ATI R600/700 OSS 3D Driver Reaches Gears Milestone

[jntesteves]

...Now, this means I may actually see my card doing useful stuff with open driver by the time 9.10 gets out...

Sorry to cut off all your happiness like that but you probably won't see not even gears running out-of-the-box by the time of 9.10. We can hope for 10.04 but, being realistic, it won't be of much use before (at least) Q2 2010.
We can only hope (and pray) to be able to play real games with FOSS drivers by 2011.

God, I can't take this fglrx shit anymore.

[Ex-Cyber]

Yeah, this is probably coming in too late for the next cycle of the major distro releases. If I'm reading things right, Ubuntu 9.04, Fedora 12, and OpenSUSE all have feature freeze fairly soon (under a month for Fedora and OpenSUSE, a bit over a month for Ubuntu).

[?John?]

Never mind...

Sorry to cut off all your happiness like that but you probably won't see not even gears running out-of-the-box by the time of 9.10. We can hope for 10.04 but, being realistic, it won't be of much use before (at least) Q2 2010.
We can only hope (and pray) to be able to play real games with FOSS drivers by 2011.

No problem, I can live with that because I consider myself to be pretty patient which makes me able to wait for the good stuff as long as it takes.
Based on my own experience confirming all the legendary "fglrx sucks!" ranting of many others including you (which makes it very unlikely to dramatically change until open drivers reach usable state), I believe the majority of the anti-blob rationale has been validated by long-term practical experience of it's users, so I'll rather stick with the vendor who actively supports FOSS driver development even if it doesn't seem to be worth the trouble at the moment than sacrificing means for the sake of the end and getting forever stuck with any form of blob as a result.

Yeah, this is probably coming in too late for the next cycle of the major distro releases.

That's right, people here said the DRM component won't be able to make it into the mainline kernel until at least 2.6.32 and Ubuntu 9.10 is currently tracking for 2.6.31, but I was hoping this would be big enough to be worth some backporting.

God, I can't take this fglrx shit anymore.

Me neither, that's why I'm so excited no matter if this development has any major impact any time soon, because at least for me it's the warranty that things are actually about to change that counts the most.
If necessary, I may give fglrx another shot at the next round of distro updates, but that's it and I take it at best as a temporary solution, not as something worth using even if it magically starts flawlessly working overnight.

[Kano]

Wouldn't it be more logical to buy the card 2nd hand WHEN the driver is ready? Then it would be very cheap too

[Vash63]

Ahh, I'm so glad I don't have to worry about distro feature freezes and such preventing me from getting the latest updates for 6 months. <3 Gentoo.

[Ex-Cyber]

Wouldn't it be more logical to buy the card 2nd hand WHEN the driver is ready?

Only if you're building a computer for the sole purpose of running 3D apps on Linux. Otherwise it might be nice to have a decent computer to work with in the mean time without buying an additional graphics card.

[forum1793]

With recent git changes from yesterday and today I noticed glxgears still causes corruption (below the gears window) when dragging a different window partially over the gears window. But, the colors of the corruption are different. A few days ago, it was more of a colored snow (like watching UHF TV with zero reception). Now it is horizontal lines of blue and the blue color might match the video background color that seems to default for kde 4+.

I also noticed that if I leave mouse pointer over the X(close), minimize, or maximize button, for a second or so, additional corruption occurs or that gears stop spinning. [Edit]In this case, the corruption is a partial copy of the gears window, to the right and below the gears window. [Edit2]Same basic thing happens running gears from the mesa../progs/demos area.

[nanonyme]

With recent git changes from yesterday and today I noticed glxgears still causes corruption (below the gears window) when dragging a different window partially over the gears window. But, the colors of the corruption are different.

It appears to be garbage from previously rendered OpenGL programs so yes, it should be pretty much different depending what you've run previously. For me it just showed stuff from demos/texenv and tests/copypixrate or tests/subtexrate, unsure which. Both of the latter have a huge grey cup.
This would be consistent with the borked image I had; there the extra stuff was obviously leftovers from glxgears since I hadn't run other programs during that session.

[nanonyme]

Sample with corruption from different programs:

http://koti.kapsi.fi/nanonyme/public/corruption.png

[Ant P.]

Ahh, I'm so glad I don't have to worry about distro feature freezes and such preventing me from getting the latest updates for 6 months. <3 Gentoo.

Speak for yourself... I'm still waiting for perl 5.10