The Truth About AMD's Development Cycle

[emparq]

some interesting tidbits:

ExtremeTech: The Vista driver, beginning with Catalyst 7.1, contains a "re-architected" OpenGL driver component. Exactly what is "re-architected" about it?

Rogers: Everything. This is a completely new driver, written from scratch in the last three years. ...

...

ExtremeTech: Why make the switch in the Vista driver, and not the XP one? Can XP users expect to get this new re-architected driver in the future?

Rogers: The new OpenGL driver has been designed from the ground up for Windows Vista, Windows XP and Linux and internally we are running and testing it on all three (or six if you count the 64 bit versions).
...
The XP and Linux versions of this new OpenGL driver will ship later this year.

---------

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2103633,00.asp

---------

Looking forward to your pending article, Michael. Hopefully, more questions will be answered (like how much later this year?.. )

[Malikith]

That is definitely interesting, I want it now.. hehe.

[DarkFoss]

Nice read...It's about time ATI re-vamped their OpenGL Nvidia has been killing them for years even in Windows..

[emparq]

Hi Michael,

Any updates from AMD on when they'll release those slides? Did they push back another month?

[Michael]

Originally Posted by emparq

Hi Michael,

Any updates from AMD on when they'll release those slides? Did they push back another month?

The slides are now completed and they are now going through the internal processes to get authorization so that Phoronix can publicly write about it. I hope it will all be ready shortly.

[emparq]

Good to hear. Thanks!

[DrCR]

Looking forward to both the article and better ATI drivers.

[yoshi314]

it looks that everything going through "internal process to get authorization" takes the same amount of time (thinks about airlied's r500 driver proposal)

[Svartalf]

Originally Posted by DrCR

Looking forward to both the article and better ATI drivers.

I'm looking forward to the article. Better drivers? Maybe. Maybe not. With all that's went on, I'm going to sit on the fence on that one- I'll believe it when I see it and it may be a while yet before we do.

[DarkFoss]

I think that they can't help being better drivers by default. It's pretty evident that the entire architecture the original drivers are based on is completely outdated. There has been zero performance increases in how many releases now.. 10? No AIGLX support.. it most likely can't be supported with the drivers in their current state
They remind me of ATI's Windows drivers pre-catalyst.. Cobbling on support for newer cards any improvement(s) seemed to break other parts of the drivers. They best drivers came from Cyborg and Omega mixing previous and leaked beta's rather than ATI's Official releases. All that changed with Catalyst.. I'm hopeful that it will be the same way for their Linux drivers once the new architecture is implemented.

I'm also looking forward to the day that I can participate in a thank you thread for the Linux Catalyst Drivers like there is for Windows. Right now it must be kind of discouraging to MTippett and the rest
of AMD's Linux staff, to work on the releases and see very few positive responses.. I'm sure it's hard work just keeping these functional.