AMD/ATI lost another Linux customer

[energyman]

Hey m4rgin4l, I'm one of the guys like you! But in my case, I bought a 3870 which doesnt allow me to play Team Fortress 2 in Linux (crashes when loading a map, right now flickering because ATi HDMI is used). I never entered a map. But I bought the 3870 because of AMDs step to release documentation. I could have bought a Geforce 8800GT at that time, but I wanted to support AMD.

In the first step, I justed wanted to tell you:
Are you taking part in OOS driver development? No? Then STFU!
But on the other hand: With buying an AMD card, you already supported them! So, your task is done! Now its their task to give you drivers for your platform.

But the main reason why I'm being so hard to AMD is, because you're right saying "They dont care about costumers!" Need a prove?
The so called "Themen-Woche" (Topic-Week) on planet3dnow: http://www.planet3dnow.de/vbulletin/...play.php?f=197
It was advertised with users can ask AMD, AMD answers! AMD did NOTHING!!!! Let me repeat: NOTHING!!! They totally blamed one of the biggest sites in Germany! Wanna see how to do it properly? Look at the Intel-Evening: http://www.planet3dnow.de/vbulletin/...play.php?f=198 They nearly answered everything! Last time, when they couldn't answer, they asked a spezialist at the company and gave the answer later.

AS a stock owner (yeah, I made that mistake, too), I wrote to AMD. The answer?
Well, thank you! How about apologizing to planet3dnow and making a REAL topic-week?

Overall: You're right! AMD doesn't take care about costumers, after they bought a card. Well.. yeah.. Wait! They supported a funny overclocking event (http://www.planet3dnow.de/vbulletin/blog.php?cp=8). Thanks AMD! Good Job and cheap advertisement for your superduperuberoverclockable CPUs, that can't compare at stock speed with Intels High-End-CPUs.

Sorry for being offtopic... But I needed to say this!

and cost less then a third.

[energyman]

I find it funny how people can be so generous to a company that doesnt properly support your platform and yet not donate a dime to the various projects that make up that platform.

'generous'?

what would you suggest? buying from nvidia who gives a shit?

[bakou]

First triangle was 9 months ago. Now we have most of the major functions working and are trying to hunt down a nagging problem with vertex buffers so that we can expand the testing. The back-to-front copy used in GLSwapBuffers is not yet HW accelerated but agd5f is working on that now.

My mistake, I was confused. After re-reading the news it seems the latest was that radeon-rewrite R600/700 can now run most simple OpenGL apps like glxgears etc. And with double buffering and shader support I assume we'll have full 3D support soon, good!

Simple. The fglrx driver is what we need for the professional workstation market. Over the last 18 months or so we have also started using it to deliver high end features to consumer users. I expect that most consumer users will be perfectly happy with the open source drivers, however.

The critical path items for the open source drivers have been (a) writing and releasing the programming docs, and (b) coming up to speed on the latest driver stack. I don't think adding more developers would have really made that much difference.

Our largest Linux market is still the professional workstation market, which is almost entirely based on enterprise distros and relatively stable hardware platforms. That's where fglrx comes from, and where it continues to be essential. As long as we are making a proprietary driver, we are also trying to use it as a vehicle to deliver neat new features to consumer users, such as MultiView and Crossfire.

Whats wrong with xrandr? In my limited experience with fglrx (Yes I tried it a while ago on Ubuntu 8.10 but it didn't last long on my system) multiview didn't work very well at all, especially with compiz which is what makes dual screens on Linux these days much more usable (windows actually maximize to the right size properly when using two screens of different sizes across a large virtual desktop etc, which I often do at work). xrandr under xorg 1.6.2, intel 2.7 and compiz 8.2 and the latest 2.6.30 kernel patch is very solid for me, Also according to most benchmarks I have seen crossfire performance is not great compared to Windows. You don't plan to implement crossfire in the open source driver? Sorry but I have a hard time believing fglrx is so perfect that people actually want to use the most powerful ATi cards on Linux over other options for enterprise rendering workstations, even though you surely know better than me.

We could have done all the development in secret and only announced when we were finished, but I think that would have taken longer and annoyed the community in the process. We wanted to hire developers who were familiar with the open source stack, and it seemed to make the most sense to have them keep working closely with the rest of the community. That meant you had to watch and suffer while we did the development rather than just being given the end product, but I still think this is the right way to proceed.

