Originally posted by M1kkko
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Originally posted by M1kkko
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Open drivers suffer none of these impairments, and can continue to evolve and improve as long as there is anyone interested in them. For instance, we've had massive breakthroughs in the performance of Radeon "R300" class hardware in recent years, and that hardware is not even officially supported by AMD anymore. It's to the point that you literally cannot use the last supported version of fglrx for R300 with a recent distro, because the packages are so new that they are incompatible with the ancient proprietary driver that supports this hardware.
Also with open drivers, you can do things like run desktop Linux (including an X server, or Wayland, or whatever you want) and not just being limited to Android or whatever platform the vendors care to support. This can allow people to run desktop Linux on a tablet originally pigeonholed to Android, for example, or you might even be able to run FreeBSD on it. Anything you can imagine, really.
Also, it's just plain wrong to think that the open drivers won't reach the performance or feature level of the proprietary drivers. Nothing is holding them back except for time. The development efforts are picking up huge steam across the board, so don't expect the performance to be held back for long. I'm counting on the Radeon HD8000 series, for example, to have fully functional OpenGL 2.1 and 2D Xorg acceleration on launch day. That's just huge.
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