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

[Michael]

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?

Yes, NVIDIA's are binary blobs as well. However, many people end up converting from ATI -> NVIDIA due to the slower performance of the fglrx drivers, installation problems, etc..

[glussier]

To be frank, the fglrx drivers, nowadays, are not harder to install and get working than the nvidia drivers.

As for Open source drivers, I do not care all that much about that, as long as the drivers are working properly with up to par performance.

As long as I can remember, the original Radeon, Radeon SE, Rage 128 and even the mach32 and 64, I always managed to get the ati cards to work correctly and with good performance in linux.

Like it is now, it is cheaper to get an nvidia card than an ATI card for the same level of performance in linux. I am tired of funding a company, ehich doesn't care all that much about it's linux users, for the sole reason that this company is Canadian like I am, which btw is not the case anymore. Now I want to support companies which really support linux, nvidia for their good linux support and Intel for their open source drivers and their excellent programming tools (compiles, profilers, optimizers and debugging tools).

[Synergy6]

Neither have opened their drivers, true. But NVidia do have far better driver support, even though it is in a closed binary. Black, but less black than AMD.

[niniendowarrior]

To be frank, the fglrx drivers, nowadays, are not harder to install and get working than the nvidia drivers.

Yeah, sure. I can agree to this on one thing. ATi can automate the installation. Working is a totally different matter.

[yoshi314]

getting a fglrx kernel module is not a big problem, but making the xorg part to work is sometimes tricky :]

so i can partially agree with that.

btw i just found something that resembles the post of one proprietary driver ex-developer i mentioned. (although that's not the one i was looking for)

http://ajaxxx.livejournal.com/53522.html?thread=133650#t133650