AMD will soon deliver open graphics drivers, said Henri Richard just a few minutes ago, and the audience at the opening keynote of the Red Hat Summit broke into applause and cheers. Richard, AMD’s executive vice president of sales and marketing, promised: “I’m here to commit to you that it’s going to get done.” He also promised that AMD is “going to be very proactive in changing way we interface with the Linux community”.
but having said that, I’d very much welcome better drivers after just having bought a ATi powered Thinkpad T60 (which otherwise has stellar Linux support)
True, but I think the the problem as far as I see it, you’ll only start to see it when their new CPU/GPU thing gets going – being it a completely new idea, probably unencumbered by patents, which means that one will be back to square one unfortunately with Ati support.
Unrelated to this post, for me, I’d love to see Ati/AMD succeed and give Nvidia and Intel some much needed competition. At the same time, however, I am reluctant to believe Ati – they’ve had a good several months to get their ‘ducks in line’ and they’ve done nothing to improve the situation.
For me, it isn’t so much needing to have open source drivers – that would be a perk, but not a necessity, the issued I have is their lack of updating their binary drivers and maintain them.
Having open source drivers won’t fix that; if there is a massive delay between the product launch, specifications being made available, and updating of the source, you’re still back at square one in regards to support – whether the drivers are open or closed source, you’re still at the mercy of AMD/Ati.
ps. Remember, this isn’t the first time they promised improved drivers.
Edited 2007-05-13 21:53
“however, I am reluctant to believe Ati – they’ve had a good several months to get their ‘ducks in line’ and they’ve done nothing to improve the situation. ”
Integrating 2 separate companies is not an easy task, there are various duplicate components (ie: accounting, human resources) that need to be integrated, networks to integrate, business practices, corporate culture, it’s not an easy task. To expect AMD to just buy ATI and then change the entire company on a dime is unrealistic. I for one am pretty happy about this, and think the timing is perfect.
Especially since, if you really read what the AMD guy said versus what the blogger wrote, it isn’t entirely clear that AMD actually promised open source anything. He promised that AMD would work more closely with the Linux community, and he promised to make their drivers work better with Vista as well.
Basically, he admitted that their drivers are awful no matter which modern OS you’re running, and that they’re going to try their best not to suck so much in the future. Still no DirectX 10 part (not that I personally care), no viable competition to nVidia on the high end, and no reasonable comparison to Intel in their commitment to free software. I’m been an AMD fan in the not-so-distant past, but I’ve lost most of my confidence in their ability to execute.
Edited 2007-05-14 02:32
What exactly is “Intel’s commitment to free software”? Intel has no commitment to free software at all, they don’t release the documentation to their chips. They are an opensource fraud: their free drivers are unmaintainable because they don’t provide documentation.
I’ve had no difficulty in producing patches to Intel drivers without extra documentation. The existence of documentation would certainly make it easier, but it’s hardly impossible without it.
What exactly is “Intel’s commitment to free software”? Intel has no commitment to free software at all, they don’t release the documentation to their chips. They are an opensource fraud: their free drivers are unmaintainable because they don’t provide documentation.
What exactly is “Intel’s commitment to free software”? Intel has no commitment to free software at all, they don’t release the documentation to their chips. They are an opensource fraud: their free drivers are unmaintainable because they don’t provide documentation.
If they really follow up their announcement, it would be nothing short of amazing. I guess I understand now why those open source ‘zealots’ kept on insisting on open drivers. Now let’s watch out for nNvidia!
This ain’t no good news. This is the all the same bullshit, AMD is becoming the same opensource fraud Intel already is.
Thanks for nothing, AMD.
We don’t want your filthy code, full of magic numbers.
What about providing full and free documentation for your chips, so we can code our own maintainable and quality opensource drivers?
“AMD is becoming the same opensource fraud Intel already is.”
Intel is an open-source fraud, now? How so?
