AMD's Hiring Open-Source Graphics Developers Still

[pingufunkybeat]

I'm sure Nvidia has also good reasons for not documenting their GPUs, and if not they can always hide behind third party IP, DRM concerns bla bla bla.

But they're not documenting anything, and AMD is documenting 99% of the stuff. Surely, that is a huge difference.

I have also very good reasons to pay only half price for any product containing a AMD GPU. Do you think AMD cares about my reasons? Of course not. Then why should I care about AMD's reasons to ship me a half broken product?

"half broken" is just the sort of exaggeration I'm referring to.

If you want to refer to AMD OSS drivers as "partly working", then you have to refer to Nvidia 's blob as "partly working" too, as not everything works under Linux.

[monraaf]

Sure!

But what I'd like to see is a sense of perspective, and what some people are spewing here (hi Panix) is malignant, intentional FUD.

AMD hasn't documented UVD. There are good reasons for this. The rest is documented, at least on r700 and below.

I'm sure Nvidia has also good reasons for not documenting their GPUs, and if not they can always hide behind third party IP, DRM concerns bla bla bla.

I have also very good reasons to pay only half price for any product containing a AMD GPU. Do you think AMD cares about my reasons? Of course not. Then why should I care about AMD's reasons to ship me a half broken product?

The drivers are stable, provide an accelerated 3d desktop, play all native games just fine (though more performance would be nice).

Just because everything works stable on your AMD GPU, doesn't mean it's the same for everyone else. There are still a lot bugs and cases where the open drivers can lockup your GPU, just look at the bugzilla. If AMD doesn't hire someone to fix these, they are not going to get fixed.

Let's discuss Michael Koenig's VDPAU implementation and how far we are from h264 and WebM decoding.

Sure nice initiative, and I hope it does deliver. But it's still a big question mark to me how efficient the shader based solution will be compared to using the UVD unit and how IGPs and low end APUs are going to cope with it.

don't shit on people who are actually writing open source, like the community has been asking them to. I'm sick of it!

I don't see anybody here 'shitting' on the people who are writing the open drivers. I see people who are criticizing a company for not doing enough, and people who are not satisfied with the product they paid for.

[V!NCENT]

Seriously, do I have to read more?
Which card do you use ? I guess you are deanjo(no offence, my proprietary f(r)iend ) ) mirrored clone and use AMD.

Deanjo? No I'm just the way I am
Laptop: HD5470
Desktop: 5770 and 3300 onboard.

Are you proud your card performance is wasted under Linux, with company stepping in way nvidia already completed for years, and openCORE driver(ubuntu, oracle and recently amd) usable only for engineers? Such people as yourself literally leave linux to never move direction desktop, opensource or not.

Wasted? Am I not getting the same FPS as you in Kwin? I buy my PC with overkill so that I can use it for a looooooong time up to the point it starts to seriously stutters due to new software being calculation intensive. In the end I save money. Also... do I 'waste' my 8GB RAM simply because I don't full it up? (pretty stupid to do so IMHO)

Linux is a kernel.

Seriously... Are we going into that territory? It's ATI Radeon, not AMD! Boohoo! <_<

Weee! You need ... which card? Current opensource state is thanks to AMD, usable only on IGP. At BEST. I guarantee!

Did not watch that video. Your point is in your senctence that AMD delivers supstandard FLOSS drivers and docs, right? Well guess what? It's better than Intel and nVidia's lack of ANY FUCKING DOCUMENTATION. Happier to have none? What is your logic? That of emotion?

Amazing, no?

I will now upgrade you to triple moron for trying to prove facts wrong by the fact stating popular opinion.

I cannot use the card features, I cannot use UVD, I cannot use superspeed graphics(but AMD opengl is almost always worse than nvidia, unlike directx. But lets call it company priorities, it still works).

Neither can't I, but UVD isn't required if you have even a remotely desent CPU that is no problem. So what's this giant show stopper? I also can't use Display Port and HDMI, because my monitor doesn't support it. So fucking what? I also not use the audio card on that Radeon because I don't use HDMI for audio. So what? Am I supposed to buy an HDMI monitor with speakers because else I would waste my card? How freaking retarted is that? Do you also cry when you waste three seats in your car because you can only sit on one? :')

Should I use windows for amd card, cause its in the "required pieces of software" on their website?

There is a Linux download option? Hello? Official support? Linux logo on the box? Does AMD not provide a proprietary driver that works with the Linux desktop components called X.org and Linux? Well?

Is windows driver.... erm ... sponsored?..

No they have this big fucking Windows logo on the box of you GPU, indicating that is is official supported? Hello?

How about making me pay for the driver in linux in same way I pay for it in windows?
Well, at least AMD actively refused to even think about it.

