Open Radeon 3D Driver Runs At 60~70% of Proprietary Driver Speed 245
An anonymous reader writes "AMD's Radeon HD 6000 series open-source Gallium3D driver for Linux is now working and running at 60~70% (in some cases, 80%) of the speed of the official proprietary 'Catalyst' driver. This is a big speed improvement in Mesa/Gallium3D compared to the times when the performance was crippling or even just a few years ago when AMD didn't support open-source drivers. When will NVIDIA change ways?"
A Grain of Salt (Score:4, Insightful)
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Indeed, though Phoronix does frequently do reasonably useful benchmarks of the various 3D drivers, so I'll take this with a slightly smaller amount of salt than say their repeated claims that Steam is going Linux.
There really is no substitute for proprietary... (Score:5, Informative)
I have CAD at home on Linux (Draftsight for 2D and Varicad (It's Linux native!!) for 3D), and there's no substitute for the Catalyst driver. The free drivers don't cut it. They may cut it for generic desktop stuff like playing video and spinning desktop cubes, but somehow combining the free driver and any CAD package gets you a very slow experience.
Until performance really does reach 80 percent, I'm gonna have to stick with the proprietary one. And since this is only for the 6000 series and not the 4000 series (my card), I'm just gonna have to forget about it until I get new hardware.
Hands up if you've ever had to call the ATI BBS in Peterborough, ON back in the day to get the driver of the week for Mach32 on any system.
By the way, if you want free 2D Cad for Linux, get your ass over to Dassault Systems and download Draftsight.
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BMO
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somehow combining the free driver and any CAD package gets you a very slow experience
Not quite true for me: Maya and Blender work fine. In fact, Maya is noticeably faster that it is on Windows 7 on the same machine, and I have taken no special steps to make it faster on Linux. I am using the laziest Linux distribution there is (Wubi Ubuntu, click click click until you have a working OS)
Minecraft is faster and more solid too (not exactly a CAD, but it uses GPUs if I am not mistaken)
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Maya and Blender both are not CAD.
And Minecraft certainly isn't.
There's something about CAD that drives the free drivers over the edge.
Like I said, in some situations, the free driver is certainly enough.
I consider the driver as part of the card. I can't modify the card itself, and it doesn't bother me that I can't go mess around in the proprietary driver changing things around. In an ideal world, self help for fixing proprietary drivers would happen, but both ATI and Nvidia think that keeping features lo
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Maya and Blender both are not CAD
CAD = Computer Aided Design, right? Am I missing something here?
keeping features locked away is a competitive advantage because it keeps "the other guy" from copying hardware or such.
I could not agree more (see my post further below)
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>CAD = Computer Aided Design, right? Am I missing something here?
Yes.
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BMO
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While you are correct, you are not informative... Chill dude, stop being elitist and give the guy a break, he doesn't know.
For the GP: Basically CAD is used for design that will generally end up in a real world object. You can design for example a fancy box or even a desk/chair/house/skyscraper and then from your printouts (including the precise measurements) make the real thing. While you could do this in Blender, it is the wrong tool for the job. They're designed for modeling the real world not making s
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While I was dickish, I have neither the time nor the ability to even begin pointing out the differences between working in CAD to design something and "using a program that looks like CAD to design something."
The reference by the other person in this thread to Minecraft was insulting, frankly.
Just because you're working in 3D doesn't mean what you're doing is CAD.
I'm also going to go out on a limb here and say that Maya and Blender, while resembling parametric solid modeling to the casual user, aren't.
If th
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I said
>Accurate representation is /everything/.
I can't leave it at that.
CAD is also used to generate code for machining in post-processing. If i do not have a really accurate model, I'm not going to have parts that come out to the tolerances I want.