They are working with the upstream X/Mesa people to get quality drivers into the standard X.org distribution in a timely fashion. Sure, their binary-only regulatory daemon was evil; but they’re fixing that with the iwlwifi driver (which has that regulatory software as part of the firmware). They want people to be able to buy their hardware and have it “Just Fricking Work” with Linux and BSD. No screwing with configurations or kernel modules or anything. It should automagically work and work to its fullest.
Sure, their drivers are still not feature-complete, but they run well enough to use Compiz/Beryl quite smoothly, have nice EXA support, and support Xrandr 1.2; and they’ve told us that things like hardware-offloading of motion compensation (XvMC), HD video decoding, etc. are in development, slated for publishing within the next several months.
Quite frankly, a company which has such devotion to making their hardware F/OSS-friendly rightly DESERVES our business.
My new workstation is almost entirely Intel-based, for what it’s worth – An E6600 processor, an onboard G965 video chipset (“GMA X3000”) and HD audio, etc. I’m quite pleased with its functionality. The only thing I wish I had was an Intel wireless ethernet card, as my current Prism2-based card is starting to show its age…
So I ask you again: How is this fraudulent on the part of Intel?
It just a matter of time! I believe, one day *everyone* must embrace FOSS or else they *will* be out of business.
Maybe this is what is needed to start the ball rolling. Intel did the same, now AMD has plans for open sourcing graphics drivers. Hopefully Nvidia will follow. Great development indeed. Maybe we will even see ATI linux drivers that work as expected too. My only concern is that we have no time frame on when this will happen.
“Proprietary, patented optimizations are part of the value we provide to our customers and we have no plans to release these drivers to open source,” the company said in a statement. “In addition, multimedia elements such as content protection must not, by their very nature, be allowed to go open source.”
That was ATI last August: http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-6104655-7.html
In line with those statements, I’d be concerned whether they’re going to open up their codebase beyond basic 2D support.
Well, provided I get some support at all for my 9600xt, I will be happy. And here was me thinking my next system would either have to be underpowered Intel or overpriced nVidia grahpics… This is good news, regardless of what they give us, it is better than the nothing we currently have!!
And what made you think you would get nVidia? They are as closed as Ati’s right now.
In my experience, ATI’s Linux drivers are really nasty. Stuff like AIGLX is unsupported where drivers are available if you have nVidia. ATI’s and nV’s drivers are closed, but they’re not equally bad at running on open source systems!
“Proprietary, patented optimizations are part of the value we provide to our customers and we have no plans to release these drivers to open source,” the company said in a statement. “In addition, multimedia elements such as content protection must not, by their very nature, be allowed to go open source.”
That was ATI last August: http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-6104655-7.html
In line with those statements, I’d be concerned whether they’re going to open up their codebase beyond basic 2D support.
I’d say that’s mostly lame excuses for not wanting to cooperate. Patents are open docs anyway so they aren’t revealing any secrets by releasing the source.
And the DRM stuff is a non issue as nobody wants it.
I’d say that’s mostly lame excuses for not wanting to cooperate. Patents are open docs anyway so they aren’t revealing any secrets by releasing the source.
And the DRM stuff is a non issue as nobody wants it.
The patents may be published but opening the source brings up the question of how they want to handle licensing the IP that the patent represents.
Just because a patent is open for others to see dosen’t mean its a free ticket to use that patent.
More correctly, did they use their own code, or did they licence the code off the patent holder – that’s going to be the interesting thing – if they were to opensource it, could they re-implement the technology using their own code rather than the licenced.
With that being said, if Ati came out, created drivers for Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD – they would get a lot of Kudos from the *NIX community.
And not only for GNU/Linux either. My Thinkpad Z61m has kept nagging me about OpenSolaris since I first got it…
which version of opensolaris? Can you elaborate, as I am in the process of making thinkpad purchase, Thanks
My Thinkpad z61m comes with an ATI X1400 and last time I looked, the current open source X.org driver did not support this card, meaning I only got a painfully slow VESA desktop in Nexenta. Maybe I didn’t try hard enough, but does anyone know of a solution to get accelerated 2D in any OpenSolaris version with this card?