Seriously... what did you expect? You have this multi trillion gazillion dollar company that is going to change its own business strategy... just for you? LOL!

Of course its AMD driver and AMD proprietary! And engineers are thankful to AMD for letting them play with hardware, no doubt. But not normal guys, uh.. I forgot, according to you my gentoo box is for freaks only.

What the hell are you talking about? Normal guys browse the web, email and type some documents. What card on earth is not capable of accelerating a supporting compiziting desktop with free soft-... oh wait your nVidia card, I forgot. Sorry man...

I never claimed opening docs is a marketing, I call AMD "opensource strategy" - marketing. So, opening docs is part of the plan, but not the plan itself.
If AMD would call it "technology education strategy" - I would rise no further questions.

First, people bitch about no opennes about open source. Then AMD is open about their strategy. No people bitch about the fact that AMD has opened up documentation (or not fully due to DRM at their own legal risk, just for us nutjobs) and now people bitch that the proprietary driver is useful, they have four guys working on a FLOSS driver and have enough documentation for OpenGL 2.1?!?!? Schizofrenic behavior...

Look, I want my hardware working on Linux. Comprende?

Me comprendo. Me also showy you proprietary AMDyo driverio. Working, da?

Yes, says me. Little guy with linux box. If I go to hardware store I don't want to be looked at as a moron, if I mention "linux". Is it bad? Should I start commiting for it? Or maybe I should commit suicide for you to be happy?

I'm the kinda guy that has more friends than spare time to see all of them on a regular basis. Usualy if I even remotely mention the name Linux they are struck in awe. And don't commit suicide; that would make you quadro moron, evolution wise

Last time Kodak guy assured me linux is supported. A day later he had two opened printers returned to him, 100? each. I have two HP since then. Linux marketing at best!

I guy said to me that Windows 7 is realy different and great. I checked it out and whiped the beta. Now I use it rarely because sometimes I have no choice.

If AMD would have put 100 developers behind open driver, and at last stand behind it, take responsibility, I would have never sold my 4770. I was a bit tired of periodic freezes and crashes you know. I hope your desktop does not freeze when you type a response to this post. I seriously hope.

NO CARRIER. Oh wait... Good joke bro

[crazycheese]

Would you sacrifice open source just so "Linux" can "move to the desktop"? No way, never.

This is hard call. Yes, I would - under condition that someday existing or upcoming graphical chip or system manufacturers move to opensource driver.

You should understand that this is a company and a company is to make money by bringing "advantage". However "advantage" is wrongly associated with:
- "exclusivity" - which in turn is just another marketing word for "deficiency". Yes, it is disadvantage of the component itself. Short-minded things are worse than open-minded. Wrong approach. Remember nvidia cuda and all this crap. But at least nvidia "created" it(after consuming agea, but who cares, nvidia is constantly eating Love to use their crappy chip ).

- or "investment" - mostly intellectual "property"(how can information be property..? Information holder can, but not information - it is just a form), which is another word for leasing. Leasing of information is just wrong. But its what they do - like nvidia or amd(less) claiming patents and etc crap. If you research, it is needed by YOU. So, so long its needed, you pay for its research. You don't research all ways out of desert and set toll zones after that. This should be illegal. They are privatizing the moon by the way... Well, nvidia and amd give closed source drivers because of this. Even if they want to open up, many things are external and NDA, and they do not hurry up in opening them however.

But the real meaning of advantage, in my opinion, is company RnD, true work, completely dynamical process. If others want to match they will have to follow exactly same way and carry same costs. Now they can replace meat with low quality carcinogen soy. But imagine things are open and others immediately notice it... You cant sell BS in open society.

Put MinGW on a Windows machine, and be done with it, if that's what you want. You have your shell, you have your binary drivers, you have your DirectX and games, and you have hardware which is supported. Why do people want to graft all of that (DirectX, DirectSound, WinAPI, windows drivers, windows filesystems, .Net, MS Office) on top of the Linux kernel instead? I mean, GIMP runs on Windows too, where's the problem?

Because there is game creation idea, using x86 hardware(or general open hardware, remember IBM and MCA bus) that is being encapsulated and forced into systems owned by microsoft(then it was called - IBM).
You dont need all the things your wrote down for a gaming platform. You need good programming tools, good graphical system, sound system, network system, some help with strings, data types etc. Right now this things are being created for microsoft, instead of being platform-agnostic. Everytime I played Fallout 2 (old fallout, not new garbage) I hated to do it in windows. If fallout 2 would be available for multitude of platforms, do you think people would care about windows? NO. Why? Because windows is ANYTHING, but innovative.

