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[Rant] Another one that joined the green "Club"...
I know this thread is a bit dead now, but I've read it quite some time ago and I'd like to share my 2c.
After almost 15 years using AMD/ATI cards (on both Windows and Linux OS's), now I'm stepping out too... My laptop with a Radeon HD 2600 burned and I urgently needed a new laptop.
First of all, thanks to M$ and Intel, 99% of laptops (at least in Portugal) have hybrid c****y muxless graphics. So, if you want performance on a laptop, you're forced to use either nVidia Optimus or ATI BACON. That was my first obstacle on Linux, as nobody could ask me if ATI muxless was supported or not on Linux (and I didn't want to change the distro I was using (Arch x86_64)). So I chose a laptop with nVidia optimus (as it seems I can make it work more or less properly with bumblebee+bbswitch (I'm going to rant about this later...)).
Secondly, my scientific apps (MATLAB, for instance) use specifically CUDA and not OpenCL (I think it's a shame, but that's developers fault too...).
Finally, and now my "rant":
a) 6 years later and we still don't have proper support using FOSS drivers or Catalyst. It's very basic at best. Power management is AWFUL (on desktops that's not a problem but that kills a laptop's battery life). 3D performance is still BAD (I don't know how nouveau has managed to catch up radeon in terms of 3D performance, is it due to ATI graphics architecture being much more difficult to program?). 2D acceleration, although works for basic compositing and such, I STILL can't use it for decoding basic things such as Full-HD videos on Linux (XV s***s btw). On lower-power systems such as ultrabooks, netbooks and HTPCs (with AMD APUs, OC), that should've been AMD's nr.1 priority on Linux, as a lot of people use HTPCs and netbooks for watching videos, without caring about codecs. Even on such c***y systems that use GPUs such as Intel HD2xxx/HD3xxx, I've better 2D support than any of ATI current solutions. I won't blame Bridgman and other ATI/AMD/Xorg Linux developers (such as Alex Duscher or agf5d), as I recognize their hard work for trying to make ATI/AMD hardware useful on Linux, (and I really know how hard must be be programming os ASICs), but they're doing something almost "impossible".
b) I'm also going to rant about Linux users' mentality because I simply don't understand this. A company that has fulfilled to support its hardware by releasing documentation to linux developers, why there's almost no one supporting / helping them after 6 years? Furthermore, when things go wrong why are 99% of the time ATI/AMD developers the ones to blame? To support my argument, I'll talk about the sorry situation of muxless hybrid graphics + Proprietary Drivers: I know that AMD/ATI has been trying to support muxless ATI+Intel hybrid cards with Catalyst. If it was AMD/ATI that wouldn't support (hybrid graphics) I bet no one would try to help them make it work on Linux. But in nVidia's case, no! That's always someone's else fault... Not nVidia's fault for not listening to its users...
And the biggest irony is that community has done a great work trying to support nVidia optimus with both nouveau and nVidia's proprietary driver. And where's someone trying to make things work, for instance, in my distro of choice (Arch Linux) (or other distos), when ATI proprietary drivers already give us some kind of support to AMD+Intel muxless laptops? (Vi0L0, I think you should see Chakra's PKGBUILDs for using a recent Catalyst with PowerXPress on a Arch-based distro). It seems Linux users mentality didn't almost change albeit ATI committed support for providing documentation to the Linux community, and that s**ks.
Summarizing, these situations made me buy a Mid-to-High-End laptop with a nVidia optimus GFX (GeForce 555M). I'm really sad to abandon ATI's "ship", but there were some constraints that forced me to do it.
My 2 cents, and sorry if I was harsh.
3V0LUT10N
p.s.: I wish the best of luck for ATI/AMD open-source driver developers...
I know this thread is a bit dead now, but I've read it quite some time ago and I'd like to share my 2c.
After almost 15 years using AMD/ATI cards (on both Windows and Linux OS's), now I'm stepping out too... My laptop with a Radeon HD 2600 burned and I urgently needed a new laptop.
First of all, thanks to M$ and Intel, 99% of laptops (at least in Portugal) have hybrid c****y muxless graphics. So, if you want performance on a laptop, you're forced to use either nVidia Optimus or ATI BACON. That was my first obstacle on Linux, as nobody could ask me if ATI muxless was supported or not on Linux (and I didn't want to change the distro I was using (Arch x86_64)). So I chose a laptop with nVidia optimus (as it seems I can make it work more or less properly with bumblebee+bbswitch (I'm going to rant about this later...)).
Secondly, my scientific apps (MATLAB, for instance) use specifically CUDA and not OpenCL (I think it's a shame, but that's developers fault too...).
Finally, and now my "rant":
a) 6 years later and we still don't have proper support using FOSS drivers or Catalyst. It's very basic at best. Power management is AWFUL (on desktops that's not a problem but that kills a laptop's battery life). 3D performance is still BAD (I don't know how nouveau has managed to catch up radeon in terms of 3D performance, is it due to ATI graphics architecture being much more difficult to program?). 2D acceleration, although works for basic compositing and such, I STILL can't use it for decoding basic things such as Full-HD videos on Linux (XV s***s btw). On lower-power systems such as ultrabooks, netbooks and HTPCs (with AMD APUs, OC), that should've been AMD's nr.1 priority on Linux, as a lot of people use HTPCs and netbooks for watching videos, without caring about codecs. Even on such c***y systems that use GPUs such as Intel HD2xxx/HD3xxx, I've better 2D support than any of ATI current solutions. I won't blame Bridgman and other ATI/AMD/Xorg Linux developers (such as Alex Duscher or agf5d), as I recognize their hard work for trying to make ATI/AMD hardware useful on Linux, (and I really know how hard must be be programming os ASICs), but they're doing something almost "impossible".
b) I'm also going to rant about Linux users' mentality because I simply don't understand this. A company that has fulfilled to support its hardware by releasing documentation to linux developers, why there's almost no one supporting / helping them after 6 years? Furthermore, when things go wrong why are 99% of the time ATI/AMD developers the ones to blame? To support my argument, I'll talk about the sorry situation of muxless hybrid graphics + Proprietary Drivers: I know that AMD/ATI has been trying to support muxless ATI+Intel hybrid cards with Catalyst. If it was AMD/ATI that wouldn't support (hybrid graphics) I bet no one would try to help them make it work on Linux. But in nVidia's case, no! That's always someone's else fault... Not nVidia's fault for not listening to its users...
And the biggest irony is that community has done a great work trying to support nVidia optimus with both nouveau and nVidia's proprietary driver. And where's someone trying to make things work, for instance, in my distro of choice (Arch Linux) (or other distos), when ATI proprietary drivers already give us some kind of support to AMD+Intel muxless laptops? (Vi0L0, I think you should see Chakra's PKGBUILDs for using a recent Catalyst with PowerXPress on a Arch-based distro). It seems Linux users mentality didn't almost change albeit ATI committed support for providing documentation to the Linux community, and that s**ks.Summarizing, these situations made me buy a Mid-to-High-End laptop with a nVidia optimus GFX (GeForce 555M). I'm really sad to abandon ATI's "ship", but there were some constraints that forced me to do it.
My 2 cents, and sorry if I was harsh.
3V0LUT10N
p.s.: I wish the best of luck for ATI/AMD open-source driver developers...
)
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