Try opensolaris 11 build 63, it might be supported on it.
My nvidia 6600gt was recognized flawlessly, with the included nvidia drivers. I was even able to see GPU temperature and enable digital vibrance.
You need to create a xorg.conf file in /etc/X11 and use the radeon driver – there have been many people who appear in #opensolaris chat room and find that the reason why they’ve got crappy snappiness with graphics is drived from the fact they’re either using the vesa driver or the ati one.
As for Nexenta, I’d personally give it the heave-ho, and install Solaris Express Developer Edition – there is a new one being either this coming week or the following, which is based off B64/65. This includes Xorg 7.2 server + updates.
You need to create a xorg.conf file in /etc/X11 and use the radeon driver – there have been many people who appear in #opensolaris chat room and find that the reason why they’ve got crappy snappiness with graphics is drived from the fact they’re either using the vesa driver or the ati one.
Wrong. The “radeon” driver, which you tell him to use, does not support the x1400 he was talking about.
Adam
Adam, is it entirely necessary to be rude?
In what way was I rude? I was just pointing out your mistake.
Adam
You know what this news means right?
FreeBSD drivers
Solaris drivers
Timely bug fixes
AIGLX support
But people lets be honest. All this is gonna take time. AMD has to resolve the IP issues tangled in their drivers.
Edited 2007-05-13 16:54
We have heard this one before. I’ve been hearing about the better linux driver support for a couple of years now with little results. I would love to see open source drivers for my ATI based laptop. As it stands now anything that requires 3D runs just horrible since its software rendering. Please hold true to your statements AMD and give some open source drivers.
A couple years? Really? That’s interesting since AMD only bought ATI in late 2006.
I am rather puzzled why the crowd cheered. What I would expect to hear is crickets chirping and a voice from the back row – “Haven’t we heard this before?! Less talking, More releasing!”
Well considering that this particular promise is from ATI’s new management (AMD), I’m not really surprised people are expecting delivery.
Personally I’d love to see an official, open driver from AMD/ATI — but not fglrx (assuming that the thing they plan to release is somehow based/connected with fglrx).
Instead of releasing something they’ve been messing around/up, is full of bugs and quirks and unreasonable slow, they should simply supply the guys from the existing open ati/radeon driver project with the necessary documentation, maybe hire them for a period of time to bring the open driver on par with fglrx and keep patching them up by themselves afterwards.
This way they’d have a good and knowledgable support/community base from the guys who’re already working on the open driver and would be able to supply a incrementally improving driver.
But let’s keep it realistic: Things will end up small-scale in the end, resulting in a castrated and bug-loaded driver. And for that it’ll probably take another 6-12 months just to get to this point.
I’d be thrilled to be proven wrong though!
http://www.sharms.org/blog
How about we wait a day or so before we start accusing people of things? Perhaps, given how big this story is/will be, there will be an official press statement from AMD. Until then it is just one website saying one thing and another saying something else.
So does this mean they are actually going to open up the specifications for their hardware, or just create better proprietary drivers? We would love to support AMD’s video cards in our operating system (SkyOS), but if all they create is a better proprietary driver, that isn’t going to help at all.
I’d contact them on the issue, but something tells me I doubt I would get very far with that…
I’ve read somewhere that ATi is in process of writing completly new drivers, they’re doing from time to time (I mean years
). I doubt they’ll open their drivers because of legal problems but we can hope that the new ones will be written with portability and stability in mind.
I had come to a decision that any new purchases of mine would use an Intel chipset, and I don’t see that changing.
Intel listened to us, their customers, and did what we asked. They got there first and deserve the benefits of getting there first. All the while ATI just ignored us.
It is not enough for AMD to simply match Intel. They need to do *better* than Intel to get my attention.
That said, I think it is great that they are finally coming around and I’m sure that many people will benefit from this and use AMD’s graphics chipsets.
