"Ask ATI" dev thread

[mirv]

And you have direct comparison for running games with wine with nvidia and ati cards, do you?

Was that directed at me? I'm not sure, but assume so, so forgive me if I'm mistaken!
And no, I don't (at least, not anything that's recent enough to be considered valid). But the last time I ran with nvidia under linux, it was unstable and buggy as all buggery. Random X lockups, 3d graphics corruption, memory leaks. I haven't had any problems like that with fglrx since AMD took over ATI and dedicated itself to monthly linux releases (well, ok, once I had a wine bug that was fixed the next month).
Having said that, people have had the exact opposite experience apparently. I just prefer a more reasoned arguement from people, that's all.

I might say a "binary nvidia vs ati" comparison would be good, but it would only be useful for higher end cards.

[Kano]

Well i have got a NV 8800 GTS 512 and a ATI HD 3450, ok, the last one is really slow, but enough to test fglrx. I did not compare speed of course, but when a game fails with fglrx and runs with nvidia then it is of course a driver fault. To be fair, there is a way to crash nvidia drivers too when you use VDPAU with a realy bad input, like bad DVB signal quality with high error rate in H264, then it crashed here too, but where is VDPAU f?r ATI? It is almost clear that ATI does not see wine support as high priority. Native Linux games usually run - xv is a complete disappointment - at least using Debian 5.0 with Xserver 1.4.2.

[energyman]

is ATI to blame for wine problems? or is it based on the fact that most wine devs have/had nvidia cards and worked around the bugs there?

me - I never had success with wine. No matter which driver. I really do not see why people even bother with it. Wine is bad for linux.

That said: there is always virtualbox.

[Kano]

Haha, Vbox for games, you must be joking. The newly introduced 3d support could use wine d3d libs, so do you think it would be faster than native wine, better forget that idea? wine works nearly perfect for opengl based games, sometimes better as the Linux native binary. DX games are more problematic and slower because there do not always exists OpenGL functions which provide the same features, so you get some extra overhead, but at least not that demanding titles still run fast enough.

[mirv]

Yeah I agree that virtual box hasn't been good for games with me. Yet. I'm sure that'll change one day.
But everything else aside, wine is useful for some things - I actually managed to play Still Life under wine when vista couldn't get it to work (not tried windows 7, but completed the game now). Of course, I still prefer native linux games.

[Mazur]

Personally I think that ATI is supporting open source better but closed drivers are still crap. Example is that thread: http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=16644 . I got one nvidia card in my old computer and it works better than ATI card in my new computer, what the hell?

[Dummy00001]

people have shown why a stable api for prop. modules is a very bad idea. Please google first before you continue on a track that would HURT linux A LOT So could you stop with the stupid stuff?

or at least read this:

http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/stable_api_nonsense.html

think about it thoroughly and then come back.

The message is obviously biased and targeted at server hardware drivers, which generally are very thin layers between kernel and rather high-end hardware. The main reason in server space to use binary drivers is to hide hardware bugs, which might result in a bad PR. (I have programmed a number of such drivers, so this is a first hand account.)

Most of the Greg's technical arguments boil down to the fact they kernel developers do not want to do it and most Linux server vendors do not need it.

N.B. And binary interface isn't only option BTW. I wonder who and why always drive the discussion in the direction, which is known to be a dead end.

3D hardware and their drivers are absolutely different beasts. The drivers are not thin - they are very thick and contain layers of logic. Also they interact with many kernel subsystems. 3D hardware has magnitudes more features, requires magnitudes more optimizations and magnitudes tighter integration with rest of the system - to deliver any sort of passable performance. There is inside of kernel no single driver subsystem which has comparable complexity.

Good luck trying to explain that to generic kernel developers.

I glad that wide Ubuntu adoption on desktop started raising the similar concerns with kernel developers being highly (and often blatantly open) server-hardware biased. It's not a secret and all are well aware that server companies roll lion share of Linux development. The problem is that improvements for desktop (and other areas) gets shuffled deep down the list of priorities, making it rather hard and unrewarding for willing people to contribute.

IOW, problem is not that there is nobody willing to improve desktop experience, problem is that getting improvements past the server-hardware bias is complicated enough to make people loose any will to do it.

[mirv]

Personally I think that ATI is supporting open source better but closed drivers are still crap. Example is that thread: http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=16644 . I got one nvidia card in my old computer and it works better than ATI card in my new computer, what the hell?

Sorry, just in case I wasn't clear, saying drivers are "crap" really doesn't say why you think they're crap. Was it just because of compiz? That was the only thing in the thread that had any substance to describing a problem. I would simply like to know why you think they're crap, and what makes you think nvidia's are better. If it's purely compiz, then say so, I just want to know if that's all.

[Mazur]

Sorry, just in case I wasn't clear, saying drivers are "crap" really doesn't say why you think they're crap. Was it just because of compiz? That was the only thing in the thread that had any substance to describing a problem. I would simply like to know why you think they're crap, and what makes you think nvidia's are better. If it's purely compiz, then say so, I just want to know if that's all.

As I already said, or maybe not?, I like AMD as the company because they are creating really great piece of hardware but drivers for graphics card is 'crap'. Why it is 'crap' and why I think nvidia is better in this way? This is mainly because I am running Arch Linux and I cannot even get support for new kernel, those drivers was removed from 'Extra' repository to AUR because of bad support. AMD is good company because it supports open source, they are releasing new code etc. But it is too slow. Even performance on by old card is better than on my new card because of those drivers.

[mirv]

As I already said, or maybe not?, I like AMD as the company because they are creating really great piece of hardware but drivers for graphics card is 'crap'. Why it is 'crap' and why I think nvidia is better in this way? This is mainly because I am running Arch Linux and I cannot even get support for new kernel, those drivers was removed from 'Extra' repository to AUR because of bad support. AMD is good company because it supports open source, they are releasing new code etc. But it is too slow. Even performance on by old card is better than on my new card because of those drivers.

Ok, I can see where you're coming from now. I do think it's a little unfair to blame AMD for a decision Arch linux made, and the new kernel support is something most likely to be addressed in the next release (no insider info, that's just a guess). But, well, if your not satisfied by the AMD driver development cycle, I can't say much about that.
I still prefer the AMD for open source support, for regular releases (I don't upgrade to every new kernel straight away anyway, although I am running the latest driver on a 2.6.29 kernel), and for their binary driver not being quite so invasive.
Anyway, I won't bug anymore, and thankyou for letting me know!