Benchmarks Of AMD's Newest Gallium3D Driver

[darkbasic]

read well above 100k$

It means 1000 peoples willing to donate 100$. I'm pretty sure it's a reasonable target _IF_ some org opens a dedicated donation fund.
Anyway, even if we reach the 100k$/year target, it means no more than 10 developers. It's a big difference, but I don't think it will be enough to close the gap with the catalyst.

In a perfect world Amd will drop catalyst to concentrate on the open drivers, but thanks to patents it will remain a dream

[pingufunkybeat]

It's not 100 full-time people working on the LINUX part of Catalyst, it's 100 (or more) full-time people working on Catalyst in general, most of which is shared between Windows, Linux, BSD and OSX.

The Linux support for Catalyst drivers is obviously not the main focus of the AMD driver developers, the vast majority goes into improving Windows performance, and Linux gets these improvements for free.

It's not very likely that AMD would give up WINDOWS drivers (Catalyst) just so they can put all the people to work on Linux drivers. It's not going to happen.

[89c51]

If we can gather several millions of dollars i proposing myself as CEO ;-)

the only thing we can gather now is cheezburgers and internets

[Qaridarium]

For several millions of dollars I'm sure glisse would finish the driver stack himself

the time part is missing... glisse will finish the driver instandly.

money makes the world go around.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1y...go-round_music

[xiando]

It's not 100 full-time people working on the LINUX part of Catalyst, it's 100 (or more) full-time people working on Catalyst in general, most of which is shared between Windows, Linux, BSD and OSX.

The Linux support for Catalyst drivers is obviously not the main focus of the AMD driver developers, the vast majority goes into improving Windows performance, and Linux gets these improvements for free.

It's not very likely that AMD would give up WINDOWS drivers (Catalyst) just so they can put all the people to work on Linux drivers. It's not going to happen.

How many of these 100 drones are working on the Linux part? If just 5 of them are doing so and these drones were moved into free driver development then that would obviously help the free drivers somewhat.

I would prefer this since I don't use the non-free Catalyst, but I do see why the AMD shareholders could prefer that these drones continiue to work on the evil binary blob driver.

[pingufunkybeat]

Well, I'd prefer that too, but AMD is after the professional workstation market, and as long as Mesa, drm, Gallium, and the related infrastructure can't provide OpenGL4 and similar stuff, I don't expect AMD to drop Catalyst for Linux.

[bridgman]

I know the obvious response at this point will be "but if you moved the Catalyst for Linux developers to the open source driver then you could have GL4 etc...", but that's not how it works. We develop the Catalyst driver code and share it across 100% of the PC market (ie all OSes), but if we moved the devs who make that common code available on Linux to working on the open source driver then they would not be able to leverage the work done for all of the other OSes, ie they would be working on a Linux-specific code base, and the same number of developers would *not* be able to deliver the same level of features and performance.

Put simply, open source drivers share code across HW vendors (ie the intel, radeon and nouveau driver stacks share a lot of common code, which is why they have similar features) while proprietary drivers share code across OSes.

[HokTar]

As if fglrx delivers the same features as catalyst...


Sorry, I am not a troll, but this one was shouting for such a reply.

Anyway, I suspect that having good h264 decoding possibilities and an efficient dynpm would significantly reduce the whining and the "what if" comments. Opengl and cl would still remain but we could have a good everyday driver. Are these on your short-term list? Maybe even helping out Christian Konig. Well, one can dream, I guess.

[bridgman]

???

In cases where the feature implementation is relatively OS-independent (ie where code *can* be shared across OSes) I believe the Linux and Windows versions of Catalyst *do* have the same features (eg OpenGL, OpenCL).

In cases where the implementation is OS-dependent or DRM is a factor (video decode acceleration, Eyefinity on older X version, even suspend/resume), ie where the code has to be pretty much re-implemented from scratch for Linux, the features on Linux can lag. Those features tend not to be a high priority for the workstation market though, so the model works OK.

For in-between things (where some of the code has to be re-implemented but not all, eg power management) there has been a lag but not so much these days.

[bridgman]

Anyway, I suspect that having good h264 decoding possibilities and an efficient dynpm would significantly reduce the whining and the "what if" comments. Opengl and cl would still remain but we could have a good everyday driver. Are these on your short-term list? Maybe even helping out Christian Konig. Well, one can dream, I guess.

Top priority for the AMD devs is enabling support for new GPU generations (via code and/or docs) and supporting community devs, which are the things that pretty much have to be done in house. When time permits, the devs also work on improving existing support (Alex wrote the initial EXA and Textured Video code, along with initial power management and a bunch of other things, Richard added GLSL and flow control support) but only when time permits.

Other than not being enabled by default, are you seeing problems with dynpm ? My recollection was that the "glitching" issue was largely fixed a month or two ago, and the remaining TODO task (splitting the code so that memory and engine clocks are changed in different blanking periods) could be done by anyone.