How accurate are the surfaces generated by Blender or Maya? Do they even close? For film and graphics and such, this doesn't matter. Nobody's going to care. A milling machine or lathe with garbage code from garbage surfaces, is going to give you garbage p
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Fair enough. I wasn't suggesting you give him a full course(and my explanation wasn't intended to be complete either), but maybe rather than a simple "yes" a bit of "well here is something to get you started on understanding the difference..." might have been helpful to the poster...
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It still fails on the high precision side of things. Can you create an object and produce highly accurate detailed labeled standard drawings in blender easily? If the answer is know, then blender qualifies as Computer Inhibited Design, not CAD... The differences I highlighted were fundamental, but by no means a complete list... The idea was to give the general idea not the 3 year university degree... :)
It is one thing to make your model "real world" and another to publish precise measurements so that other
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... If the answer is know...
* no.
I cringe seeing that!
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Yes, you really are I'm afraid.
You just said the equivalent of "Powerpoint is good enough for DTP right, so why worry about slowness in InDesign?"
Although that's not fair, actually, since Blender and Maya are actually pretty powerful in their own forte, but they're simply not CAD.
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As long as they PROVIDE the driver, I don't care either. The whole free driver thing started because they didn't provide, and we didn't have a choice. Either you hacked a driver together, or you were SOL.
Today, companies do much better.
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You *really* didnt just make a comparison between CAD software..
And Mindcraft.......
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ATI cards have traditionally been better at video and dual head than 3d. Nvidia, traditionally, has been the exact opposite. Open source also drivers get a lot more attention to 2d graphics than proprietary drivers though, as everyone benchmarks and buys based on 3d performance.
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You're right, the current open drivers do not cut it, by far. But the ones mentioned in the article are not included yet in any major distro, do look for them in the next Ubuntu. As for your 4000 series card, it's probably time to upgrade to 6000 ... I just did for playing wine games and the difference between the two is pretty incredible.
For games, I will stick with the closed driver until the open one is just as good or better. AMD has promised to make the open driver have the same development cycle as th
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The problem with your statement bubba is the fact that I just bought a replacement system in March that includes an HD4220 Radeon IGP with no PCIe Video Card Slot. This is a business system so upgradeability is limited. As a small business owner, I'm not willing to replace a working system for at least 5 years as the IGP is sufficient to handle the Win7 Aero Needs and such with reasonable performance. Keep in mind this system was not bought for Gaming/Fun. It's a Business machine, thus makes money.
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So long nvidia... (Score:2)
The nvidia-glx package has been broken for a week or two in Debian wheezy, and the nouveau driver makes my GPU fan spin as if I was trying to calculate a trillion decimals for pi. Result: I am booting Windows XP right now. Guess who's going to be buying ATI next time he replaces his computer?
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Replying to myself... I should have read the article first. Power management is still not too good. Geez, I don't play Crysis on Linux, I don't mind too much if the video acceleration is not on par with the proprietary driver, but I can't stand my video card SCREAMING AT ME ALL DAY LONG. Oh well, I guess I'll have to stick to the proprietary drivers for now.
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Considering the nVidia drivers and OpenGL libraries are shipped as one piece, the fact that you specifically mention 'nvidia-glx' sounds like it's some thing broken apart by the Debian wheezy package managers. I would bet they are at fault for any issues you may be having, not nVidia.
Regardless of any argument performance-wise, nVidia has been releasing reliable Linux drivers for the better part of a decade. Their OpenGL implementations work, they're standard, and they're not full of bugs. They're video
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First try to update the nVidia debian package.
If that doesn't work:
Remove the debian package for the nvidia driver. Download the driver package directly from nVidia, and pay attention to your debian updates. If debian updates the kernel, re-run the nVidia package. Use the nVidia install script instead of the debian package for your video driver and this won't happen...
