Terry Makedon (AMD/ATI): "We can't open our drivers"

[Svartalf]

i wonder what could that 3rd party code in the ati driver be. only drm solutions like hdmi come to my mind.

I strongly suspect that this is NOT totally the case. To be sure, there IS some of that present for some of the reasoning- but there's likely to be some proprietary performance hacks that they can't protect via Copyright or Patent, possibly some embarrassing things in design lurking in the codebase or in the chip's interface. I've seen it before in the past for other vendors as I've helped them do Linux driver work.


In all honesty, I'd rather they gave x.org a leg up on what they needed to accomplish a full enough R300 driver to matter for things and left it at that. But, I don't see that happening right at the moment.

[yoshi314]

In reality, anything in the R300, R400, and R500 series of chips are going to be intrinsically identical at the programming level, with each chip in question being a scaling up of the R300 architecture or a process improvement.

well, r500 seems quite different from previous series, while r300 seems pretty similar to r400.

wonder what's in store for us with r600.

although i believe there is some truth to that. 9700 and X-series were probably a major step forward, and it was so different from previous ati cards, that they were safe to release the specs for older models.

[Svartalf]

well, r500 seems quite different from previous series, while r300 seems pretty similar to r400.

What makes you state this?

wonder what's in store for us with r600.

Heh... Your guess is as good as mine on that one. I just take it in as they give us support. I'm just disappointed in what I've seen to date with ATI's offerings. I can only hope that AMD works on things a little differently and places more emphasis on it than they do nowadays.

[Michael]

What makes you state this?

Well the R500 series does have a ringbus memory controller and many other architectural changes.

[yoshi314]

What makes you state this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_Tec...s#X1000_series

avivo and different 2d core, at least. the card behaves different even with plain 2d.

also r500 cards feature internal 2d resolution of 1280x1024. you can easily see it when using framebuffer console on linux. everything lower is jagged on console, and blurry under X.

[glussier]

It's nothing new, for years ATI has been saying that there was proprietary technology that couldn't be open in the fglrx drivers. So, my thougt is that you might ask for opening their drivers all you want, but this is a lost case.

Anyway, I don't care if the drivers are open source or not, I only want them to work properly, which they actually do for me. If AMD/ATI adds the composite extension, I will be happy. If it takes too long doing that, then I might be forced to move to Nvidia or Intel.

[yoshi314]

If it takes too long doing that, then I might be forced to move to Nvidia or Intel.

that way you lose. you paid ati, now you're going to pay nvidia/intel.

you should instead demand your money back, as an unsatisfied customer. if more ati-to-nvidia converts would do that, things might have been different.

[glussier]

that way you lose. you paid ati, now you're going to pay nvidia/intel.

And, what's the problem about paying Intel? I already do, so not much will change in my computing habits.

Eight now, if I need 3d opengl performance, I definetly won't buy an ATI card, complain that it doesn't perform and hope that, eventually ATI will improve it's drivers performance. If I need performance now, and don't use windows, I'll go the nvidia way.

[Synergy6]

you should instead demand your money back, as an unsatisfied customer. if more ati-to-nvidia converts would do that, things might have been different.

And, considering the box probably states "For use with Windows PCs" or something similar, they'll just laugh you out the door.

[Saist]

If I might make a comment here. I see a lot of people hammering on ATi for not opening their drivers...

so, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Nvidia-GLX proprietary as well? I've seen a lot of comments about people "converting" from ATi to Nvidia.

Isn't that just changing the pot for the kettle? Are not both black?

Maybe I'm just wrong about this, but before anybody go slamming on ATi for not open sourcing the drivers, shouldn't Nvidia also be targeted in the same breath or post?