The ATI marketing guy on stage (Henri Richard) at the Red Hat Summit just committed to fixing the ATI problems with open source. To paraphrase “most people are worried about what they will lose…IP, etc…we’re worried about what we can win.” They know it’s a problem and they are committed to fixing it.
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What does this mean, specifically? What is ATI promising to do?
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Words are, as they say, cheap (though thankfully getting less so.)
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I had conversations with ATI years ago at OLS where they said pretty much the same thing. I wouldn’t hold your breath.
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My guess is that they will write better drivers for their cards on linux. At least I hope so. Many people are starting to get ticked off at their lack of support for Linux and newer technologies emerging.
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Aaah, I’m dreaming for the days when my worst question when buying a gfx card will be “which one of all these top-notch very-recent cards, all with linux drivers, should I buy ?”…
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‘commited to fixing the problem’ could mean anything. Once there are actual open source drivers for modern ATI graphics cards, I will celebrate. Until then, I’m just waiting for Intel to release a standalone graphics card with DVI out.
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We’ll see what they do. Spot pointed out that he didn’t say “open source” but the context for the statement was that they want to open up specs for people to be able to use the GPUs as more general purpose processors. I don’t care if they open up their drivers or not, just as long as we have the support and the specs to be able to write our own.
People are skeptical, and rightfully so, but I suspect that something here has changed. I’ll try to gather more information during this week and see if I can get something more concrete on the topic.
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Words, words, words. Promises, promises, promises.
We’ll pop the cork the day we have a real committment. This include fully functionnal open source driver (no blobs allowed) OR full documentation to write said driver (ideally both like Intel, with 0 day engineering support)
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ATI: you’ve *already* lost.
[Unfortunately for DAAMIT, this means that I will be buying Intel chips in the foreseeable future....]
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SLIMY. He was very careful to imply open source, and not to actually say it.
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The proof will be in the pudding, of course. Totally agreed and still skeptical. I’m just repeating what the guy said on stage. So it will be your task to make sure they deliver.
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blizzard: it’d be cool if you could nail things down a bit more with the dude. Thanks for the recon!
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I’d love to ask him why free software developers make better drivers than them? Why don’t they even help them out with specs?
Anyways they’ve been saying this thing for years now, literally, so I’m with the others.
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I’m still going to buy an open graphics card and fund the competition. ATI is bringing too little too late. They should be announcing their plans to develop and release a complete open source driver today. Anything less than this announcement is not enough. If they aren’t careful Intel could take the gaming market by storm. Vista and DX10 don’t seem to be going down well with all my friends.. its a bitter pill to swallow, and every day Linux gets sweeter with more eye candy and games.
If I were ATI I would have done this long ago, long before Intel got their open source drivers integrated into all the shipping distros. Because right now if I purchase a video card I prioritize by Intel for compatibility, unless I need performance, then nVidia. ATI is not an option for me because of this situation. Who’s fault is this? Mine? Did I not complain enough? C’mon, ATI..
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If AMD/ATI were serious, the first thing they could do would be to allow Dave Airlie to release the open-source drivers he’s *already written* for ATI cards under an NDA with them:
http://airlied.livejournal.com/31180.html
- Chris.
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that’s great news. I hope they stick to it. If not, you are entitled to wave this blog post in their faces and point at all the comments saying, “yeah, that’s what they said last time”.
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Pingback from tecosystems » links for 2007-05-10 on May 10, 2007 at 12:37 am
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Is there a link to that quote?
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For 10 years I used amd processors. I am inclined to give intel a try.
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Yeah fuck ATI.
I was on the Canadian bandwagon for years! And then I start seeing what Ubuntu and Beryl can do, and of course I gotta try it. Now I’m pretty god damn tech savvy, and I gotta say, the 10+ attempts it took me to get XGL running properly with Beryl pissed me right the fuck off. It’d be fine if I didn’t eventually get it going; only to see how EASY it is to repeat the process with an nVidia card.
So I’m done, fuck it; I bought a $700 X1900 XT 512 a few months back, and I’m gonna hawk it to buy an 8800GTX. The thing is, no one wants to buy it from me! I’ve even offered it for $200 (Canadian!), and had people laugh at me through Craigslist.
Screw you ATI; you broke my heart, and now my bank account.
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I’m upset too with my ATI, my x1900xt is unable to let me play with native linux games like Enemy Territory (texture trouble, looks awfull), neither with wine wow game (far far too slow in comparison with nvidia equivalent).
So I will try to save some money selling my card to a windows user, and I will buy a cheap nvidia one, which give me more perfs in all situation.
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Shaze, wolfy: buying a Nvidia is equally bad. They don’t support Open Source either.