I am glad you didn't keep it secret, that would probably make everyone even more irritated and hopeless if you did

I'm logged in on Windows too, but for different reasons -- after 2 years and a big box of scrapped hardware I still haven't found a Linux analog modem driver or standalone modem that can handle my crappy rural phone line ;(

Lame. I once had a rural phone line random disc. issue (in Windows with a softmodem) and we complained so much to the phone company that they came and did some fixes on the line nearby, worked fine after! But yes it sounds like you understand where we are coming from when people on this forum complain about the state of Linux drivers.

[AdrenalineJunky]

As a user of a Lenovo T500 with switchable graphics between the Intel 4500X chipset and an ATi 3650, I feel the need to add to this discussion. I can't believe we have an AMD employee here going on about "BLEEDING EDGE" software support. That is completely ridiculous. Let me say I am no open source crusader, I use the NVIDIA closed sourced drivers on other machines, and I wold also use fglrx IF IT WORKED. I respect that you have released documents on open source, but if you really wanted to effect changes quickly in the Linux community you would just release the source for fglrx for Linux, since it is obvious you need the open source community's help developing that buggy piece of shit, rather than forcing them to reverse engineer everything from scratch just to protect some kind of trade secrets, which are no longer really secrets anyway.

Since my machine uses many new components I am required to use these so-called bleeding edge kernels. The oldest kernel I can use to give me wireless support is 2.6.27, 2.6.28 supposedly works with it however it is buggy and I experienced some crashes. Additionally, the oldest kernel I can use to get proper support for my Intel chipset GPU with the new Intel drivers is a heavily patched version of 2.6.29, or preferably 2.6.30 (both of these also work great with the wireless, thank you!). Intel or NVIDIA do not send their employees to troll forums complaining about bleeding edge software, rather they actually work on supporting the current state of Linux software, and they do a fine job of it. Also the NVIDIA closed source drivers add support for these 'bleeding edge' kernels usually before they are even officially out.

Since, as you can see I use a laptop from a company you have obviously made a deal with to officially support, I find it rather insulting that your company has sent you here to make excuses, since you are not supporting it whatsoever in Linux. The fglrx driver serves almost no purpose that I can see, it is too buggy to use for any practical reason 3D drivers are used, even if I was willing to downgrade my kernel and forget about supporting the rest of my perfectly good hardware from companies which make working drivers available in a timely manner. It would be completely impractical for me to downgrade my entire system and compromise all my other hardware anyway, just to use drivers with buggy 3D rendering, buggy compositing and buggy video playback (oh right, all 3 reasons to even use a 3D card in the first place!)

I am sorry for the insulting and ranting tone of this post, but given you appear to be posting on behalf of AMD/ATi you are bringing out the worst of my feelings on this issue, and your stance is illogical and inexcusable.

if you wanna complain about FGLRX - its at least understandable, but at the same time i don't think you understand the full situation AMD inherited from ATI, or just how far it has come.

but calling the AMD employees who spend their time here trolls is rediculous, as they spend alot of time providing very interesting and usefull information, as well as insight into what exactly is going on at AMD.

furthermore, despite the dmesg spamming (which can be stopped) with patches FGLRX actually works quite well with 2.6.29/2.6.30, i use arch linux and have never had to wait for more then a day or two after a new kernel or driver is released to install it, yes this is some measure of extra work for the community, but bridgeman has explained before that due the the huge codebases and the amount of work to be done AMD decided to try to support kernels in a time frame that would work for the majority of people allowing them to still maximize effort on adding new features and fixing bugs, in an order that once again benefits the majority of people - which is hardly unreasonable considering 2 years ago the drivers were so far beyond horrible it was a joke.

[bakou]

if you wanna complain about FGLRX - its at least understandable, but at the same time i don't think you understand the full situation AMD inherited from ATI, or just how far it has come.


but calling the AMD employees who spend their time here trolls is rediculous, as they spend alot of time providing very interesting and usefull information, as well as insight into what exactly is going on at AMD.

I understand its a bad situation, providing information is good, making excuses as to why you can't compete with your two major competitors is not. You have to understand how angry that makes me as a long time supporter of Linux and finally deciding to become an ATi customer for the first time since the Radeon 9600 pro era, largely because I didn't want an nVidia card that would die after a week in my laptop (despite knowing they have much more practical Linux support at the time, and having better performance at the same price point). I am not an AMD apologist or fanboy, I go with the company who I think will give me a better value for my dollar.

furthermore, despite the dmesg spamming (which can be stopped) with patches FGLRX actually works quite well with 2.6.29/2.6.30, i use arch linux and have never had to wait for more then a day or two after a new kernel or driver is released to install it, yes this is some measure of extra work for the community, but bridgeman has explained before that due the the huge codebases and the amount of work to be done AMD decided to try to support kernels in a time frame that would work for the majority of people allowing them to still maximize effort on adding new features and fixing bugs, in an order that once again benefits the majority of people - which is hardly unreasonable considering 2 years ago the drivers were so far beyond horrible it was a joke.

