AMD's opensource lies exposed

[crazycheese]

Supporting ancient hardware indefinitely hinders a hardware company's ability to develop new hardware. Developing hardware pays bills too.

You are forgeting much bigger side of a medal - thankful customers vs raging customers.

[glxextxexlg]

You are forgeting much bigger side of a medal - thankful customers vs raging customers.

No they won't "rage" if the company drops binary support for their 2 year old r600-r700 hardware and when open source drivers will not be mature enough to make rage work. They'll rage instead.

[monraaf]

Haha, I love the "curve ball" argument.

Poor nvidia, suffering from the "curve balls" by the evil community, instead of simply releasing the specs for the hardware millions of people have purchased, and are not allowed to use, understand, or program.

But no, it's the "curve balls" that are the problems, but our heroes are dealing well with such brutal attacks.

LOL. Yeah deanjo's point of view can be quite entertaining, sometimes.

[pingufunkybeat]

LMAO, sorry but the medical research being done with Cuda is even saving the lives of poor ATI FOSS users.

That's the best argument I've heard yet.

If you use open source drivers, you kill children.

[pingufunkybeat]

No they won't "rage" if the company drops binary support for their 2 year old r600-r700 hardware and when open source drivers will not be mature enough to make rage work. They'll rage instead.

Some more FUD.

They dropped support for 5-year old chipsets.

That gives r600/r700 (which are very similar to program) another 3 years.

The only thing the free drivers are missing is OpenGL 3.1 support (this is 2/3 done) and performance optimisations.

I think that the drivers will be in a really good shape in 3 years.

[crazycheese]

Some more FUD.

They dropped support for 5-year old chipsets.

And nvidia:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux-display-amd64-96.43.19-driver.html

The problems with AMD opensource driver are following:
- ultra small crew
- development support is not connected to selling of cards(buy, don't buy - no matter)
-- same day support will hardly ever happen(maybe same half-year support is realistic)
- it will never reach full possible speed due to absence of close-to-hardware tools and direct communication with designers.
- no video acceleration, probably will never appear

If you buy a discrete card, 99,99% of people that do that, expect performance from it. Either its closed source or opensource matters maybe for 10% once they realise its either proprietary and functioning or opensource and inferrior code. Sadly, Nvidia has way better proprietary. So the decision for them is obvious.

Untill AMD realises this. Until it decides to change it. There will be no change in amounts of cards from AMD deployed under linux.

[agd5f]

Also, just to clarify, the older chips are still supported on existing supported platforms (windows and enterprise Linux distros), just not on new kernels and X versions.

[crazycheese]

That's the best argument I've heard yet.

If you use open source drivers, you kill children.

Im in no way deanjo supporter, but cycles wasted due to bugs and inefficiency or due to botnets and viruses - are same thing - wasted cycles.

[deanjo]

Some more FUD.

They dropped support for 5-year old chipsets.

RS690 introduced March 2007, driver support dropped March 2009. Last time I checked that was only two years.

[deanjo]

rather than pointing and laughing at the lack of X/Y/Z in free software - get coding or stfu?

Why when there is a perfectly good blob pre-made and ready to use that offers all the features needed. Hardware works for me, not the other way around where I work for the hardware so it can start working for me years down the road and never offer the same performance as the solution presented at time of purchase.