BTW, this made it to slashdot. How not surprising.
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/10/1424224&from=rss
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For now, ATI’s shitty support means I don’t buy anything from them. Yup, ATI is having no sales to me and to the other 0.5% of the market the GNU/Linux represents.
They’re also missing on sales to my mom, my dad, my sister, my professor, many of my friends, and all the other random Windows-users who ask me for purchasing advice.
From my point of view, who knows? They might want to install Ubuntu some day. Even if ATI were price/performance competitive, I’d still advise those people to buy something marginally cheaper or lower performance to have their computer be more future-proof.
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They don’t even have to cough up an Open Source driver, just make one that works. Me wonders why that has been so hard to do.
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Yeah, what Johnny said.
I just called ATI’s presales, got transferred to a manager who assures me “There is some very exciting news pertaining to the “driver troubles” we’ve all experienced”; but he declined to say anything specific because of NDA’s.
He said he will liaze with their Linux team to generalize an annoucement for the OSS community, through me, by EOD today, so we’ll see.
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…and what about the aiglx support ?
it’s a good news, but we want facts -
I spent some time with the AMD guys last night. There will be more progress here. Stay tuned.
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My last card was NVIDIA. My next card will be NVIDIA.
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Just one single paragraph with no real NEWs?
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I have hated ATI for ever. Although I am a die hard AMD fan, it is hard for me to place my trust in a company like ATI. Thanks to them, I have two laptops worth $1500 each which do not work as good as they should on linux compared to an intel/nvidia platform. ABSOLUTELY $UCKS !!!!!!!
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Hi Chris,
Please tell me this “time with the AMD guys last night” was them revealing to you their big hack.
http://gnuosphere.blogspot.com/2006/08/ati-enemy-of-free-softwareculture-or.html
Please? :)
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The only way to go for ATI is open source.
Realy, it is.Look at it this way:
ATI and Nvidia have been giving support for Linux on closed source drivers for years now. ATI has not gotten any better and Nvidia was always able to maintain a decent level of support.
(this is mostly due to the fact that the Nvidia drivers and OpenGL stack are the same in Linux as it is in Windows)So these drivers are still a pain in the rear.
ATI drivers suck soooooo much that they are not even worth considuring at this point.
But with Nvidia drivers you have lots of issues:
1. No OpenGL suipport out of the box for Linux.
2. No modern OpenGL support for older Nvidia cards. (I have a Geforce4 MX card that is no longer supported by Nvidia)
3. Security and bug problems are not addressed quickly.
4. kernel upgrades break Nvidia drivers.
5. X.org upgrades break nvidia drivers.
6. You have the choice between installing obsolete Nvidia drivers with known bugs and may not support newest cards that are supplied by driver packages by your distribution…
or
You can install using Nvidia’s packager, but then you run into distribution incompatabilities and you’ll break it with every kernel update or X.org patch.So even with the much superior Nvidia drivers you still run into a shitload of issues regarding usability and these issues affect new users in a significant way.
Every person that uses Nvidia drivers WILL at one point run into issues and having to muck around with reinstalling that or are forced into using old kernels and such.
Were as in comparision with my Intel 945g I NEVER had any issues with any kernel upgrade or X.org upgrade breaking anything.
3D support was out of the box. 2D support out of the box.
ATI can _easily_ reach this level of support by working with X.org and kernel developers. Supporting them with source and specs they can easily outperform Intel (which only provides source) in the Linux support.
ATI can provide fast, stable, VERY easy-to-install driver support.. if only they would work with Linux and X.org developers.
And it would be MUCH MUCH CHEAPER for them to do so.
But so far they have their IP stick shoved so far up their ass that they can’t work with anybody. Instead they’ll spend a shell of a lot of money on crappy support that almost nobody can use effectively.
I don’t expect them to change any further then minimal lip service about improving their own private drivers.
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I have Radeon 9800 Pro, and I run Linux. Since ATI cares very little about users like me, my next setup is going to be ATI free.
It is easy to say that they are committed to fixing things. It is much harder to actually do something about it. Two faced twits! By the sound of the comments here, people don’t trust ATI any more than I do.
This will be real news when I see some c code instead of some marketing chimp screaming.
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I still have belief in ATI. Driver support has taken forward steps.
OS driver support has taken even bigger steps, but ATI could still give more support for them, at least. On the other hand, developing two drivers for “one” device is just a waste of time…
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ATIs driver will not survive the light of open source.