The nVidia compile process prompts the kernel to export it's latest symbol table (wh
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Thanks for your help, but I am pretty sure the package is broken in my case. I have been following the instructions at http://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers [debian.org], and this is not the first time that graphics support breaks on my computer, so I have dealt with this issue before. I have uninstalled all the nvidia packages and reinstalled them, and some of them complain of missing dependencies... I would show you the console output, but I am away from my main desktop right now. The problem, however, looks su
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I am not blaming nvidia for my woes, I am just saying that if an open source driver for ATI or nvidia comes out that is competitive with the proprietary one, which has power management that actually works, I will switch because I just don't want to go through the hassle of compiling the nvidia release, switching to another distro packaged driver which does not work so well or wait it out on Windows. All the video cards I have ever bought were from nvidia, and the fact that they have a good reputation on Lin
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Debian's nvidia driver has always been an iffy proposition. Try removing all the nvidia packages and install with nvidia's installer.
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That's a problem on Debian, not your video card... As anoying as it is, I'd have to say, works well on stable. But I bet you had other problems on Debian hurting you because of that card, I've had plenty of bad experiences running proprietary video drivers. It is hard for any distro to keep proprietary software in a good condition.
Anyway, I've already taken that route, and the last GPU I brought was an ATI. The free driver isn't as fast as the other computer that has an nvidia with the proprietary driver (a
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Pi is exactly 3.
When will NVIDIA change ways? (Score:2)
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Knowing NVIDIA it will be the same as it was for their chipset drivers so not before the FOSS drivers are nearly on par with the proprietary ones and they suddenly realize it's less work to fix the open driver rather than keep working on the proprietary.
Easy answer (Score:2)
When will NVIDIA change ways?
When the open AMD driver gets to at least 100% of the proprietary driver's speed in ALL cases, AND when AMD's sales start jumping up because of it, AND when Ubuntu decides to stop making it easy to install the Nvidia proprietary driver*. In other words, when they have a market reason to change ways and when competition is threatening to creep up on them if they don't.
Wow, that was easy enough. Next question?
*: Face facts, among Linux users who are going to want to use high-end video cards, the vast majori
Wrong demographic (Score:2)
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There's actually some logic here. The virtues of open source are similar to the virtues of slow cooking. The slow cooking approach is to pay $150 for a video card, then cripple the shit out of it with open source drivers, for any applic
NVIDIA changing their ways (Score:2)
That totally depends on who buys NVIDIA after Intel and AMD squeeze them to death. At that point, the answer could be anywhen between "immediately after that" and "never."
NVIDIA (Score:2)
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My response was that, ATI had apparently found some reasons to change, ie. start supporting an OSS driver effort, despite the fact that their[ATI's] proprietary driver, just as with Nvidia's, had always run at 100% of its own speed.
Presumably, something other than sheer performance considerations is behind the fact that Nv
Re:Why change? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Nvidia claims that a significant amount of their graphics technology IS the driver and that opening it up would expose too much of their IP
For many, many years now NVIDIA has claimed they don't own the IP to large chunks of the code in their drivers, therefore it can not legally be exposed.
The truth of the matter is, NVIDIA's drivers, more often than not, have proved to be very reliable and fast even while ATI was openly bragging non-Windows platforms is for suckers. Beyond that, 99.999999999% of the world doesn't care if the driver is proprietary or open source so long as it performs well and is bug free. NVIDIA easily qualifies. And simply p
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Assuming a 7000.000.000 world population, your 99.999999999% would be 7 individuals. You really think only 7 people care about open drivers?
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The nVidia vs AMD/ATI open source driver issue is all because hardware manufacturers pay for the patents in OpenGL. If you consider the driver part of the patent licensing, as nVidia does, there is no way they can open source the driver. If you consider the driver and hardware separate, as ATI does, you can open source the driver, with some caveats - namely it can't be called an OpenGL driver (it is OpenGL compatible). WINE operates similarly as a Windows compatible API.
Personally I've found nVidia's extens
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Claiming that proprietary drivers are better because they work better right now is exactly that kind of short sightedness. AMD's move to help get
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You're completely ignoring the big fact that the Open Source Radeon driver also runs at 100% of its own speed. In fact, I'm willing to bet good money that ANY driver can run at 100% of its own speed.
