AMD's Hiring Open-Source Graphics Developers Still

[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.

[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 ?

[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.

[DaddyBear]

Do you Like BEAR ?

[pingufunkybeat]

Actually, I think that AMD is trying to mimic the Linux business model, by giving the open source community open source drivers and documentation.

That's how pretty much everything works in the Linux land, the only thing that varies is how much of the actual programming the hardware manufacturer does, and how much is left to the community. At least hiring more developers is a good thing.

[monraaf]

Well bridgman already said they hired the extra devs because of interest from their embedded customers. It remains to be seen how much regular GNU/Linux users are going to see any benefit from his. Remember that AMD initially had 3 people working on the opensource drivers, but except maybe two code drops from Richard Li I have only seen commits from Alex Deucher.

So yeah I remain skeptical.

[pingufunkybeat]

An optimistic way to look at it would be to assume that embedded customers like getting good performance from the hardware

[V!NCENT]

@crazyscheese,

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but the entire KDE SC is full of SVG. The Login screen, all icons, Qt widgets, Kwin, the entire Plasma workspace is SVG and SVG wasn't braught to you by Google. Hell... Show me something other than SVG on my desktop except my wallpaper and the mouse cursor...

Are you sure you're not blind? Lol...

[Artemis3]

In the past 4 years, i have purchased 5 cards, all nvidia; for this sole reason: Works with linux. I have also been waiting for the day people start saying the quality of ATI/AMD drivers are the same, but alas it has not occurred.

DRM is the reason i dislike hdmi. If you stick to DVI, you don't need DRM.

I don't really do any 3d with the desktop, but i do wine and the few 3d native games available. There is no amount of marketing that will convince me; people must start saying it works, it never freezes, and installing is a breeze. The only thing i pay attention is price, consumption, benchmarks, and the state of linux support. My experience with nvidia gear has been superb except when the device is physically damaged by factory faults.

[darkbasic]

This is because you don't care about free software. You will probably enjoy Windows 7 too, microsoft did a good work.