), and still don't even support proper multi-screen configuration in 2011. Plus the system occasionally hangs randomly when switching VTs, because of race conditions caused by not using kernel modesetting.

Nvidia is not all that great. And it's not open source. And it doesn't support open source.

The decision is very simple. The OSS drivers are imperfect, but they are doing it The Right Way (tm).

glxextxexlg, can you find me a chart which shows how long Optimus has been supported under Linux? Fact is that if you buy an Nvidia system, chances are that your system won't even boot into X, let alone support it completely. That's because nvidia really doesn't give a crap about Linux.

[glxextxexlg]

Exactly. Legacy drivers. Didn't they stop supporting newer xorg versions with those?

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODQyMQ

Its perfectly understandable that a hardware which is visually extinct from the material world to be not supported with the latest X stack. Nvidia's legacy drivers being able to work with maybe not the latest but modern linux distributions is just amazing. Let alone that read carefully and understand riva128 + many legacy hardware are already fully supported by noveau gallium3d drivers, so even if nvidia drops support for the latest X stack, they have the option of noveau on their side, and after 15 years of good binary support we'll most probably have that support when our hardware support gets dropped. Any more hollow rants?