While I’m on the topic, I should say that this principle applies to areas that stretch far beyond OSS. In the US of the year 2007, I feel that the votes that we cast every day with our wallets are *far* more important than the votes we cast at the election polls.
So many people agonize over their votes in the elections, and then cast their dollar votes foolishly and without thought.
Edited 2007-05-13 16:35
> They need to do *better* than Intel to get my attention.
Well, they would do A LOT better than Intel by simply providing good, free drivers for very fast 3D accelerators, when Intel provides good, free drivers for very slow 3D decelerators.
“[..] when Intel provides good, free drivers for very slow 3D decelerators.”
Uhm…The G965 (“GMA X3000”) is far from slow. It has a 667 MHz GPU with a directly link to the motherboard’s potential DDR2-667 or DDR2-800 memory. It supports hardware T&L, OpenGL 1.5+, hardware video decoding and motion compensation, SM 3.0, etc.
Previous generations did a lot of their tasks in software (especially T&L and clipping, which made games a no-go); but their newer generation stuff is quite good.
Granted, the G965 is in a lot of ways a glorified stream processor, but the fact remains that these are *NOT* slow GPUs.
I confess my ignorance as to the real performance of the latest Intel 3D hardware, though I’m afraid they are far from the minimum for gaming at the currently most common resolution of 1280×1024.
I did have Intel graphics in my previous PC at work, and 3D performance was horrendous, though far more than enough for 3D screensavers, wobbly windows, and cube multidesktops. Not having to fiddle with the Linux drivers on Linux was nice too. If I were to choose what video chips to use in a non-gaming setting, today I’d spec Intel, for sure.
“AMD Will Deliver Open Graphics Drivers”
READ:
“Let’s fire our driver development team and give specs for OSS developers- they’ll write stable drivers for US for FREE! MUHAHHAAA!!!11ELEVEN”
Next news will be:
“GPL zealots found out that ATI..sry, AMD drivers will be released under MIT license- drivers was banned because they are not “free enough”- for example GPLv3″
I prefer fully working drivers(closed source) not FREE half-assed OSS drivers that have miserable parts of features implemented.
IMHO.
I prefer fully working drivers(closed source) not FREE half-assed OSS drivers that have miserable parts of features implemented.
Ahh but they don’t work. X crashes almost every time I log off or switch users. It was only recently that ATI fixed the problem with X crashing when resuming from standby or hibernation.
Don’t start a licens flame war.
We’ve Intel and AMD/ATI is answering. No more nvidia cards until they promise to release open source drivers.
http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=288#comments
For an instance here, I’m not gonna let plenty of negative comments above kill my enthusiasm. The very day open specs pop up and support for nice open source drivers with full specs arrive, I will give 100% support to that vendor. Assuming based on this statement ATI is first, Nvidia will really have to come up with something amazing for me to even bother about them.
My recommendation will go straight to ATI based on their “fair play” as a gfx vendor.
Now, that said, and being truly honest saying it.
Play your cards ATI, and I will be a loyal customer day one!
well,
for this moment I only vote on one thing:
a well performing stable 3D card
so ATI — no go and that has bene for years
NVIDIA is the best main stream bet. and yes I would like to see open source but sometimes, it just won’t happen in time.
More open drivers and standards means it will be easier to free people from MS despotism.
That is a good news for me, because when buying new hardware I’ll have _any_ choice at least. Not only Intel
.
they perform nearly identical to the windows drivers (ie nVidia)
The nVidia drivers perform nearly identical because the drivers are nearly identical (nVidia use a wrapper).
For AMD to do the same, it would mean quite a lot of work (Depending on the actual implementation of the driver). But actually, in the long run, it most likely would pay off.
I’ll believe ATI/AMD when they actually release them. Hell I would be satisfied if they released just the specs for the cards themselves.