Nope. It's a proven fact that adding a HOSTS file will improve the speed of any driver to the point that it runs at 150% of the speed of itself. The fact that this will cause a rip in the space/time continuum, making the universe implode is irrelevant, because the HOSTS file also creates 100% security from thin air, so the driver will continue to exist in perpetuity.
HOSTS files FTW! Is there anything they can't do?!
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Careful, you may invoke APK
You mean foaming saliva boy? That's kinda the point. :)
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Careful, you may invoke APK
Personally, I'd love to see some kind of APK/Dr. Bob crossover. Maybe about how maintaining a good HOSTS file prevents subluxations.
Re:Why change? (Score:5, Informative)
Many reasons..
The binary driver cannot be redistributed with the linux distros..
The binary driver may drop support for older hardware at any point, and the older versions which still support your hardware are unlikely support current kernels or X11 versions.
You cannot fix a binary blob driver yourself, you are beholden to the vendor to do so.
Also that "100%" is relative to the binary driver itself, its possible that given time the open driver will surpass it.
Out of interest, does the open driver support OpenCL yet?
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The binary driver cannot be redistributed with the linux distros..
I've never had a problem with this. I always go to nVidia's or AMD's web site for my video drivers (on Windows). And some Linux distros DO provide binary drivers. I'll take a high-performance proprietary driver any day over a "free" but ineffective alternative. That said, I did pick one of my recent machines because it had a driver supported intrinsically by XOrg. Choice is good.
The binary driver may drop support for older hardware at an
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Many reasons..
The binary driver cannot be redistributed with the linux distros..
Gimp doesn't distribute with the most popular Linux distro. Not all of it is license. Some of it is choice, and the fact that CDs are only so big. And this fix is quite simple if it can boot to VGA, which nvidia can. ATI could not for a long time...
The binary driver may drop support for older hardware at any point, and the older versions which still support your hardware are unlikely support current kernels or X11 versions.
You can still run a GForce2 on 11.04, so I do not see this as a problem, but a "potential" problem. Some people call that FUD.
You cannot fix a binary blob driver yourself, you are beholden to the vendor to do so.
Most users can not fix ANY driver themselves. And open source projects have lost interest and dropped support too... Admittedly, i
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You can do framebuffer output with the proprietary drivers installed just fine. The issue with lack of KMS support is there's always a bit of graphical glitching as you transition between the framebuffer, and the rendered X display. KMS gives you a smooth transition from one to the other.
If you're going to forgo a significant amount of graphical performance just to remove some superficial glitching that you only ever see on boot, then you are a vain anonymous coward.
Re:Why change? (Score:4, Informative)
You can pass a vga= argument to the kernel on boot to allow modes other than 80x24. See this table [wikipedia.org] for possibly modes.
Re:Why change? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because proprietary drivers traditionally have minor bugs and annoyances which are getting fixed like never. Not everybody is craving for the top fps on the new games - many want speedy 2D and video without glitches. I'm not sure that OSS drivers would be better in the respect, yet IMO chances are better with two alternative drivers available.
Also, OSS drivers for both nVidia and ATI would likely exchange patches or probably reuse many common features, making them more compatible to each other, thus reducing number of surprises when something works on ATI driver but not on nVidia's.
Re:Why change? (Score:4, Informative)
Interestingly, nVidia is actually pretty good at fixing bugs.
GNOME3 had a nasty corrupt-on-resume problem with the nVidia driver, and since a) laptops are slept and resumed often, b) nouveau has no power management to speak of, which is kinda important in a laptop, and c) the GNOME devs had no intention of fixing the problem anytime soon, it was nice that d) nVidia fixed it in a month. They're pretty good with other bugs, too.
The nice thing is that, with GNOME3 and nVidia, I have the first instance of tear-free video playback on a Linux desktopin, wel, ever*.
