The New Driver Is Out! Meet Oktoberfest!

[Michael]

The next Phoronix article (specifications) just got embargoed back twelve hours until noon EST on September 6... So just back twelve hours. Stay tuned for all the details!

[hmmm]

good stuff - couldn't they make it 10 in the morning? [12 Noon EST translates to 2 AM in the morning to me here in Sydney].

[Michael]

FYI, the Radeon HD 2400 and Radeon HD 2600 results will be published this Friday.

It looks like we may have at least one graphics article a day each week day (and possibly weekends) leading up to the official 8.41 driver release.

[Thetargos]

We don't want the good news to be over yet!!

[hmmm]

Do you have any plans to do becnhmarks comparing the 1gb & 512mb HD2900xt cards and the 512mb & 256mb HD2600xt?

[Moustacha]

FYI, the Radeon HD 2400 and Radeon HD 2600 results will be published this Friday.

It looks like we may have at least one graphics article a day each week day (and possibly weekends) leading up to the official 8.41 driver release.

Might be too much of an ask, but could you compare with previous gen mid-range cards, of ati and nvidia, and with the nvidia mid-range if you can?

[billybore]

I repeat my questions

I repeat my questions about new 8.41 driver, anyone can ansewr me?

1- News about Hypermemory? (very important for mobility)
2- News about fan control?
3- News about suspend/resume problem? (specially for Fedora 7)
4- With ATI Mobility X300 and new driver is possible to play with Flightgear and use Cedega? (with Windows Vista I can play with many games (PES6,VSK5, ...) at high quality details)

Please answer me, thanks.

[phreadom]

Personally I'd really like to see a clear answer on the status of support for the AGP X1600Pro.

I have a 512mb card that currently is recognized incorrectly as PCIE, resulting in the 0x AGP mode and the driver only sees 256mb of the 512mb of vid mem.

This effectively makes the card useless for almost any 3d application.

That aside, great news today! I look forward to further news. Thanks for all the information Michael!

[opera]

You were predicting doom with no knowledge of the driver.

So people predicting good things are ok, but people predicting bad things are not? They are told to shut up? Are you taking somebody's side here, or what?
And yes, I have the same knowledge of the driver as everyone else. It sucks as of now. So, we can expect it to suck. I'd say, predictions about it still will suck, are more reasonable than the others.

Since the new driver has a new (and different) codebase, you can't use the old drivers for your predictions.

New? You're not talking about the open source driver, are you? Certainly you can't rewrite everything from scratch and keep not only major version (8) but high minor (4)? It will, for sure, include lots of crap we're stuck with today.

According to Michael, this new driver has been in the works for a very long time, not just the 1-month development time allocated to previous drivers.
Also, since the old driver is likely going to be trashed, there was little reason for the dev/financial team to support a soon-to-be-obsolete driver, hence the lack of any real improvement

I still think you're referring to another driver. We're still talking another minor version of fglrx 8.4x.

Any definitive evidence of randr superiority? Anyway, if the new driver will be open-sourced, you can just hack randr support into it.

Oh, my fucking god. Are you serious? You really have to be kidding. Do you know what RandR 1.2 includes? I very much doubt it. It's a solid base meant to be used for all drivers. It has been in the planning before Xfree86 "became" X.org. It has lots of things apart from just "big desktop" support.
* Easy management of monitor layout (one tool for all your computers, whatever driver they have).
* Sub-pixel knowledge for smooth font rendering even with:
* Rotation support
* Auto resizing the desktop on hardware plug-in/out

And it's clear that you've gotten a media-biased and very unrealistic view on open source. You think that just because it's open source, all problems are solved? "you can just hack randr support into it." What?
Let me tell you a few things;
* It's not "just" soemthing to add.
* I've bought an ATI card. Why should I for free make their drivers better? Open source doesn't mean "let other people do the hard work for free"
* If ATI still control the project, instead of being community centered, my (or others) patches might not be merged, and am I supposed to support and release my own versions of the driver? The word "Windows" pops up in my head.
* RandR may very well heavily conflict with what's used in the drivers, so a merge might be very hard. Especially for someone new to the source tree.

Get realistic, will ya?

It's sad to see what might happen when people like you comment on things like this. Imagine in the future, the "open source" ATI driver lacks TV-out, and people complain about this (they bought a card with TV-out support). Will you tell them "it's open source, implement that yourself"? That's just disgusting.

Open source has absolutely nothing to do with the manufacturer's responsibilities. You can't just move the responsibility to the end-user because you give them the source code.

When did that happen?!

Never at ATI, but I've seen the same thing on lots of other big corps "going open source", and I see a tendency here. I'm very sorry for sharing my assumptions based on these tendencies.

Again, you can't use the old crappy-driver pattern for the new one.

Yes, since the "new" one (if we're talking about the open source driver, not 8.41), seems (yes) to be developed only at ATI, with the only difference of a big source tree being available. It's a very good thing yes, but the driver could still suck. If they'd work together with the community a heck lot earlier than they are, they could have gotten lots of help into making it work well (portability, no re-using of X.org functionality etc etc). I already explained this though.

1 week from now, if the new driver is as bad as you say, we'll all hail you as the new Nostradamus predictor@home. Until then stfu, you have no real basis for your predictions.

If I'm right, you'll hail me, but until then you tell me to "shut the fuck up", just because my predictions doesn't suite you? Who are you, and what are you afraid of? You a share holder of ATI? You think people will stop buying ATI products like crazy because of what I write?
Come on ffs. I don't see much good at ATI, and I am rather skeptical of the new drivers. Don't I have the right to be skeptical?
Even the better if I happen to be completely wrong. For crying out loud, I'd be happy to be completely wrong.

[Xipeos]

I still think you're referring to another driver. We're still talking another minor version of fglrx 8.4x.

Don't judge a driver by it's version. Someone suggested the 8.41 means the 41 release of the 8th year. Not everyone is using the same versioning system as the kernel devs.

And it's clear that you've gotten a media-biased and very unrealistic view on open source. You think that just because it's open source, all problems are solved? "you can just hack randr support into it." What?
Let me tell you a few things;
* It's not "just" soemthing to add.

Of course you can opera. A couple of dedicated programmers can do it in...two weeks? wtf do you know?! You're just an angry user.

EDIT: you don't have to re-write the whole driver for randr. You can just build an interface that translates randr requests to DDM (like wine and cedega do with their compatibility layer).

* I've bought an ATI card. Why should I for free make their drivers better? Open source doesn't mean "let other people do the hard work for free"

You'd do it for yourself. You can pay yourself if you want to... (but then again, you're just an angry user, not a programmer (?) )

* RandR may very well heavily conflict with what's used in the drivers, so a merge might be very hard. Especially for someone new to the source tree.

Can't take a little challenge, you wuss?

Open source has absolutely nothing to do with the manufacturer's responsibilities. You can't just move the responsibility to the end-user because you give them the source code.

Again with the wussing. As of now, we know very little about AMD's open-source initiative. And even if they shifted all the work on us, it would be much better then what we had so far. They way I remember it, *many* people were asking for the shift (even you - "give it to x.org hackers" remember?!)

Come on ffs. I don't see much good at ATI, and I am rather skeptical of the new drivers.

Fine be skeptical, I won't comment on your bitching anymore.