Ubuntu 9.10 Gets Unreleased Catalyst 9.10 Driver

[bridgman]

There's no support for my RS690M.

Support for GPUs based on the 3xx-5xx core, which includes RS690, was dropped from the Catalyst driver about 5 months ago and we shifted support focus to the open source drivers. Most distros ship with open source driver support built in and ready to go. What problems are you having ?

[tball]

Sure, except that's not what I said. I was just qroviding another side to the "everything is happening on Linux" comment. In the PC graphics market, a bit *more* is happening on Linux and I expect that growth to continue, but we do need to strike a balance across the whole PC graphics market.



Sounds reasonable, but the "1%-ish" numbers I was talking about were for all PC graphics vendors, not just us.

If the problem were our Linux support I would expect us to have a disproportionally low Linux market share compared with what we have on other OSes, and the Linux market would presumably do just fine without us. In reality, though, our market share in Linux seems to be quite close to our share in all other OSes.

I agree with you, but I think you might put the linux gpu market alittle too low. Many of us don't have any choice of buying a computer without windows preinstalled. And that counts as a windows buy, doesn't it?

Actually I think alot of the current linux users, have an oem window copy around somewhere. Even it is used or not.

At the university we are ~40 % using linux on a computer with windows preinstalled. Every single of those computers will count as a windows gpu buy.

(This is not bashing or anything like it. Just that I disagree with the ~1%-2% linux gpu market)

[bridgman]

I agree with you, but I think you might put the linux gpu market alittle too low. Many of us don't have any choice of buying a computer without windows preinstalled. And that counts as a windows buy, doesn't it?

Actually I think alot of the current linux users, have an oem window copy around somewhere. Even it is used or not.

If the system was purchased with Windows but is being used with Linux we would count that as a Linux system, not Windows. OEM hardware mfgs would probably treat it as Windows buy, however, which is one contributor to the chicken-and-egg problem with Linux pre-installs.

At the university we are ~40 % using linux on a computer with windows preinstalled. Every single of those computers will count as a windows gpu buy.

(This is not bashing or anything like it. Just that I disagree with the ~1%-2% linux gpu market)

Again, we would count your uni systems as Linux, not Windows. You can see how hard it is to get good numbers though. I can find numbers which convincingly argue for anything between 0.1% and nearly 20%, although the more credible ones tend to be somewhere in the middle.

Part of the problem is that Linux usage is "lumpy" - everyone you know uses Linux, most of the people I know use Linux, but if you start taking really random samples the numbers aren't so high. I did an informal survey of the people on my parent's street -- not one person on the street used Linux or knew anyone who did.

That doesn't prove anything, it just means that one of the priorities for the industry is getting some better market penetration numbers.

[nanonyme]

True, real Windows sales would probably be lower than they nowadays are if all machines wouldn't be bundled with Windows by default but I doubt that'd be worth more than a few, anyway less than ten, percent error marginal.
Edit: Oh, wait, am I talking about the wrong thing? Just took a quick look at the last few posts.

[tball]

If the system was purchased with Windows but is being used with Linux we would count that as a Linux system, not Windows. OEM hardware mfgs would probably treat it as Windows buy, however, which is one contributor to the chicken-and-egg problem with Linux pre-installs.

Fair enough. Didn't know that :-) But if the OEM mfgs don't give you the information about a linux gpu buy. Who does?

......

That doesn't prove anything, it just means that one of the priorities for the industry is getting some better market penetration numbers.

Totally agree. I didn't took the ~40% as normal, but far from. I just wanted to make a point, that actually none of us in my country have the choice of buying a computer without windows. Well thats not quite true, we can a buy a computer without windows from 1 computer company, but they tend to suck unfortunately.

Not even dell wants to sell their computer without windows overhere :S

[Schugy]

Support for GPUs based on the 3xx-5xx core, which includes RS690, was dropped from the Catalyst driver about 5 months ago and we shifted support focus to the open source drivers. Most distros ship with open source driver support built in and ready to go. What problems are you having ?

I'm unable to play games like Ankh, Ankh2 or Jack Keane with it. I can only watch the intro. Seems like open 3D drivers aren't yet feature complete. In my old Desktop PCs I have a GeForce2MX (bought in 2001!) and a 7600GT and both work with legacy drivers.

With the free drivers I can't even play foobillard without graphics errors and poor performance.

[nanonyme]

Iirc there actually were bugs in foobillard that cause some graphics errors. (as in, wrong assumptions about some parts of OpenGL implementation)

[smitty3268]

Iirc there actually were bugs in foobillard that cause some graphics errors. (as in, wrong assumptions about some parts of OpenGL implementation)

Right, foobilliard was using some OpenGL feature that most old drivers just passed along to another nearly equivalent one which worked the way they thought it should. But when the newer drivers implemented the feature they were using foobilliard broke because the calls were no longer getting passed to the function they should have been calling all along. The explanation came from Keith Packard about the Intel drivers having the same problem.

[kensai]

If the system was purchased with Windows but is being used with Linux we would count that as a Linux system, not Windows. OEM hardware mfgs would probably treat it as Windows buy, however, which is one contributor to the chicken-and-egg problem with Linux pre-installs.



Again, we would count your uni systems as Linux, not Windows. You can see how hard it is to get good numbers though. I can find numbers which convincingly argue for anything between 0.1% and nearly 20%, although the more credible ones tend to be somewhere in the middle.

Part of the problem is that Linux usage is "lumpy" - everyone you know uses Linux, most of the people I know use Linux, but if you start taking really random samples the numbers aren't so high. I did an informal survey of the people on my parent's street -- not one person on the street used Linux or knew anyone who did.

That doesn't prove anything, it just means that one of the priorities for the industry is getting some better market penetration numbers.

All these arguments from brigdman falls when you speak of nVIDIA, they have great Linux support even though it is not the market leader. Enough Said.

[bridgman]

Sorry Kensai, I don't get the connection. We were talking about market share and how to measure it. How are my "arguments" there failing ?