Any news on ATI fglrx 8.42?

[metala]

your expectations are over-the-roof. i bet you'll be dissapointed.

i'm in no hurry for new fglrx. i'd rather wait a bit longer for radeonhd driver to mature.

You have to wait to the end of the year to have mature 2d support for radeonHD. Theya re currently working on 2d acceleration. And as it sounds 3d is more complex and needs more time.
What i have read is that radeonHD will not have all the things the proprietary driver will. AMD/ATI can not unveil all the information, cause there are agreements.

[Alistair]

You have to wait to the end of the year to have mature 2d support for radeonHD. Theya re currently working on 2d acceleration. And as it sounds 3d is more complex and needs more time.
What i have read is that radeonHD will not have all the things the proprietary driver will. AMD/ATI can not unveil all the information, cause there are agreements.

Its quite clear from my initial reading of the documentation release that there will be 'bits' that *are not* in the docs. These 'bits' will be related to third party Intellectual Property agreements that ATI/AMD is already tied to. What precisely these missing bits will affect in the way of 2d drivers and 3d drivers I'm not clear on -- one thing that appears clear to me is that certain hardware based locking schemes will not have their codebase revealed. So it is possible that in the future there will be video material available to the proprietary driver that ****might**** not be available to the opensource driver.
Considering the depth of skills that is already assigned to the radeonhd driver team, I have full expectation that the driver will mature -- perhaps not before june of next year, but eventually, to the state at which the vast majority of common users in linux will be more than satisfied with it.

I can clearly see also that the tvout capabilities may not be released, again due to 3rd party IP agreements. I happen to have an odd perspective on this as I'm working on a media project platform to deliver (cable) television signals to computers directly. Our hiccup is not the ability to put the medium on the (computer) screen, this is easily done, but rather to deliver it consistently to downstream television like devices. We're quite excited with the OpenSource Intel folks but we've hit our own snags on ATI --and equally- on Nvidia.
And in reality - the corporate attitude doesn't really include 'linux' as a priority, but the bulk of the team on the project are *definately* trying to keep linux in scope of 'just works'

[Ole-Martin Broz]

haha. . waiting is painfull.. what about me..

Im waiting for 2x gpu blocks for 2900 XT that ive ordered, waiting for the new quadcore from amd, waiting for some radiators, waiting for crysis, quakewars for linux, 8.42 driver/aiglx support, steam for linux, my G9 mice i ordered, waiting for my 4gb ocz pc4000 platinium ddr memory. yeah.. my list is enourmous.

well.. cant wait till 8.42, food the FEED up in FF, waiting for it to arrive, and im waiting for ubuntu gutsy aswell .!

[fatfatwolf]

And now it's Oct. 10th...

I am half dead because of the waiting...

[petercah]

Hi,

I have a thinkpad t60p with the mysterious v5250 (m56gl 71d4).. I am really struggling to find out for sure what exactly the architecture of this model is??

Is this card the same as the v5200/R520?? Will it be supported fully in the 8.42 release?? Could someone please clarify?? Would be much appreciated....

[Michael]

Hi,

I have a thinkpad t60p with the mysterious v5250 (m56gl 71d4).. I am really struggling to find out for sure what exactly the architecture of this model is??

Is this card the same as the v5200/R520?? Will it be supported fully in the 8.42 release?? Could someone please clarify?? Would be much appreciated....

Hi,

Yes, it's part of the R500 series and will be supported in 8.42.

[petercah]

Thanks.....that's music to my ears....so long XGL

[heruan]

Why AMD/ATI never announces release dates for its drivers?

[ivanovic]

Why AMD/ATI never announces release dates for its drivers?

Plain and simple said:

IIRWIIR (It Is Ready When It Is Ready)


Fixed release dates already quite some time before it can be out are something that is IMO even a bad thing. The problem is that you get a pressure of releasing that date even when there are grave bugs in the program. I prefer to wait some more days and have less bugs. That is one general thing why many open source programs do not have fixed release dates for *anything*, the really big ones just keep a general guideline that is nothing more than a target to meet but that will often not be met, what even is good because it means more time for new features and bugfixes.

Regarding the ATI drivers:
We do know that they want to release ~1 driver per month. My guess would be that the general aim is to release in the middle of the month to have some room for fixes if they are needed. If you think back to the last release you might remember that there were quite some bugs in it (hey, it was a complete rewrite of a subpart, that is normal) which have to be fixed now. Fixing bugs is not like "hey there is a bug, it will be dead in 5mins", fixing bugs often involves long time research for the root cause of the problem.
Since AMD/ATI wants to provide AIGLX with that new driver (at least regarding what Michael wrote in his reviews of 8.41) means that not only bugfixing has to happen but also implementing (and stabilizing) of it which takes quite some ressources.
I think a good working driver maybe around the 25th (very vague guess) is better than having a really buggy driver by the middle of the month simply because "a date was announced and we wanted to stick to it". Better give the devs the time needed to make a good product...

[Michael]

Since AMD/ATI wants to provide AIGLX with that new driver (at least regarding what Michael wrote in his reviews of 8.41) means that not only bugfixing has to happen but also implementing (and stabilizing) of it which takes quite some ressources.

Yeah, that remains. if you are prone to motion sickness be sure to have Compiz Fusion disabled this month!