Catalyst 10.1 and Xorg 7.5 / 1.7.x?

[monraaf]

Don't get me wrong I'm not pro-Nvidia -- all my past GPUs are ATI's -- but I feel that dealing with this issue would be *really* appreciated by the community... a lot more than support for new GPUs.

I don't know exactly which community you are speaking out for, but I think a lot of people who bought a HD 5xxxx card, me included, would disagree with this.

[nbi1]

IMO, power management is the only thing missing from the OSS drivers. If I operate my 4870 with the open drivers, it sits there and fries. You could cook hamburgers on it.

That's because there's no fan control, at least none that I can find. That's one of the motivations for sticking with fglrx. With the Radeon driver my 4850 runs hot.

[energyman]

and what is so important about 1.7 that you must have it? Apart from the version number?

oh wait.. nothing.

[Kano]

@bridgman

Basically the "new GPU" support is certainly done in the shared part of the fglrx driver that would be the same in Win. There is absolutely no excuse that the Linux/X bindings around the binary part is not updated yet. Nv managed that months ago! Or do you want to claim that your ATI's fglrx Linux "team" (or is ist just 1 person?) has to work on GPU upgrades as well?

[not.sure]

and what is so important about 1.7 that you must have it? Apart from the version number?

oh wait.. nothing.

True. But if something is already old enough to be in Debian testing(!!), and you still say it's 'too new'.. well.. that can't be good. Then even users with a rather conservative upgrade philosophy will be stuck.

[bridgman]

@bridgman

Basically the "new GPU" support is certainly done in the shared part of the fglrx driver that would be the same in Win. There is absolutely no excuse that the Linux/X bindings around the binary part is not updated yet. Nv managed that months ago! Or do you want to claim that your ATI's fglrx Linux "team" (or is ist just 1 person?) has to work on GPU upgrades as well?

Yep, there are some common code modules which implement a good part of the new GPU support. The issue is that sometimes (depending on the nature of the new GPU features) adding new GPU support often comes along with making significant API changes to those modules, and that pushes work out to all of the client drivers which use that common code. There are also some chunks of functionality (control panel being the obvious one) which have separate implementations for Linux and Windows. In the case of the Evergreen line the display changes resulted in a fair amount of display driver redesign.

[mtippett]

Well, I guess I will return my HD4670 and get an Nvidia equivlent. If someone from AMD/ATI is reading this forum: you lost another sale, fess up and at the very least provide drivers for stable Xorg and kernel releases. How hard can it be? Does the API really change that much between releases? Nvidia can obviously keep up.

Yes. The API does break does change in driver relevant ways.

NV effectively moved away from all common X code and the resultant invasive binary replacement of things like libglx. So yes, they get it easier due to less interfaces that need to be kept in sync.

ATI (or at least when I was there) had a less-invasive driver, but was more prone to break X release to X release since it was exposed to XAA/DRI/GLX, etc and there was lots of changes happening with them.

The end result is that ATI has to move away from the standard interfaces (much the same as NV), but will be more invasive on install. Difficult choice, but that's where it sits.

IIRC, the last 3 releases of Xorg broke ABI compatibility with GLX, DRI and I think some core X functions. That's the price for "Innovation".

Matthew

[Kano]

Nobody looks how "invasive" the drivers are - they just have to work. As the mesa libs are always exchanged it does not matter if there are more files exchanged or not. You can not mix fglrx with other cards for 3d anyway (well maybe using a LIBDIR override, but who does that) so nobody will care.

[mirv]

Well I wouldn't say nobody will care...I personally prefer to have drivers as least invasive as possible.

[Kano]

That way with every supported Xserver the installer has got extra binaries. Logically the installer is getting bigger everytime. The latest nvidia drivers grew too, but more due to extra opencl libs. ATI ships the same driver multiply times.