The Truth About ATI/AMD & Linux

[yoshi314]

Should we really care that much about R200?

of course we should. there are lots of machines with those cards installed or embedded into mainboards and they're going to stay around.

i mean, linux has even drivers for cards like s3 trio, or 3dfx. it's not a linux way of doing things abandoning support for older hardware.

[Svartalf]

Should we really care that much about R200? There are talks of R700 for Q1 2008. Should people be stuck in the past resolving DX8 issues for R200?

Sigh...

I really, really wish people would quit fixating on what chipset we're talking about here and get to the meat of the problem- which is the same whether you're talking about the R200, R300, R400, R500, R600, or the hypothetical R700.

[amwriter]

The release document was slashdotted a day or two ago...

Think this guy is on to something:

http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=237293&cid=19383997

Makes me wonder if the Linux w/ATI user group as a whole might be able to do more to get ATI's attention.

[emparq]

If it weren't for the Thinkpad, I would not have to bother with these pathetic ATI drivers at all.

Does anyone have any idea why Lenovo went with ATI over NVidia for the high-end Thinkpads?

They dropped ATI with their T61-series. NVidia is now their high-end graphics adapters.

[emparq]

here is a comparable article about nvidia driver development:
http://www.abclinuxu.cz/clanky/rozho...-nvidia?page=1

Thanks for the link, good read. Back to my earlier point about public communication (at least in a rough sense of what's-in-the-pipeline), AMD/ATI could help rebuild their public image if they took a cue from Andy Ritger and started offering more public information along similar lines.

See below:

Andy Ritger: Thanks for asking. Some of the improvements that we plan for the Linux driver over the coming months include:

- Improving our GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap implementation's handling of out-of-videomemory scenarios (this is the cause of the "black window bug" when running Compiz or Beryl composite managers)
- RandR 1.2 support; this will layer on top of the NVIDIA X driver's current dynamic display configuration support.
- Improved mobile support, focusing on hotkey switching, and power management handling.
- Various improvements to our Render acceleration support.
- Improvements for many of our workstation products, including Quadro Plex, G-Sync and SDI.

Here's hoping AMD/ATI will decide to follow suit with more public communication along similar lines.

[Licaon]

from the nVidia interview:

Additionally, we see a growing portion of NVIDIA's workstation customer base using Linux, primarily in highend markets like Oil and Gas, Medical Imaging, and Digital Content Creation.

i was asking myself for a while: "Doesn't ATi want a share of this?" come on... these are high level customers using linux massively onto alot of workstations

[Svartalf]

from the nVidia interview:
i was asking myself for a while: "Doesn't ATi want a share of this?" come on... these are high level customers using linux massively onto alot of workstations

They didn't think the money was even IN that space- they sort of only worried about Windows and more DirectX (and you'd get shuffled off to DirectX by DevRel if you were on Windows at all if they could at all do it...). AMD does think this and they DO want a piece of that ever growing pie- but they don't know how bad things really are right now and how long they've been that way.

[glussier]

My take on "The Truth About ATI/AMD & Linux

1- Control Center, this function is only a squeleton of the windows Control Center. The speed at which AMD/ATI are developping-it now, it will take years before it gets the functionality of the one available in windows.

2- AIGLX, I believe that we may get this before the end of the year.

3- Performance, The ATI driver performance in windows is twice the performance in Linux, therefore driver performance has to increase 2 folds (100%). I don't think that AMD/Ati will ever be able to do that. If it is possible, it means that the ATI linux driver is baddly designed and coded, therefore the whole driver team should be replaced.

What I suspect, is that the ATI card were designed for directX (makes sense, as all the current ATI cardss are based on the 9700Pro which was designed by ATI with the help of Microsoft). Probably low level directx functions are hardwired directly on the gpus.

The present driver's monthly schedule has been going for 2 years, so it was not invented by AMD. In that 2 years if the driver team was not able to increase the driver performance, nobody will be able to convince me that in the next 6 months the linux drivers will get performance parity with the windows driver.


For the past 6 months AMD has been in talk mode only, look at all the bad news: R600, except for the high-end model, was a paper launch. Probably, Barcelona if release in July, will be a paper launch, has we know know, that the Barcelona may not be released before October of this year.

[yoshi314]

i also cannot fight back the impression that ati cards are like winmodems - they'll work properly only with the so-called 'operating system' from redmond.

[mlau]

My take on "The Truth About ATI/AMD & Linux

1- Control Center, this function is only a squeleton of the windows Control Center. The speed at which AMD/ATI are developping-it now, it will take years before it gets the functionality of the one available in windows.

I suggest ATI document the X extension required to configure the driver
at runtime or maybe even provide some backend library code (source of
course) which talks to the driver and let others write the actual GUI/CLI
code.

I'm sure there are lot of bored people out there who'd like to
write a decent control center app (me included, although I have very
limited experience writing userspace apps and GUI code because I do kernel
work all day). Think of a native KDE/Gnome CCC app...