AMD Catalyst Will Not Support Wayland Anytime Soon

[droidhacker]

It's astonishing that some people cannot get their heads around the idea the for a product as complex as a modern GPU, open drivers are little more than a nice promise today. I may be more simple minded, but I'll take what works, thank you. Would I like all drivers to be open sourced? Sure! But there's this thing out there called "the world" that you can't just ignore. Or change at will.

The only driver that WORKS for any GPUs in Linux, ARE the open source drivers. Predominantly for AMD and INTEL hardware.

[droidhacker]

This!

The current open source drivers are useless and until this changes I'll stick with the binary blobs.

The blob is useless and the open source drivers are the ones that actually work.
That is, unless "works" is synonymous with "beat your head against a wall until you're dead".

[droidhacker]

It's definitely easier to use a blob.

Why would somebody try to learn the intricacies of GPU driver programming just to get his $300 card to work right?

Excuse me? How you figure?

Take your favorite distro's install disk, put in disk tray, follow instructions to install.
Done.

How can anything be any easier than that? Particularly the following;

Take your favorite distro's install disk, put in disk tray, follow instructions to install, download blob driver, mess with terminal for an hour, have it complain that its not compatible, research on internet forums for 3 days, figure out how to hack the installer to actually install, install, find that its incompatible with your current kernel or xorg, download old kernel, compile and install it the hard way, try to boot.... fail. Research on internet forums for 3 weeks, find all incompatibilities with old kernel, build and install old versions of those, finally it boots, reinstall blob driver, now finally it works, but poorly, and crashes frequently.

[droidhacker]

It is useless if you want to do anything more than desktop compositing. For games, it is practically useless.

Funny, every game I've ever tried worked just fine....

Also, if you want video acceleration, good luck.

If you want video DECODE acceleration with the blob.... good luck. Your only real option is something like crystalhd, or shader-based.

Also, I like the latest version of OpenGL now

Nothing uses the latest version.

as opposed to so long from now that once they finally reach that version that it is irrelevant.

It will be ready by the time it is actually needed.

[droidhacker]

There's a thing called paying the bills at the end of the month...maybe you heard of it.



I wish I could shout this at the top of my lungs! I'm a realist, and I know that we don't live in a perfect world. If this were the case, everything would be open source, wars wouldn't be fought between nations and cars would run on sunflower oil only. So for now, we have to make due with what we have. I use Intel's open source drivers because I don't game or do anything GPU intensive on Linux. But if I did, I would definitely use the NVIDIA blob, not because it's closed source, not because I want to piss people off, but because it's the best.

Your "best" has been recently found to contain critical debilitating privilege escalation exploits. Further, they have a tendency to have OTHER nasty debilitating bugs that go for years unfixed, their bug support process IGNORES ALL BUGS. If I was restricted to blobs, it sure as hell wouldn't be nvidia.

[droidhacker]

Believe me, I've tried them, at least the ones from AMD.

* No power management.

http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/#KMS_Power_Management_Options

* No HW video acceleration

So?

* No OpenCL (there is a prelilminary version now)

See bold.

* No performance.

Funny, I have a dual GPU laptop, I have the discrete chip DISABLED, and set the power management profile to "low", and yet STILL, the performance is more than adequate. Perfectly fluid, in fact.

=> The open source drivers are useless.

Try it now. 2005 open source drivers WERE useless. THAT WAS SEVEN YEARS AGO!!!!

I don't buy hardware for a few hundred dollar, just to be able to use it properly in 10 years.

Few hundred dollars? Wow. You've SERIOUSLY got your priorities mixed up. BADLY. Maybe you ought to try the open source drivers on some $50 hardware.

[droidhacker]

Fuck you Nvidia, and all the idiots who support the blobs.

FIFY
10chars

[droidhacker]

There might be some users who are willing to put up with this crap and some who have to.

WHAT crap?

Still the OSS drivers are in no way a real alternative to the binary blobs.

You got that backwards. The blobs are NO REAL ALTERNATIVE to the vastly superior open source drivers.

Only evangelists are torturing themselves with these drivers.

You're, of course, referring to the blobs.... because the open source drivers actually work.

Normal people just use what works best.

Which is what works and comes pre-installed with their favorite distro --> open source.

Why should I watch the [blob] driver drain all my battery if I have a better alternative?

You tell me....

Why should I deal with missing features if a better alternative is just an "apt-get install" away.

Again, you're obviously referring to the blob drivers, because the open source drivers have more useful features. And no, you don't have to manually install them, they install automatically.

By that time those drivers will hopefully work.

The blob driver will never work. In fact, it will just keep getting worse.

Otherwise just buy new stuff. No one cares about 10 year old hardware.

Whose hardware is 10 years old? AKAIK, the blob driver has dropped support for 10 year old hardware, so your concerns are pointless. That certainly isn't a point supporting your position.

[pingufunkybeat]

There might be some users who are willing to put up with this crap and some who have to. Still the OSS drivers are in no way a real alternative to the binary blobs. Only evangelists are torturing themselves with these drivers. Normal people just use what works best.

For 2d, stability, ease of use, xrandr support and everyday work, they are better than the blob, in my experience. Why you're torturing yourself with Catalyst, that's a different question.

People who depend on highest performance and OpenCL have to use blob at the moment, but for 99% of what a normal working person does every day, open drivers are amazing, and the gap is closing all the time.

Why should I watch the driver drain all my battery if I have a better alternative?

Switch to a lower power mode when you're not gaming. There, it's that easy.

Anyway, trollish troll is trollish. I've played (and finished where applicable) the following games with acceptable performance, on a lowest-level budget r700 card:

Doom3
Quake4
Prey
Amnesia
Penumbra Trilogy
Nexuiz
Trine
Shadowgrounds & Survivor
RTCW
World of Goo
Osmos
Steel Storm
Gish
Aquaria
OpenArena

Who is getting money to lie on the internet, I wonder? Bad boy! It's practically useless for you because you're a spoiled brat, that's what.

[bug77]

Oh good, fanatics are home.