But… But… “Linux doesn’t exist in 2007”!
but in the absence of them, i have always bought nVidia graphics cards and motherboards because the drivers may be closed source, but by god they are better than anything ATI could provide.
however, if ATI were to opensource their drivers i would change over to ATI from nVidia in a shot.
*waits*
The statement quoted said nothing about open sourcing drivers for ATI/AMD GPUs, but it seems that this is the assumption many are making in this discussion.
I would say that there will be no open source drivers from ATI/AMD, just like there are no (and likely will be no) open source drivers from nVidia. AMD only said that they would try to make their drivers work better with Linux. I interpret this as meaning that they are committing to providing better closed source drivers to better position themselve against nVidia, which does provide pretty good drivers.
And why do I say no open source drivers? For the same reason there are none for nVidia – drivers for both include proprietary IP that cannot be opened up. And why aren’t the GPU specs opened up? Pretty simple answer to that – it would mean revealing trade secrets to the competition.
I don’t see the open source driver initiatives that currently exist providing anything very good, since the developers don’t have access to all information regarding how the various GPUs work (see paragraph above).
So right now, I will still buy nVidia cards, because even with their price premium, I don’t have to worry much about driver issues. I would love to be able to choose ATI/AMD (becasue there are finally good closed source drivers), but that day has not come yet. Maybe soon (1-2 years). Open source video drivers are a no go for the forseeable future.
>The statement quoted said nothing about open sourcing
>drivers for ATI/AMD GPUs, but it seems that this is the
>assumption many are making in this discussion.
Have you RTFA? The first sentence is: “AMD will soon deliver open graphics drivers, said Henri Richard just a few minutes ago…”
Next time, consider thinking before you talk; sometimes it helps you seem more intelligent (and intelligible).
Hey dude – you should chill just a bit. The quote said “AMD will soon deliver open graphics drivers…”, not “AMD will soon deliver open SOURCE graphics drivers…”. I also followed the links that some of the other posters provided addressing this – did you? What I said was that several posters here interpreted this to mean open source drivers were coming from ATI/AMD. You should read more carefully. I would like to see GOOD open source GPU drivers for nVidia and ATI/AMD, but with my feet as firmly planted on the ground as they are, I am not holding my breath – are you? Intel will do this (or so they say) but their GPU solutions are nowhere near where “A” and “n” are.
Sheesh!! Why do people take this stuff so personally.
“The open sourcing of graphics drivers will indeed be good news, but it’s not a big surprise. ”
From this: http://enterpriselinuxlog.blogs.techtarget.com/2007/05/09/amd-will-…
That’s why it’s misinformation ! Everyone saying bullshit, adding words, making it looks like nothing true.
They ain’t open-sourcing anything! Even if the article says it.
Please, accept my apologies for being so rude; whether you were right or not, or whether you had read the article or not, I should not have been so impertinent.
Wouldn’t you look foolish if this all turns out to be false.
So far AMD has said nothing else, and AFAIK they didn’t actually come out and say they’re releasing open source drivers, this is just an interpretation someone had and there seem to be conflicting ones.
Why spreading news before any announcement.
Check your source. Nowhere it’s said they will open-source anything.
That’s just a phantasm you want to believe in.
Note: I would say the same thing to any website posting this news. That’s _not_ true
Edit: I forgot that I think this is false because of an old article from August ’06 saying what ATI did in the past that confirm some thought about them not releasing anything. I know, that’s old. Read it and see for yourself.
http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/4f127f9da534863e9fe0d77779e48198/i…
Edited 2007-05-13 21:26
Why do people keep posting things announced by ATI last year?
Do you people keep forgetting that AMD ACQUIRED ATI!!!
Jheez, Time will tell.. Stop spreading old news.. And await for an announcement from the current owners of the company.
Interview with AMD:
http://liquidat.wordpress.com/2007/03/13/amdati-linux-interview-wit…
“Anyway, opening the drivers is no alternative for Makedon: first of all there is too much 3rd party technology in the drivers “like for example compression algorithms”. The 3rd party companies certainly wouldn’t allow AMD to release that source code.