I don't know it AMD/ATI better now, but Catalyst used to be brutal for bug fixes. I think they're better. I also don't mean to impugn Nouveau as they've done great work with what they've had, but I do value battery life and not cooking my thighs.
* without turning off compositing and partying like it's 1999.
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you can get the same by enabling tear-free in catalyst or turning on vsync.
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Possibly, but not with Compiz or KWin. Believe me, I've tried every combination of sync and rate in both the compositor and driver and, until GNOME3, none of it worked unless compositing was turned off.
Watch the "elephant charge" or "crack of doom" scenes in Return of the King. It's gotten better over the years, but this is the first time I've seen video playback on Linux on par, well, with what Mac OS has been doing for a decade. I don't know what the Mutter devs did, but they did it right.
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Except.. These drivers have been around for years, and don't. So you wait for what, 3 years to get a driver that performs just over half as good.
Hey, here's a bug report..
"The driver seems to limit my hardwares performance to only 60% of what it was..."
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Because proprietary drivers will taint the kernel, and you may lose support because of that. Because one can't fix bugs in a proprietary driver, and no company will fix them fast enough or on old drivers. Because you want to add something to it. Because you want the driver that was compiled toghether with Xorg and your kernel, so anything wrong appears before distribution. Because you want the driver that (again) was compiled toghether with Xorg and the kernel, so that you'll be sure there will be no delay
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I use Linux on a Powerbook with Radeon graphics. For some odd reason, AMD does not provide binary drivers for this platform, but the open driver works great.
On my other machines with x86-64, I use the binary Radeon drivers as it is the only way to get full OpenCL. Even there, it sometimes happens that I need to use an older kernel or disable some kernel features, as the binary driver does not play well with the pace of Linux development.
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Meanwhile I have a Gateway subnotebook with AMD processor and graphics (Athlon 64 L110, R690M with X12xx graphics) and it only runs Vista. On Windows 7 resume doesn't work. On Linux I get complete graphics corruption even with RenderAccel disabled. So for some of us, neither fglrx nor ati works. Which is why some of us have finally learned our lesson, and will never buy anything more complex than a cellphone with ATI graphics again.
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I wouldn't say that's fair, the Xbox 360's graphics work fine! (Which cellphones are starting to come towards in graphics complexity..)
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sleep/resume, thanks to ACPI, is a mess. A recent kernel release changed the behavior regarding trusting ACPI about being able to power down a device or not, and ended up draining batteries faster then earlier versions that insisted on powering down everything.
Sadly neither way is optimal as a device may have a legit reason for not powering down.
This however is less of a issue in Windows as the OEMs can work around flaky ACPI data in their drivers.
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And yet I don't have these kinds of problems with laptops with nVidia, and I've had laptops with basically everyone's chips in 'em. Now, I DID have a different kind of problem with a poorly bonded die, which was a known problem. nVidia admitted it, and HP didn't. I hate HP more than ATI... But still resolve to avoid ATI.
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Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet the open driver supports them anyway.
The more widespread open source becomes, the more practical alternative architectures become.
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4 years after they stop making the hardware, they finally mature enough to be relevant.
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I'd use it.
The single biggest source of problems I've had with Linux over the years has been hardware without open-source drivers. I'd go so far as to say it's the only source of unsolvable problems I've had with Linux.
If you're not a serious gamer, you don't need a card to work at 100% of its potential - 99% of the time all I need mine to do is use about 1% of its power to render a desktop. If the driver's reliable and open-source, why would I care that a different driver would give me a slightly-better F
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Pretty much t
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Being open means that these drivers won't simply go away once the product line is deprecated in favour of the newest and coolest graphics card, and that it will be able to receive improvements and bug fixes essentially until the last working piece of hardware dies off. Being open also means that it will be able to provide support for this Radeon graphics cards in other platforms besides the officially sanctioned ones, such as Windows and Linux. Being open also provides a way to provide competition for the people AMD employs to develop their official graphics card drivers, because if an open driver developed by amateurs on their spare time happens to be nearly as good or even better then they may as well be out of a job, and they can't have that. Being open also means that, if the open drivers mature enough so that they are comparable to AMD's official offering, then it will be in AMD's best interests to get directly involved in the development of these open drivers and even abandon their proprietary offering in favour of this project.
