Expected 8.4 features

[Vighy]

I'm just trying to guess.. 1month and half could mean both, much and nothing, but:

is there a possibility for RandR 1.2 support in 8.4?

or maybe, instead, are you putting together all the things you've been working under the cover and now you feel their ready for the public!? (for example Textured2D and friends)

or again, instead, are you trying to collect as much tech info as possible on how manufacturers implemented your solutions, and you will be giving us POWERPlay support!?

Ok, I should stop dreaming and wait till the release date. :-)

[Kano]

Well I don't think it is possible to change huge drivers so fast, that all bugs will be away. That's definitely a long term thing - when you even think that some bugs are years in the driver and not fixed - even if a changelog mentioned a fix which never existed (modeline bug is definitely still in it). A clean rewrite is certainly better, but also this needs time to evolve. My suggesting would be: this year is definitely Nvidia the leader, maybe 1-2 years to keep up - biggest hope are the free drivers, at least for basic 3d like compiz they should work later. Don't know if it is possible to use em for games which require GLSL soon, even if there are ways to implement it in a software emulation (using LLVM -> gallium3d). If you want full featured 3d drivers now, it is absolutely impossible to buy ati. You can see speed increases in benchmarks but these are only done with apps which only require a subset of features - other not tested ones are still broken like pointsprites. Of course Nv cards are not flawless, but compared to ati they are definitely better in most cases. Maybe ati is better for open source driver purists, but not for gamers. So as conlusion: best don't expect more than a few added PCI-IDs in a new release...

[SavageX]

You can see speed increases in benchmarks but these are only done with apps which only require a subset of features - other not tested ones are still broken like pointsprites.

It almost seems like that whenever you talk about the ATI drivers you end up mentioning pointsprites. I do think that "implement what gets used, do the other stuff later" (obviously the long term goal should be to eventually implement the *whole* spec) does make some sense and I wonder what relevant parts of the GL spec seem to be missing.

(E.g. apart from that fglrx seems to hate Nexuiz from a performance point of view it doesn't seem to have problems to deliver the features we need - all problems I have with fglrx are in the 2D area (I'm not running Compiz))

[Vighy]

Well I don't think it is possible to change huge drivers so fast, that all bugs will be away. That's definitely a long term thing - when you even think that some bugs are years in the driver and not fixed - even if a changelog mentioned a fix which never existed (modeline bug is definitely still in it). A clean rewrite is certainly better, but also this needs time to evolve. My suggesting would be: this year is definitely Nvidia the leader, maybe 1-2 years to keep up - biggest hope are the free drivers, at least for basic 3d like compiz they should work later. Don't know if it is possible to use em for games which require GLSL soon, even if there are ways to implement it in a software emulation (using LLVM -> gallium3d). If you want full featured 3d drivers now, it is absolutely impossible to buy ati. You can see speed increases in benchmarks but these are only done with apps which only require a subset of features - other not tested ones are still broken like pointsprites. Of course Nv cards are not flawless, but compared to ati they are definitely better in most cases. Maybe ati is better for open source driver purists, but not for gamers. So as conlusion: best don't expect more than a few added PCI-IDs in a new release...

in my desktop experience ati is not that bad! i just need some little things more, and then I'm ok!

and what i said was a bit different: the sentence "are you putting together all the things you've been working under the cover" does take in consideration that big changes are impossible in such short time, but such a delay is too much for just "a few added PCI-IDs".

and what about intel support!? it seems you have in mind just nvidia
if you are paid by nvidia, declare it!

[sundown]

if you are paid by nvidia, declare it!

Kano is a closeted ATi fan

[MagicTempest]

I've always been optimistic about ATI, but ever since they seem to have dropped all AGP support I'm beginning to get more and more annoyed with ATI. I haven't been able to use any driver since the new naming scheme because they lock up my X with no apparent reason or logging.

So I would very much hope that ATI will finally fix the AGP problems they have and make the driver work for all those people out there with a AGP card.

[dokers]

I've always been optimistic about ATI, but ever since they seem to have dropped all AGP support I'm beginning to get more and more annoyed with ATI. I haven't been able to use any driver since the new naming scheme because they lock up my X with no apparent reason or logging.

So I would very much hope that ATI will finally fix the AGP problems they have and make the driver work for all those people out there with a AGP card.

Yeah, I have the Radeon HD 3850 AGP, so I'm doubly unsupported. Maybe just a hint of support would be nice. I still think it may be a ways off. Until then, the radeonhd driver isn't that bad of an option and works for me (if you don't want any type of video acceleration or 3D).

[Svartalf]

Kano is a closeted ATi fan

Heh... He's not paid by anyone. He's not a closeted ATI fan either.

They've got...issues. And since Kano's a distribution developer (Uh, hello- Kanotix...), he's seeing a lot more pain in things than many end-users would.

I don't like the situation much either. Nobody doing game development for Linux does.

[daniel of sarnia]

Lower my x1650pro idle temperatures

glad to see I'm not suffering alone My X1900XTX gets so hot that I get these little stuck pixels on my monitor (I thought it was my lcd t'll one winter day I left my window open and they were all gone, after I closed it and the room warmed up a couple hours latter they came back) 3D gets really corrupt after playing a while and with 8.03 just crashes in ETQW after about 5 min of playing. I cleaned the dust out of the heat sink and cleaned off the old thermal grease off the gpu for some fresh stuff. It helped a little be I still have the problem basic problem. I don't even know if I can check the temp with fglrx but it seems all singes point to hot...

[Malikith]

I have a small list of bugs I have been able to run across in my time using fglrx, mostly game bugs/slightly slow performance:

- Performance still isn't quite there as we all know, hopefully they will be able to resolve and bring us a bit further to that peak performance.

- The Savage 2 player model bug needs to be fixed.

- Glest freezes upon creating a building, if you don't move your cursor for a few seconds it will come back but as soon as you move again with the transparent building it will freeze again complaining about buffer underruns in the console. This may not be a bug with fglrx, it could just be a glest problem.

- Finish their work on Xv its nearly perfect already.

- Fix AGP HD 2xxx cards.

- Support HD 3xxx cards officially.

- Implement the pointsprites for Kano.

- More compiz fixes.

Theres their list of mine, of course theres many more problems than that but I either forgot about them or don't know about them. This list isn't even that long, you'd think they'd be able to handle that within a month or two but of course they have other priorities..