AMD's Hiring Open-Source Graphics Developers Still

[monraaf]

Open source driver fairy tale.

The red guy on the contrary cries for nice understandable open working boat. When the man gives him his money, red guy suddenly gives him a pile of wooden bricks and several ants. Puzzled, the man says three magic letters with question mark.

- "See - here is material so you make your own boat." the red guy explains;
"Here is description how to work with wood.
And those are two tiny helpers to assist you, and the likes of you, whom we call community, in making the boat
By the way,.. the two paddles are included preassembled, ants already assembled them.
You can, of course, wait for them to assemble the whole boat in 40 years.
But, we are not associated with them... so you are on your own"

- "But I want a boat! I pay for it, in the end..."

- "Oh, you mean that. Of course, we have that too. Here."
And red guy handles him a black squishy something that immediately sinks under water, causing red guy to pull it back and smile.
"You can trust it, it is as good as from green guy"

LOL, nice story

Yeah, I think AMD is trying to mimic the IKEA business model on Linux. They deliver the goods but you have to assemble it yourself, or in this case write the drivers. Only difference writing drivers is a whole lot more complicated than assembling furniture, and there's no Linux discount, you still have to pay the full Windows price even if you don't use it.

[bridgman]

Open source driver fairy tale.

OK, so if I understand correctly your concerns are :

1. that we are somehow misleading our customers into believing that there will be useable (by *their* criteria) open source drivers when in fact there are no useful drivers and nothing exists but some documentation and some promises

(btw who are you claiming made the promises ?)

2. that we are claiming our proprietary drivers are competitive in the workstation market when in fact they are not useable for workstation scenarios

Is that about right ?

[crazycheese]

I have no experience with that crap browser. How many FPS do you get with KDE? With vsync on it's a constant 60fps here.

Over 60 I guess, I will test this once I'm at home(I'm currently not).

Don't get me started on Windows, especialy with laptops.

No, ok, I will not.

Soon we'll have the best SLI possible: all GPU's running. I don't see the problem. Also SVG acceleration. Windows and Mac are stuck in the dark ages with that.

Strangely, nvidia invests for gpgpu on linux way more. Until recent purchase of whole truck of engineers by AMD for this case, but I didn't hear from them much and they are rumored NOT to work on opensource project.

SVG and things will only be possible thanks to Google effort (call it lobby if you wish, but its positive lobby in terms of development). So all hail google. I cross my fingers for your success, holy dataminers. (well, at least they don't leak the collected data)

Strangely, something very complex and much widely accepted such as Adobe Falsh is accelerated for years on non-linux by AMD. But linux gets accelerated unused SVG.. Nice. I hope someone from W3C sues Adobe for closed format being a standard and puts all the data with arguments as hi-def flash film on his server, whilst handing over a linux powered laptop with opensource driver to the the judge to see this reaction. Will he rule out the decision to make Falsh opensource or will he spend time installing windows on that laptop? Which would be less painfull for him? Who knows.

[crazycheese]

crazycheese, what marketing are you talking about ? I haven't seen any marketing in this area for years (other than working on improving drivers etc., if you count that as marketing).

Open source driver fairy tale.

A man needs a boat. He sees green guy and red guy on the coast.
Green guy has only "my boat is compatible with this river. For years." Ad, nothing more.
When the man asks him to see the boat - he gives him black squishy something that surprisingly works, but makes him feel dirty and trust the green guy on that it does not vanish in the middle of the river. The green guy also ensures "the boat" is good to cross stinking swamps or holy mud pools as well.

The red guy on the contrary cries for nice understandable open working boat. When the man gives him his money, red guy suddenly gives him a pile of wooden bricks and several ants. Puzzled, the man says three magic letters with question mark.

- "See - here is material so you make your own boat." the red guy explains;
"Here is description how to work with wood.
And those are two tiny helpers to assist you, and the likes of you, whom we call community, in making the boat
By the way,.. the two paddles are included preassembled, ants already assembled them.
You can, of course, wait for them to assemble the whole boat in 40 years.
But, we are not associated with them... so you are on your own"

- "But I want a boat! I pay for it, in the end..."

- "Oh, you mean that. Of course, we have that too. Here."
And red guy handles him a black squishy something that immediately sinks under water, causing red guy to pull it back and smile.
"You can trust it, it is as good as from green guy"

[crazycheese]

To which AMD responded with broken PowerXpress support in FGLRX that has to restart X, eliminating the POINT of GPU switching, and also making the driver impossible to get rid of without breaking your system. (At least with Ubuntu, it no longer recognizes Mesa's libgl.so anymore and wants to use a PowerXpress version, and X segfaults and complains it can't find fglrx_dri.so.

I'm not discussing catalyst/fglrx at all.
If nvidia blob makes me think my hands are dirty every time I use it, catalyst is just plain allergy.