And, obviously, if these open drivers represent a business success story to AMD then you can bet that this will spread out to other companies, and everyone who used windows and had to deal with hardware with support problems certainly knows what a PitA it is to be tied to proprietary drivers which are crap.
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Being open means that these drivers won't simply go away once the product line is deprecated in favour of the newest and coolest graphics card, and that it will be able to receive improvements and bug fixes essentially until the last working piece of hardware dies off.
Wewt! I can get speed improvements! Now, at their current rate or increase, it will only take 5 years for the driver to be able to perform at the same level as the proprietary driver.
Being open also means that it will be able to provide support for this Radeon graphics cards in other platforms besides the officially sanctioned ones, such as Windows and Linux. Being open also provides a way to provide competition for the people AMD employs to develop their official graphics card drivers, because if an open driver developed by amateurs on their spare time happens to be nearly as good or even better then they may as well be out of a job, and they can't have that.
If, by 'competition' you mean something which performs sub par to your own drivers, I guess there's a point there somewhere.
Being open also means that, if the open drivers mature enough so that they are comparable to AMD's official offering, then it will be in AMD's best interests to get directly involved in the development of these open drivers and even abandon their proprietary offering in favour of this project. And, obviously, if these open drivers represent a business success story to AMD then you can bet that this will spread out to other companies, and everyone who used windows and had to deal with hardware with support problems certainly knows what a PitA it is to be tied to proprietary drivers which are crap.
So, a product which is developed for years and has only recently achieved 60% of what the commercial driver can do *isnt* crap.
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Wewt! I can get speed improvements! Now, at their current rate or increase, it will only take 5 years for the driver to be able to perform at the same level as the proprietary driver....So, a product which is developed for years and has only recently achieved 60% of what the commercial driver can do *isnt* crap.
Dear troll, no it is not crap, it is running on my 4 way Phenom box right now, very nicely. I had problems with the Catalyst driver including odd behavior on reboot and horrible breakage on nearly every kernel upgrade. When I have time on my hands I will fiddle with the Catalyst driver some more and get it working again, it does have advantages. But using it does entail a certain degree of pain I am not willing to suffer at the moment. I regard the Calalyst driver as a hobby project, the open driver as my r
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The Gallium3D driver has been under development for nearly 4 years. Out of the box they where able to get roughly 30-40%, so, after 3 years, it increased roughly 10% per year. So yea, for 100%, itd be about 5 years. It should be noted that it performs in selected tests at that speed, NOT across the board. The more complicated and graphics rich the test, the worse the open source driver does. For example, the Lightsmart benchmarks come in at around 25%.
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Being open also provides a way to provide competition for the people AMD employs to develop their official graphics card drivers, because if an open driver developed by amateurs on their spare time happens to be nearly as good or even better then they may as well be out of a job, and they can't have that. Being open also means that, if the open drivers mature enough so that they are comparable to AMD's official offering, then it will be in AMD's best interests to get directly involved in the development of these open drivers and even abandon their proprietary offering in favour of this project.
TFA clearly states that the majority of the code was released by AMD devs and that they have recently expanded their open source driver team by adding two new members. Are you suggesting that this was all work done by the community? This is definitely not the case. Also, I would imagine that the Gallium3D driver is Linux-only and wouldn't be portable to other platforms, so they would still need the proprietary drivers for Windows.
When you think about it, if support gets better, then Linux could actually hav
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Being open means that these drivers won't simply go away once the product line is deprecated in favour of the newest and coolest graphics card, and that it will be able to receive improvements and bug fixes essentially until the last working piece of hardware dies off.