Second there is too much IP in the drivers. He compares the situation with McDonalds which will not release the recipe to the sauce of the BigMac also: “It is just not economically justifiable to do that.”
Also, an NDA like Intel uses is not possible because – according to Makedon – there is not “so much 3D intelligence” inside the Intel drivers.
However, he adds that the 2D part is already open source and that there are discussions to also release other parts like the install routines as open source as well. He cannot say never, but that AMD will not take this path for at least the next 6 till 12 months.”
I guarantee it.
The closest thing to ‘Open Drivers’ is a binary blob with a BSD style wrapper library.
You ain’t going to see truly open source drivers from AMD ever.
Good to see you’re on the board of the directors, thanks for the heads up.
Why don’t all you naysayers give the new management some time to screw up before we condemn them?
I don’t understand why these two companies (Via and XGi) don’t merge and then release full open spec and open source drivers for their graphics cards and focus on OpenGL performance and just give us a base level for DirectX 10 so that it will operate at a decent enough level for Windows Vista. Via will never fully compete with nVidia, AMD, and Intel at the high end but if they completely reorient themselves to serve the open-source/developing/government market and make its success their success and start making complete systems including full open spec everything including motherboards with LinuxBIOS and compete for things like the OLPC project they would do fairly well I think. They need to differentiate themselves better.
They need to stop focusing on the developed markets and focus on the developing world and untapped markets like a real open hardware provider and at getting cheaper and less energy hungry equipment to the world which Via already excels at in certain respects. Honestly most people just need something that can run a web browser, office suite, and a few other odds and ends. Via can already do impressive things like ITX but just imagine if they combined their resources with open source. Well they might even be the first to create an open-source “steam processor” or whatever the proper in vogue term for such things is now. Releasing even a lower end product would at least allow the open-source community to show what is possible when such things are fully programmable and can be optimized according to customer and community needs without being dependent on things like proprietary drivers and not enough specs. Who knows maybe the OSS community could fine tune the drivers enough to allow Via/S3/XGi to actually beat nVidia/ATI in certain areas.
Personally I wish that AMD and nVidia would do a cross-licensing deal with their base patents and allow at least their older hardware to be fully or mostly open-speced. I hope that AMD starts providing good support for open-source gfx drivers but I’ll believe it when I see it. I know that they can do it but at least if they don’t want to provide the full resources necessary then they should just let an OSS programmer sign an NDA and make the driver. It would be better if they would just release the specs for their hardware and then just support the open-source driver and focus on their Windows and Mac drivers except maybe for their workstation cards which really need proper Linux/Solaris support as more workstation and graphics apps use these operating systems and yes I know that many probably thousands already do. I shouldn’t be complaining too much about this I suppose as I still just play with Linux and use Windows as my primary OS but my other friends that use/play with Linux have typically just stopped buying ATI/AMD cards because they don’t usually work as well as the nVidia ones. I have an nVidia card and I’ve never owned an ATI so I can’t compare personally its just what my other tech/geek friends tell me. Of course your mileage may vary. Also I have no personal experience (nor do my friends to my knowledge) with using Linux on Intel graphics so I will make no comment about such things.
The thing is, I don’t think companies like S3/VIA and XGI really understand open source development. It’s more than just releasing the source code. Both are generally friendly to open source developers (they provide databooks and source code to a certain degree), but they don’t get the community part. Their code is usually a periodic tarball release, which they dump on a mailing list and that’s the end of it. They never respond to feedback or attempt to clean up their code to make it merge-able upstream or provide much information as to what’s changed between their code drops.
This coming from a VP of marketing and low on details, I am a bit skeptical about all of this. I wouldn’t be surprised if this just means they will update their opensource 2D drivers to support unsupported cards(the x1000 and up) with may a few new features. On the other had, ATI has released their card specs in the past, and they may do so again.
If they do either release open source drivers or at least the specs in an open manner, I’ll be kinda annoyed considering that I just replaced my ATI card with and nVidia one.
