Given up on ATI. sold and bought an NVidia

[Kano]

@bridgman

It is ok to support newly released distros, but ATI's fglrx developers completely forget those already released older distros! Try to use compiz or beryl with Xorg 7.1.1 or Xserver 1.3 - no go for ages! I do not say that for every driver release because I did not enable it by default and those who really need it installed anothoer distro in the meantime, but supporting ONLY current releases is absolutely crap and Nvidia supports at least for the new cards every distro and Xserver (somehow they don't want to support Xserver 1.5+ for older GeForce 2 cards and older). If you can not install those distros on your own, I could even do live iso images which show those errors - absolutely no problem...

[RealNC]

@bridgman

It is ok to support newly released distros, but ATI's fglrx developers completely forget those already released older distros! Try to use compiz or beryl with Xorg 7.1.1 or Xserver 1.3 - no go for ages!

This reminds of this other thread where I rant about the "version zoo" of Linux libs and APIs

[jonnycat26]

but for now I *think* our first priority should be dealing with issues on released distros and moving further upstream as we make progress.

I'd totally agree with that. And so, I beg you to either do one of two things:

• Give us XV + composite without issues
• Give us a non-flickering OpenGL + composite

Seriously, I'd give quite a bit to be able to watch a movie while I have composite + desktop effects enabled.

Oh, and fixing that multi-user X session bug would be great too.

[RealNC]

I'd be happy to maximize and resize windows without lag for a start

[SyXbiT]

I'd totally agree with that. And so, I beg you to either do one of two things:

• Give us XV + composite without issues
• Give us a non-flickering OpenGL + composite

Seriously, I'd give quite a bit to be able to watch a movie while I have composite + desktop effects enabled.

Oh, and fixing that multi-user X session bug would be great too.

I'd have to agree.

I'll let you choose mr. Bridgman.
You say you don't want to promise stuff, in case you let us down, but We need promises, or we'll bail to nvidia.
No, this isn't a threat, but a fact of life.
I really hope you respond to people who request a feature, instead of just give vague defence.

Not supporting Xserver 1.5 (for a few months) was a SERIOUS let down.
can you assure me that this won't happen for 1.6, 1.7 etc.. ?
because, if you can't, I have no choice but to never buy ATI again

Same goes for supporting compiz properly.
can you assure me this is a high HIGH priority for ATI, and that you are working on it, and that it will be fixed VERY soon (and properly)

Same goes for hardware decoding of h264. while ATI released some unused libraries, nvidia has actually done it. And given source code to mplayer etc..

Can you assure me this is a high HIGH priority for ATI, and that it will happen soon (a few months)

This is the sort of feedback the community needs.
This is the sort of thing that will make me buy ATI again.

Bridgeman, I'd really appreciate specific answers to my questions.
I can always return my nvidia card

[mits]

"Πόντος"=Pontus was a GOD of the old greek mytologie.. every new sidux have a own GOD how protects the user... first sidux god was "Chaos" "χάος"

oh, didn't know that... cool (I had actually forgotten about the god (/titan) Pontus too)

[Kjella]

Bridgeman, I'd really appreciate specific answers to my questions.

I think you want the answers you'd like to hear rather than the reality of it. In the grand scheme of things AMD support for Linux is far from their top priority compared to Windows, and of the Linux users they're first and foremost interested in solving the issues that professional OpenGL users buying high margin cards are having. If Bridgman told you having dancing monkey cubes on the open source desktop was their highest priority he'd be lying his ass off and you know it. Of course, this is pretty much true for nVidia too but just putting things a little into perspective.

A lot of the things AMD is taking the blame for are the shortcomings of X. It wasn't designed for synching video frames, it wasn't designed for compositing and it's just recently work has gone into changing all that. nVidia did something about it by overriding the bottom half of X and rolling their own, while AMD and Intel have taken steps to make X better even though it's not really a vendor-specific thing. It's common driver infrastructure that should have been generic to the kernel and X.

Bridgman has been pretty honest about it - they've got a limited staff and are trying to do things in order of priority. They will help, but not write the whole open driver themselves. UVD is a legal quagmire that may never be open source, and there's other things higher up on the list like power management. Compositing without flickering or tearing should end as soon as the driver model hits the 21st century. Not good enough? Well, you can tell sweet sweet lies but no, all your problems will not go away in a few months.

[SyXbiT]

I think you want the answers you'd like to hear rather than the reality of it. ......

I know that. I'm not complaining. I'm aware that ATI may have other priorities.

what I want to know, is what they are.

If ATI were to officially admit that compiz and XServer 1.6 weren't a priority, we couldn't complain.

ATI just needs to be more open. They need to make promises, and keep them.

If they can't guarantee compiz, hardware decoding and XServer support are a priority, I won't complain, I'll just buy nvidia

sound fair? (so, Bridgman, can I get a response?)

[NSLW]

I won't complain, I'll just buy nvidia

I recommend you to do it now and spend your money on nvidia because it is the best motivation for ATi to hire more developers to work on the drivers. More developers are needed because ATi drivers lack many features and they wont catch up with nvidia with such a slow speed.

[bridgman]

SyXbiT bought an NVidia card before this thread started, so the discussion is really kind of moot. The offer is really "if you make enough promises I might send back my NVidia card".

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=15333

Neither we nor any of the other hardware vendors are making advance promises on future driver features. We do try to give guidance, however.

Our current priorities outside of the core workstation business are to get close to feature parity with other OSes except where limited by OS and/or graphics framework, and to ramp up support for consumer-related features. We have added Ubuntu to the supported OS list (previously just RH and SuSE) and you can assume that anything needed to work well with Ubuntu will be on our list.