I wish that was true - but unless I'm being misled, these drivers already don't support my 2-year-old card or the generation after it. Is there anything concrete to give me hope this will change, and the 6000 series they're now making great steps forward with will be supported for more than 10 minutes after the 7000 series is released?
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If you take a look at the xorg's mailing list you will find out that drivers for ancient relatively rare graphics cards such as the Matrox 400 line are still being developed and maintained. So, I don't believe that no one will be interested in getting involved in this sort of project.
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...it's only advantage is being Open?
I can see how many people may not see a great cost/benefits ratio there...
The main advantage of being open is long term support. Graphics card drivers are quickly abandoned by AMD once they are a few years old. So their newer drivers don't support old cards, and older proprietary drivers don't support new kernels. So your only solution when using an old card (pre HD series) with a new operating system is to use the open source driver. The problem is not limited to Linux. On Windows, AMD issues "legacy" drivers for older cards but they are not thoroughly tested. So while they fi
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...it's only advantage is being Open?
I can see how many people may not see a great cost/benefits ratio there...
Nice troll. You could also say "the only advantage of living in a democracy is being free".
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Until 51% of the people who voted decide to take away your freedom.
I'd rather have a constitutional form of government that guarantees my freedom regardless of what the majority decides. That of course implies democratic processes, but these aren't the ones making me free.
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I'd rather have a constitutional form of government that guarantees my freedom regardless of what the majority decides. That of course implies democratic processes, but these aren't the ones making me free.
And neither does free/libre software directly make you free, but it is an important link in the chain. See the poster in this thread who runs ATI hardware on hardware not supported by AMD. Though it was the effort of programmers not employed by AMD that directly made that come about, however this most probably would never have happened without software freedom.
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My experience with closed source linux drivers is that they're usually very poorly integrated with the rest of the system. The companies usually like to solve everything their own way (tm), rather than using the frameworks all the open drivers use.
When AMD dropped their support in fglrx for my radeon x1300-based GPU in my laptop (yes, they drop support for hardware whenever they feel like it) I had to start using the radeon driver on my ubuntu-machine. Everything has worked much better in the system since t
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Ok, I get it now.
Thanks for the explanation.
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Funny, when I use the free drivers my screen flickers.
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Somehow, that adage almost never works well at the real world.
Did you get some Greece bounds a couple of years ago?
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Don't burst his bubble, that's not nice.
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Because 3D horsepower is only used for games, right?
Don't you have homework to do before you're allowed computer time?
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Mommy told you to play nice.
And who said I ran 3D graphics hardware on Linux? My only Linux machine is an old G4 Powerbook.
Oh right, you thought I was "personally defending" myself or something, rather than just participating in a discussion. Ah, to be that narrow minded again! Simpler times!
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Why aren't you going to be doing any gaming? Because there aren't many games that are made to run well on Linux. And why is that? Because the graphics stack sucks for 3D. It's a circular argument that has allowed the state of Linux graphics to continue to lag behind embarrassingly. I can't see how ATI being committed to improving their Linux drivers is anything other than a good thing?
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Some people can notice the flicker at 60 hz even. Going up further than that, a simple comparison test may yield no discernible difference. But unconsciously it can definitely make a difference. Remember, your brain doesn't see things, it interprets things. So while consciously, you may not be able to pick out a difference, higher quality video and audio still make an experience more natural and let you feel more immersed.
The highest quality displays can look 3d without any special effects simply by dis
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That sounds horrible. I have a Radeon 7500, and I can play 720p mkv files back almost perfectly using opengl. 1080i files are a little worse, but still watchable. This is on a Pentium 4/3.0GHz. The only reason I use opengl over xvideo is because I have a dual head setup, and this card is too old to support xvideo with both heads running. With only one head on, I can get absolutely perfect playback.
You may have some serious config problems, rage3d.org is supposed to be a good resource.
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I disagree.
The nvidia multihead drivers are also tricky on some monitors.
In general the biggest issue is poor EDID signals from certain monitors.