% strings /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/fglrx_drv.so | grep -i fake
FakeClientID
atiddxFakedMarketingNamesNum
atiddxFakedMarketingNames
atiddxFakedMarketingNameKey
GetFakeAsicName -
I just don’t see where all the hate aimed at ATI comes from. They are currently OK for Free Software, certainly the fastest thing you can run with Free drivers.
Intel is doing the best job with support but they don’t have the hardware yet. Nvidia is 100% closed unless you want to jack around with a bleeding edge driver that isn’t even close to supporting current 3D desktops. That leaves ATI products that are supported by Xorg. No you can’t buy the latest and greatest but an X850 isn’t too obsolete is it?
And I really can’t see AMD being stupid enough to let this situation fester forever whereas Nvidia has stated loudly and proudly at every opportunity they couldn’t give a rats rear about us, they toss the closed driver over the wall because a few really big customers justify the effort but we who want a Free system aren’t on their radar.
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“I just don’t see where all the hate aimed at ATI comes from. They are currently OK for Free Software, certainly the fastest thing you can run with Free drivers.”
Only old cards that were reverse engineered with r300 and that you can’t find in stores. You can’t even get 2d in the latest ATI cards without fglrx which distros can’t include due to licensing, it crashes: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=414194
Also, fglrx doesn’t support Xvmc or AIGLX. You can only use it with XGL which we all know is a very nasty hack (two x servers, definitely not an out of the box solution)
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also, poor people with laptops who can’t replace their cards and only get hte latest ATI cards. I think we know for sure that Dell is not using ATI cards for Ubuntu.
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I have to agree with John Morris. At the moment there are two video cards you can buy if you want Free Software and 3D: Intel onboard chips or ATI cards. That’s the only way using Free Software and have 3D, compiz/beryl,…
I don’t say that the ATI situation is perfect, it’s far away from being perfect and i would appreciate every move from ATI towards Free Software. But i can’t understand how any Free Software guy can curse ATI and recommend NVidia.
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My main machine uses NVidia and Ubuntu, Compiz just works with a click of the mouse.
However I also have built a multimedia machine using KUbuntu Feisty and went for an ATI 1650. Why? Because NVidia do not support Purevideo under Linux, but ATI do support AVIVO. This computer drives a 32″ LCD TV and has a DVICO HD TV card and a SoundBlaster Audigy 4 out to and external HiFi amp. I do not want 3d effects or play 3d games on this machine, I want the best video playback I can get and the ATI card provides it through xV.
I had issues under Edgy and older ATI drivers, but now with Feisty and the latest drivers in the repo (not the newest from ATI) it all functions superbly.
ATI/AMD add AIGLX and all could be forgiven.
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I hope there really will be a change, I can neither watch movies with the proprietary drivers nor have a dualscreen, that just shouldn’t happen.
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I belive this will be for stream processing, the multipurpose part of the gpu that does calculations. ati/amd is not going to increase that much in the grfx department – im sure they will slightly, but as said before its just common to improve with time, so they can say they are commited no matter what the next release they make will be better than the last and with amd they can poor more money into it – but not much.
so stream computing will get greater support from the linux community, but the rest of the gpu fans wont have any great surprises other than what we would normaly get with a new release.
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“I have to agree with John Morris. At the moment there are two video cards you can buy if you want Free Software and 3D: Intel onboard chips or ATI cards. That’s the only way using Free Software and have 3D, compiz/beryl,…”
Yeah, that’s true, I have ATI X800 GTO too. The point is that it’s because of community effort that the drivers exist, not because of anything ATI has done.
I think part of the hatred towards ATI is also that their closed drivers suck so bad – so both the people who value freedom (ATI does not give specs or support to developing the drivers) and those who just want some working drivers (closed or not) join the choir.
For free software usage, Intel’s are the best but eg. the Radeon X800 gives somewhat better performance even with the mediocre-performing reverse engineered open source drivers. Another factor is that you have to buy Intel’s graphics via buying motherboard + processor + memory, since there are no separate graphics cards yet from Intel.
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and to add to my other comment, i do belive that they will fix compiz/beryl support, but thats all they need to make you happy right, so thats all they will do until mass complaints are seen again.
the popularity of linux is the only thing keeping support going for amd/ati drivers. if the popularity of linux was like it was 6 years ago (or there about) today (in the same situation), i could tell you they wouldnt give a damn.
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Well, they got about 3 months to do it. If not, I am grabbing an Nvidia 8800. I’m sick of my video card holding me back when it comes to Linux.
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I had an ATi card…and I was crying…
Today, I only buy nVidia cards…and I’m very happy with them… -
Next laptop will be intel-only. Desktop too, maybe, since I don’t needflashy new games…
Can it be working gfx card time now plz?
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v483/gabbagabba/plz.png
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