What if you get a mighty binary blob with super performance and people still look at you like a moron in the hardware store? What would you scrap next?

Opensource gives immense advantage, but only as attribute to existing worthy code.
If you compare opensource student code vs unreal engine or stripped open version vs full-featured closed source blob, its like comparing white mice and black elephants. Compare white elephants to black elephants, I think the former ones are more sexy!
If a company produce both white mice and offer black elephants as upgrade(AMD) and other just produce black elephants(more stable sort)(nvidia), ... yeah - this is state of current madness.

[V10lator]

We should ask Michael, how he managed to do long Intel sandy bridge test. Or is your notebook PowerVR powered?

No PowerVR, just a little bug: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31960 and no reply from intel since 2010-11-30. So I have to use an older, patched driver without 2D, 3D or Video acceleration.

Can I start bitching Intel now because they have no working driver and AMD has two?

[pingufunkybeat]

Such people as yourself literally leave linux to never move direction desktop, opensource or not.

Would you sacrifice open source just so "Linux" can "move to the desktop"? No way, never.

Put MinGW on a Windows machine, and be done with it, if that's what you want. You have your shell, you have your binary drivers, you have your DirectX and games, and you have hardware which is supported. Why do people want to graft all of that (DirectX, DirectSound, WinAPI, windows drivers, windows filesystems, .Net, MS Office) on top of the Linux kernel instead? I mean, GIMP runs on Windows too, where's the problem?

Yes, says me. Little guy with linux box. If I go to hardware store I don't want to be looked at as a moron, if I mention "linux". Is it bad?

Wow, that is a really strong argument for making software license decisions for the most critical parts of an open operating system.

What if you get a mighty binary blob with super performance and people still look at you like a moron in the hardware store? What would you scrap next?

[pingufunkybeat]

Just as you have the right to sing praise about how wonderful it is that AMD has partly documented and partly provided some code to interface with some parts of its GPU products. He has the right to complain and bitch about AMD's lack of dedication to the open drivers, its lack of features and lack of performance.

Sure!

But what I'd like to see is a sense of perspective, and what some people are spewing here (hi Panix) is malignant, intentional FUD.

AMD hasn't documented UVD. There are good reasons for this. The rest is documented, at least on r700 and below. You can say "partly documented", but then be specific.

AMD still hasn't fully documented the very latest cards, and some other stuff, like HDMI on Evergreen+. As I understand, they want to write code first, document later, which is OK. I definitely want to see the rest of the docs, though.

The open drivers now support all of OpenGL1, all of OpenGL 2.1, and about 90% of OpenGL 3. The remaining parts for OpenGL 3 are due to Mesa problems, as soon as GLSL improvements are done, we'll get all of that. That's 95% of what an r700-class card can do, about 85% of what an Evergreen+ class card can do and more than 99.99% of what any currently existing Linux program can actually use. You have to make this explicit in order to qualify the "partly works" part. The drivers are stable, provide an accelerated 3d desktop, play all native games just fine (though more performance would be nice). The bullshit about "you have to write your own drivers" and "nothing works" and "1% of functionality" is blatantly false. Do people get paid for this shit?

Look, the deficiencies of the Open Source drivers are widely known, and people who actually use them are aware of these deficiencies even more than others. So let's discuss the facts instead of spreading malicious lies,

Let's discuss the best way to get the GLSL compiler up to speed, because this is blocking OpenGL3. Let's discuss Michael Koenig's VDPAU implementation and how far we are from h264 and WebM decoding. Let's discuss particular optimisations like HyperZ and texture tiling, which are almost done (what is their status, anyway), and let's discuss the CPU-bounded bottlenecks that jglisse was profiling some time ago.

But let's not whine like a bunch of spoilt little brats because their Windows games running on a Windows emulation layer, using a FUSE bridge to read them from an NTFS filesystem give them 40FPS instead of 100FPS. You're using the wrong f*%$ing operating system! Linux is here to provide a Free operating system, that anyone can modify. If you don't like open drivers, just go and use something else FFS, you have Mac, you have Windows, you have a Playstation 3, if you don't like open drivers, either fix them or shut up, but don't shit on people who are actually writing open source, like the community has been asking them to. I'm sick of it!

I'd like it if AMD hired another 10-15 full-time programmers to whip Mesa and r600g into shape, but I don't think that we can demand more than documentation and a basic OSS driver. This is what they are doing. Good work, and please hire a few more people because Alex alone is not enough. Thank you.

[crazycheese]

No, Intel doesn't tell that, instead they tell... Nothing! Bugs are getting ignored and so on...

P.S. I never sayed nobody has the right to criticism AMD, I only sayed I can't understand it.

We should ask Michael, how he managed to do long Intel sandy bridge test. Or is your notebook PowerVR powered?

