"Ask ATI" dev thread

[nanonyme]

ou are realy hart the intelligent one.. Frozenbubble! the creativ one my be Scorched 3D i lilke it :-)

Do you have any idea at all how old Scorched Earth is? I admit though, the extensions to the original innovative idea of Scorched Earth they've thought of are pretty neat.

[CNCFarraday]

"you also can use wine for the windows firefox and windows Flash player to use OpenGL extansions. "

windows flash + windows firefox in wine on linux... Words fail me...

"why stay on windows? on my pc wine is 244% faster on testing windows version of zlib than windows xp !"

I don't "stay" on windows. I've been using various Linux and *BSD for the last 10+ years. I have 4 linux machines at home and one FreeBsd, at work I have a linux workstation and deploy and test on an array of linux hpc servers.

However, i keep an XP hdd in the Gentoo machine to play games because, like it or not, the only games I play either don't run at all in wine or are barely playable on a quad core with 8GB ram...

There is a fundamental problem with wine in that it makes it easier for people to... use windows apps on linux. The goal is not to give people a free windows clone where they can run ie7, photoshop, some games and, in your case firefox+flash, but to build quality apps and games that make no need for these things, thus no need for wine.

The bottom line is that wine is pointless and counterproductive. Instead of investing all the energy in developing and testing wine, that energy should be focused on making and maintaining apps that fill the gap wine is used to stuff right now.

Every time you advocate running a game developed and built for the windows os platform in wine, you are basically saying that linux sucks as a game platform. And maybe that's the problem. Instead of reverse-engineering crap for wine and second guessing if x syscall from redmond has 12 parameters or 18, with 6 always null pointers,developers should talk to game publishers and try to find out what is needed so they can release on linux. Everything that DirectX does can be done on linux. From a functionality pov it's all there. What's missing is a common interface. (well yeah, maybe linux sound still sucks and needs work). At th very least, a priority should be to build up facades over OSS, ALSA and so on so someone working on a game can use ONE common interface that will work on any distro. Maybe the linux sound system isn't such a good point, but, in general, there's no "package" that guarantees developers that they can build on top of it and it will work on ANY distro.

If every distro wants it their way, fine, but at least come together and provide a common facade, so devs don't have to learn some obscure gtk+ crap or some alsa-only bug.

[mirv]

There are no "wine extensions" for opengl. There are extensions that will allow more portable code or data structures between APIs, and it so happens that wine could definitely make use of these (wine devs will have to do that themselves!). Just wanted to clear that up.

Same again for KDE most likely. Later fglrx drivers won't magically make KDE any better. Period. Bugs may be fixed that KDE devs may work around, and won't have to anymore, or new features can be included that will be of use to KDE - but the the KDE devs will have to take advantage of that.

[mirv]

there is no need to clear that up i know it but by english is not so good :-)

KDE... fglrx will fix some RandR problems thats the point to improve kde :-)

Yep, fair enough!
I was writing it more for other people reading - I figured you were aware of it. Although I'll admit that wine will likely be the highest profile application to make use of the particular extensions.

[energyman]

@Qaridarium and Xavier

You DO know that games are proprietary closed source software, right? If you are sick of closed source and only use open source software, why buy uber-cards at all? I mean, what free, open source games are there that need anything more powerful than am integrated intel 950 crap?

vegastrike. Play it. Play its svn version. It is awesome - and totally brings my hd3870 to its knees when closing in to an asteroid field...

[mirv]

I would imagine programs such as 3dsmax, or maya could benefit from the extensions too. I haven't used either in a long time, but I know that 3dsmax at least had a d3d and an opengl renderer.
Even X11 or GDI would benefit in small ways (the framebuffer coordinate of 0,0 can be changed to suit them better).
It will likely be a while before anything starts to take advantage of it though (drivers need updating, and each program would need rewrites, etc etc etc).

[energyman]

tesselation was once planned for dx10. Then nvidia woke up and saw that they were screwed, so they convinced MS to remove a lot of stuff from dx10...

dx11 is what dx10 should have been. AMD/ATI had the hardware back then, they have it now. That is one reason why amd is in a lot better position when windows 7 comes out.

oh and:
GL_AMDX_vertex_shader_tessellator

[energyman]

low means low... yes me to i buy an 4670 only becorse of the good energyefficiency.

an 5870 will have 30-40watt idle and thats the monster car with 1600 shader units.

says who? 30-40W? really? source?

[energyman]

There are no "wine extensions" for opengl. There are extensions that will allow more portable code or data structures between APIs, and it so happens that wine could definitely make use of these (wine devs will have to do that themselves!). Just wanted to clear that up.

Same again for KDE most likely. Later fglrx drivers won't magically make KDE any better. Period. Bugs may be fixed that KDE devs may work around, and won't have to anymore, or new features can be included that will be of use to KDE - but the the KDE devs will have to take advantage of that.

?

if kde doesn't have problems with intel, doesn't have problems with xorg-ati, doesn't have with nvidia but does have with fglrx - who is at fault?

(well, in this case, Xorg devs are at fault. Install fedora_dont_backfill_bg_none.patch and kde+composite will be fast. Or don't use composite with fglrx)

btw, why the obsession with composite? Sure, transparent plasma bar is nice, and sometimes I turn it on. Most of the time I don't because I really don't care that much.

[energyman]

right but idtech5-Rage will not be portet to linux.
unreal-T-3 will not be portet on linux ........

S2 games ports HON to linux well nice!

you see witout wine.. Linux Die for the gamers..

or without wine more companies would port. Have you ever thought, that maybe wine is a really bad idea?