ATI, when will we be able to watch a movie in Linux??!!

[dungeon]

Yes it is!

[vertigo]

The open source drivers recently picked up a tear-free solution that kinda bypasses the framework, not sure yet if we can do something like that in fglrx.

I doesn't work now and it won't work in the foreseeable future.
Great news!
Thanks!

[bridgman]

I doesn't work now and it won't work in the foreseeable future.
Great news!
Thanks!

Well, if you want to make up your own news and be disappointed by it I can't really stop you.

That is, however, *not* what I said.

[jonnycat26]

Well, if you want to make up your own news and be disappointed by it I can't really stop you.

That is, however, *not* what I said.

I know it's not your fault, and I really appreciate having someone in the know who takes the time to post here..

But if we could have some or *any* idea as to what's being worked on and what's a priority, it'd really mollify a lot of us.

[bridgman]

Nobody in the business pre-announces software features, and I don't really think we are likely to start doing that ourselves.

That said, it's a pretty fair bet that your priorities are the same as ours, with the caveat that most of our Linux business comes from the commercial workstation market so our priorities will continue to be a mix of consumer and commercial expectations.

That doesn't mean that consumer wants will be ignored (far from it), just that the progress may not always be as fast as you would expect from the resources we are committing to Linux. When you see improvements in areas that you don't give a rat's a** about, like Crossfire or the ability to run accelerated 3D on 4 screens, remember that those features *are* important to other Linux customers even if they're not something you care about.

Unless you're looking at a few specific issues (eg running fglrx with bleeding edge distros and unreleased kernel & xorg versions, or duplicating NVidia driver *internals* so that Wine devs only have to code for one GPU) our plan is to continue making improvements in the areas that users are asking about the most.

[jonnycat26]

Nobody in the business pre-announces software features, and I don't really think we are likely to start doing that ourselves.

Not to be an ass, but aren't you really in the hardware business? As I see it, you only write drivers so that the hardware you sell works. Given that fact, wouldn't it make some sense to tell us what we can expect in the next few months to year?

[bridgman]

Sure, in the sense that we *sell* hardware and *license* software, but the software and hardware engineering efforts are not that far apart in scale, and at various times most of the GPU vendors have spent equal amounts on SW and HW engineering.

We are in the product business, and most of the visible face of the product is software.

Modern GPUs have evolved into highly parallel floating point engines with a few specialized functions (eg texture filtering and triangle rasterization) so the "system functionality" (ie what most of the competition is about) is almost entirely defined by software.

The "new hardware features" are really boring -- all of the "new features" are in software. The days of software just exposing the underlying hardware capabilities are long gone.

[jonnycat26]

Sure, in the sense that we *sell* hardware and *license* software, but the software and hardware engineering efforts are not that far apart in scale, and at various times most of the GPU vendors have spent equal amounts on SW and HW engineering.

But... but... if people knew (specifically linux users) that you were planning on fixing things like, dunno, the opengl flickering with composite enabled, maybe they'd buy an ATI card instead of a NVidia. Maybe I wouldn't throw mine down a sewer.

Just saying.

[bridgman]

I do understand that, and it's a strong argument for providing pre-release info, but we also don't want to get stuck in a situation where people are making purchase decisions based on future promises which for some reason we can't deliver. We have to sell based on what we are shipping today, combined with your reasonable expectations for the future based on the progress you have seen so far.

Right now only one released driver supports OpenGL under Compiz and that driver does it by replacing DRI with proprietary code. The X/DRI community is planning to move from "compositing off by default" to "compositing on by default" over the next year; we expect to be part of that transition.

[Redeeman]

in that case you might want to make it somewhat more apparant to the linux users what to expect, after having huge giant humongos articles on phoronix, displaying tux and ati logos, saying same day support and all sorts of stuff(i realize this isnt really ati/amd doing those articles), you may want to slap a huge giant notice on your linux page saying:
"Dear customer, while we do provide a blob for linux, which can(maybe, if you happen to have a lucky motherboard) drive the card, lots of features are probably not there, or broken. For instance, you may experience X not starting, video will probably be useless for you, and we dont have ANY idea(that we will tell you about though) when this might come."

Btw, now that i got you here, any progress on getting the weird half-wrong message removed from the 64bit driver download page?

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10868