[crazycheese]

I'll take the heat.You are a moron.

Seriously, do I have to read more?
Which card do you use ? I guess you are deanjo(no offence, my proprietary f(r)iend ) ) mirrored clone and use AMD.

Are you proud your card performance is wasted under Linux, with company stepping in way nvidia already completed for years, and openCORE driver(ubuntu, oracle and recently amd) usable only for engineers? Such people as yourself literally leave linux to never move direction desktop, opensource or not.

Well rock on!

Linux has 2000 times less 3D superspeed graphics demand.

Linux is a kernel. An efficient state-of-the-art opensource kernel and operating system. Using it for state-of-the-art development or state-of-the-art gaming is something WIDELY adopted. But guess what, every time "linux" and "graphics" tags come up, "nvidia" is almost always associated third tag. Are you happy?

You read Phoronix. You read the state in which the cards are. You read that card X that cost $Y gives Z performance. You are notified. So stop bitching if you do not do your homework.

Yes master, acknowledged master.

People that go FLOSS know there are compromises. Don't claim you don't know that, because that would make you a double moron.

Tell it to HP, RedHat, Google, Mint, Apache - they will look at you as if you are the person you are trying to mimic right now. Because they somehow get only benefits from it. Oh that must be cause they are opensource and not opencore.

I realy can't accept a non compositing KDE grade desktop workflow. I need that card. Therefore I bought the card. There is no screwing around since the AMD driver supports UVD and superspeed graphics. On their driver website, if you had cared, they declare the required pieces of software.

Weee! You need ... which card? Current opensource state is thanks to AMD, usable only on IGP. At BEST. I guarantee!

Oh, by the way...

I case you forgot...
*beep*
Amazing, no? I cannot use the card features, I cannot use UVD, I cannot use superspeed graphics(but AMD opengl is almost always worse than nvidia, unlike directx. But lets call it company priorities, it still works).
Should I use windows for amd card, cause its in the "required pieces of software" on their website?

The FLOSS driver is sponsored, but is Linux software.

This is best shortest single line of BS I ever saw on internet. No seriously. Is windows driver.... erm ... sponsored?..
How about making me pay for the driver in linux in same way I pay for it in windows?
Well, at least AMD actively refused to even think about it.

It is powered by devs paid by AMD but it is not AMD's driver, even though they do probably have some copyright somewhere.

Of course its AMD driver and AMD proprietary! And engineers are thankful to AMD for letting them play with hardware, no doubt. But not normal guys, uh.. I forgot, according to you my gentoo box is for freaks only.

You call opening up docs for FLOSS development marketing. It is not.

I never claimed opening docs is a marketing, I call AMD "opensource strategy" - marketing. So, opening docs is part of the plan, but not the plan itself.
If AMD would call it "technology education strategy" - I would rise no further questions.

Hate 'us' FLOSS lovers for it if we convinced you or something, instead.

Look, I want my hardware working on Linux. Comprende?

Says you. And it is usable. I get very nice desktop workflow out of Kwin with 3D effects. I love it and can't get back to non-3D. As for games, yeah... Dissapointment is your problem. If you don't want FLOSS you go with proprietary crap. That's the trade-off. Also if you don't like that then you can start your own code commits if you realy, REALY care. But I bet you don't care that much, beacuse otherwise you would have made time for it.

Yes, says me. Little guy with linux box. If I go to hardware store I don't want to be looked at as a moron, if I mention "linux". Is it bad? Should I start commiting for it? Or maybe I should commit suicide for you to be happy?

Last time Kodak guy assured me linux is supported. A day later he had two opened printers returned to him, 100? each. I have two HP since then. Linux marketing at best!

If AMD would have put 100 developers behind open driver, and at last stand behind it, take responsibility, I would have never sold my 4770. I was a bit tired of periodic freezes and crashes you know. I hope your desktop does not freeze when you type a response to this post. I seriously hope.

[V10lator]

Last time I heard this 'crappy' FOSS Linux Intel driver provides hardware accelerated video decoding, something not provided by the AMD 'sponsored' FOSS driver.

The intel driver is not usable (no 2D nor 3D) on my netbook right now, on my desktop with ATI Graphic:

OpenGL vendor string: X.Org
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on AMD RV730
OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 7.11-devel (git-ad2999d)
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.20

Seems like 3D is working with open drivers here. And if you don't want them get the binary blob.

Also I don't hear Intel employees telling you that you have to write your own FLOSS driver for the hardware you already paid for.

No, Intel doesn't tell that, instead they tell... Nothing! Bugs are getting ignored and so on...

P.S. I never sayed nobody has the right to criticism AMD, I only sayed I can't understand it.