In 2010, when I had catalyst crash the machine instantly once I tried to do tty switch (alt-ctrl-f1..7) - something very normal on linux, I instantly understood the driver quality. Yeah, I have allergetic reaction to catalyst and opensource driver makes my card look like a turtle - both in performance and in driver evelopment speed. A lot of development should be done to catalyst to make it perform like nvblob performs now, and this is done by AMD, true. But several millions dollar budget past - this will not bring advantage or be a worthy argument for the switch.

Why should I care about proprietary garbage from AMD in several years, when I can have working proprietary garbage from nvidia now?

AMD cares much much more about maintaining DRM crap "sanely" than investing same amount into opensource driver, which WOULD be advantage over nvidia.

Lets sum up on AMD:
- company opensource investment - nearly absent
- some kind of external official payment model for opensource - ignored
- proprietary driver - buggy, worked on

Nvidia:
- company opensource investment - absent
- proprietary driver - already working for years

Sure, making opensource driver explicitly requires even greater amount of investment than comparable closed source. Money payed by company for driver code obfuscation is much lower than patent removal or settlement costs. But the advantages to the consumers and in longer term to technology designers themself are also way higher. You do not need patent - you need technology alliance - drop money on alliance research instead of licensing - purchase the house instead of renting.

Im off to nvidia performance hardware with blob driver, till intel makes performance hardware with opensource driver. Why? I do not want to buy or have a discrete card which features do not work with proposed opensource drivers making it look more like student educational software than driver. Opensource would be really good upgrade. Upgrade to already good and fast working driver. Not some kind of 2nd class bs - like you get for example from Kodak in linux. I have no Kodak printers only because of this. I also do not have epson printer, because hp driver is opensource.

So now I have nvidia 260 gtx 216 inside, 1.8gb version. At least till AMD does opensource driver that works with purchased hardware, or closed source driver that strongly outperforms nvidia in usability, hardware support frame, stability, absence of bugs, features and last-not-least performance.

DRM or HDCP interest me not, the argument does not work. I go to cinema or buy bluray - for the cover alone. Inside comes ripped version. Money payed and I get the "product", not some limiting crap. If there would be DRM-free movies on disk - even at higher price, I would have bought them instead.

Design catalyst with hdcp only for "cinema producer" cards, if that would at last allow to focus your effort on something advantageous - like opensource. That would be way better for your little consumers.

Till now, my gfx hardware choice is enslaved by nvidia, thanks to AMD.

[V!NCENT]

Compositing is smooth here with KDE 4.6.3 and 270 blob. Firefox scrolls large pages much smoother in composite mode than with xf86-ati.

I have no experience with that crap browser. How many FPS do you get with KDE? With vsync on it's a constant 60fps here.

My athlon II gets video streams offloaded to gpu and can sleep or chop on source code instead - valued bonus for money, isn't it expected when you pay extra for discrete card? How's with same amd card on windows by the way?

Don't get me started on Windows, especialy with laptops. Getting out of standby is a total disaster. When it is not, some 4:3 screen resolution is used and not stretched (which is good in a way though) over my entire laptop screen. Luckily I'm not using that crap anyway. I also use VLC on Windows, so I don't even know if it is HW accelerated. You've got to be kidding me if you're going to tell me that you use Windows Media Player....

The only drawbacks of nvidia driver are - completely closed source, bad multimonitor and bad SLI. For AMD to match, it should work out all features that nvidia offers plus one. Currently they invest way more in their proprietary driver anyway.

Soon we'll have the best SLI possible: all GPU's running. I don't see the problem. Also SVG acceleration. Windows and Mac are stuck in the dark ages with that.

[DaemonFC]

Heh, they already did it with their official optimus statement - best marketing ever.

To which AMD responded with broken PowerXpress support in FGLRX that has to restart X, eliminating the POINT of GPU switching, and also making the driver impossible to get rid of without breaking your system. (At least with Ubuntu, it no longer recognizes Mesa's libgl.so anymore and wants to use a PowerXpress version, and X segfaults and complains it can't find fglrx_dri.so.

I'm glad I didn't try their latest driver bundle on an important system or else the shrapnel it left when it blew up the system would have left me trying to recover without a working X server.

I wonder if Nvidia Optimus actually works. Anyone?

[bridgman]

your marketing is strong

crazycheese, what marketing are you talking about ? I haven't seen any marketing in this area for years (other than working on improving drivers etc., if you count that as marketing).

[pingufunkybeat]

The activities you mentioned have very little in common with gpu itself. Video is not accelerated

That's not quite right. Video DECODING is not accelerated, but everything else is: scaling, colour conversion, etc. That's half of the processing power needed for video playback and this half (XVideo) is very good and fast with open drivers.

You're right that decoding would be nice, but that's on the way too -- MPEG2 is accelerated already, and h264 is being worked on.

[crazycheese]

maybe nvidia should try the same good marketing strategic stuff ?

Heh, they already did it with their official optimus statement - best marketing ever.