If the patch works so well why is it not integrated into the main driver releases, even after several releases? I have heard many people complaining about crashing after using the patches so I decided not to try it.

[Hasenpfote]

and cost less then a third.

No, the cost only slightly less than samespeed Intel-CPUs.
What I meant was, why do they show how great their CPUs are overclockable (with stuff everybody has at home like liquid nitrogen or even liquid helium), and can't compare with Intel at stock speeds?

Well, it's not so bad, that AMD is only delivering mid-range CPUs. But then they should give users other advantages, like real good customer support and good drivers (780G on Windows XP anyone?, GTA IV after release on HD 48xx, anyone?). Where is the ATI PowerXpress for Desktops? Why do I need to have a card that uses 60W while being idle? btw: @bridgeman: it is planned to implement PowerXpress on Linux?

[AdrenalineJunky]

No, the cost only slightly less than samespeed Intel-CPUs.
What I meant was, why do they show how great their CPUs are overclockable (with stuff everybody has at home like liquid nitrogen or even liquid helium), and can't compare with Intel at stock speeds?

Well, it's not so bad, that AMD is only delivering mid-range CPUs. But then they should give users other advantages, like real good customer support and good drivers (780G on Windows XP anyone?, GTA IV after release on HD 48xx, anyone?). Where is the ATI PowerXpress for Desktops? Why do I need to have a card that uses 60W while being idle? btw: @bridgeman: it is planned to implement PowerXpress on Linux?

depends on the price point -it goes back and forth a bit. also platform prices make a huge difference as well. for instance, the AMD 955 gives similar performance to the i7 920, costs $65 less, but the cheapest motherboard supporting the i7 920 on newegg is $170, where as motherboards for the 955 can be found much, much cheaper.

as far as knocking ATI for issues - its not like nvidia has a perfectly clean slate there either - drivers for vista right after launch? display lockups on linux a while back? mobile cards falling dead left and right?

[bakou]

depends on the price point -it goes back and forth a bit. also platform prices make a huge difference as well. for instance, the AMD 955 gives similar performance to the i7 920, costs $65 less, but the cheapest motherboard supporting the i7 920 on newegg is $170, where as motherboards for the 955 can be found much, much cheaper.

as far as knocking ATI for issues - its not like nvidia has a perfectly clean slate there either - drivers for vista right after launch? display lockups on linux a while back? mobile cards falling dead left and right?

Yeah as I mentioned earlier the only reason I have an ATi card and am posting here is because I was scared of the mobile GPUs dying. Again, it's not really an excuse. There's a reason why this thread has the title it has. Looks like OP is willing to take the risk of going back to NVIDIA, doesn't it? I've had a small issue with one nVidia card out of like 5 that I've owned but I did overclock it too, and any issue I had with it in Linux relating to drivers was fixed very promptly. They may not be willing to open source much but at least they take the closed source drivers seriously. Seriously enough to not fuck over anyone who buys a new PC for a year.

[L33F3R]

'generous'?

what would you suggest? buying from nvidia who gives a shit?

at least it works. Same for intel, at least to a degree it works. Dont get me wrong i loved the athlon x2 and my old 9600 but you wont see me buy a phenom or a new ati card because for linux (and in the case of phenoms) they suck, period. Im not a dumb consumer, I buy shit that works. Maybe in the future the tides will change but as it stands you buy an ati card for the open source drivers, and thats it. What you propose is rewarding companies for bad behavior.

[energyman]

oh? phenoms suck with linux?

I posted on lkml because of a usb bug in sb700 - and amd devs were very quick in responding.

I once posted on lkml because of an ahci bug in nvidias 520 chipset. It also was fixed quickly - by the ahci maintainer.

Amd's amd64 architecture was even developed with linux devs together:

http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=107763851825114&w=2

and what have the cpus to do with the graphics? Nothing that is. AMD has still the best prize/performance ratio.

But hey, buy intel and tell us how much 3d sucks - or how poulsbo graphics are working out for you.