Edit: Meant to reply to Xaero_Vincent:
“You know what this news means right?
FreeBSD drivers
Solaris drivers
Timely bug fixes
AIGLX support
But people lets be honest. All this is gonna take time. AMD has to resolve the IP issues tangled in their drivers.
“
This is a great move for AMD.
You still need to buy their hardware anyway, and by opening the drivers, OSS devs will create drivers for systems and deal with issues that AMD doesn’t feel it’s worth their time to deal with, and AMD can sell hardware to users of those systems.
OSS always makes sense for hardware vendors.
Edited 2007-05-14 01:34
I hope this will happen *cross fingers* Intel right now have great open source drivers, my next laptop will have Intel graphics for sure, if this happens I’m going to buy AMD/ATI graphics card for my desktop.
Go AMD/ATI and Intel!
Edited 2007-05-14 02:51
We have heard this in the past and I doubt anything has changed.
What we want to see is specifications of the cards so the different operating systems can write their own drivers under a free licence.
Only thing I see coming from this is drivers that may be open source but is full of magic numbers and only maintainable by ATI employees.
Open the specifications, that is the way to go.
Personally, as a mostly non-gaming user, my priorities are:
1) Drivers that work well (AIGLX, up-to-date Xrandr, multihead behaves sensibly)
2) Open source drivers (integrated with my distro, easily patched by Linux vendors – working with the graphics manufacturer – to improve out of the box behaviour and general functionality)
3) Performance
Summary: I don’t want a good FPS score in 3D games. I want to install my distro of choice and have a GL composited desktop Just Work with decent performance. I want simple GL apps and games to run well. If I have to turn off some fancy effects running games- like Nexuiz, Quake version n, etc, that’s OK by me as long as they’ll run when I do want to have some fun!
These requirements could be satisfied by a good closed driver. But I’d be happier to have an open driver and I think it would provide a better overall experience.
A graphics vendor that could give me this would get my purchase in preference to one with a better price/performance ratio. If I could have high performance too that would be even better 🙂
I agree with you there. I sued to care about performance at some point, but there aren’t really any games for Linux that push the hardware all that much and I think starting small with better desktop integration then focusing on performance is the way to go.
{I agree with you there. I sued to care about performance at some point, but there aren’t really any games for Linux that push the hardware all that much and I think starting small with better desktop integration then focusing on performance is the way to go.}
It would appear that there are now going to be at least two choices open to you here … Intel and ATI both have now announced open source graphics drivers.
This will probably put pressure on nvidia to do the same, but even if not, there is always the nouveau project.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouveau_%28graphics%29
“””
there aren’t really any games for Linux that push the hardware all that much
“””
Doom3 and Quake4 come right to mind. I don’t follow the Unreal universe and others.
well OPEN documented chipset/graphics/audio hardware.
I mean a chipset what would allow to get you usable workstation without any proprietary crap and such. With clean robust drivers thought not best possible performance of course. For most tasks (save addicted hardware junkies and gamers) there simply isn’t any need to any supreme performance goals.
Is asking for a very baseline IDE/SATA/USB/Firewire/Ethernet/Audio/Graphics openly documented (and supported) hardware too much?
The first vendor which will get there will have my money without doubt.
intel?
While this sounds like great news, many (including me) aren’t too sure how to interpret what AMD is really saying.
Mainly because the announcement is made by a “Sales and Marketing” guy. Geeks don’t have much faith or trust in those folks. So I can see why some people are skeptical of this announcement.
But then, we can’t make early assumptions about their announcements with past history. Back then that was ATI. They’re now owned by AMD. So what’s AMD like with opensource? Track record? Good? Bad? Have they always delivered what they announce? (Even if delayed, etc?)
On the other hand, could AMD be reacting to Intel’s recent announcement?
Linux: 965GM Express Chipset Drivers
http://kerneltrap.org/node/8185
Either way, I really do hope they do open things up. I guess time will tell.