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ATI going open source
MKR
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http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=826&num=1
tl;dr: ATI is working on open-sourcing Radeon drivers.
If this goes well, we may see nvidia and other 3D accelerator vendors opening up, which would benefit everyone.
Edit: http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=302 has a somewhat more involved comment thread on this.
tl;dr: ATI is working on open-sourcing Radeon drivers.
If this goes well, we may see nvidia and other 3D accelerator vendors opening up, which would benefit everyone.
Edit: http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=302 has a somewhat more involved comment thread on this.
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Dell selling PC + Unbuntu + ATI + proper drivers.
2009 is a year of Updates - one every Monday. Hopefully. xx
It's kind of a cause-and-effect thing.
Ubuntu driving Linux adoption->Dell selling linux PCs and pushing hardware developers to support Linux->ATI - owned by AMD (who has a history of being pro-OSS) - open sourcing drivers.
That would be so sweet... So so sweet.
OpenGL?
Not really as up-to-date on feature set as DirectX is. Plus DirectX is an API suite dealing with far more than just graphics.
Not to say it isn't feasible to use. Companies like id and Blizzard don't seem to have an issue with it. But going the DirectX route definitely does make things simpler since there's a lot more taken care of.
SDL + OpenGL is comparable to DirectX, and I prefer SDL's idioms anyway. I'm not going to comment on feature set, because I've been working mostly in C#/DX for a while now. I'd use OGL if C# had any support for it, but I'd rather not go back to C++ just for that.
http://taoframework.com/ - Might want to take a look at this.
The open source community has been very vocal about the fact that they could fix the problems if they had the source available.
Time for the guys who keep talking about that to step up and do something. This will be a real test to see if OpenSource drivers can be made that are comparable to the commercial ones.
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FUCKING YES!!
They have been. The XOrg people have made a completely clean-room reverse engineered driver for the R300 chips (Radeon 9 series) without even getting the specifications for the damn card. These drivers have more features and better performance than ATi's own set. So I've no doubt that if AMD does indeed actually start giving out some source (and not just the 2D part, like they used to) then we'll see some good, stable drivers.
Um. The 9200 is an R200 chipset. It's a rebadged 8-series, kinda like how the Geforce 4MX was a rebadged GeForce 2. The R300 was a 9700 (and 9500) and greater (where they started supporting DX9). You know, the ones still officially supported.
themoreyouknow.jpg
I've run Vista Ultimate on an x300 SE & now an X1950 Pro. I didn't have ant trouble with the x300 but the x1950 wouldn't work at first. The a second set of drivers was released now everything is great on Vista for me.
ATI video processors might not be as cutting edge as nVida's but they have been very stable for me and my friends. They run a lot better with Vista than nVida's crap drivers as well.I'm looking forward to seeing what comes from this. I haven't used a *nix OS in a year and a half. But know that my older x300 will work properly gives me yet another reason to try.
[strike]I'm not sure where you got this, but the R300 chipsets do not have a fully functional open source driver. They have a rudimentary driver that does some basic functions, but it is not anywhere near a replacement for the fglrx driver. It's basically there so you can do anything that doesn't require 3D acceleration.[/strike]
And all this aside, they released more info about this news, and apparently what AMD is doing is giving certain specs to the xorg guys to allow them to make that non-3D accelerated driver better, however they will NOT be giving them the information needed for a fully accelerated driver. This is to replace the current "radeon" driver with an open source version supported by ATI/AMD, and "fglrx" will still be where you need to go for real support.
So it was mostly a publicity stunt, although it will lead to *hopefully* better performance of the standard radeon driver.
EDIT: I screwed up on my chipset numbers, you're right, although the acceleration is very sketchy and basic.
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They do have awful performance. You can't even run a composite manager, because it just shits the entire computer. Quake2 has massive artefacting with lighting using the drivers, which is unsolvable, save for running it in software mode:
http://fina-fisken.net/gallery/d/1587-1/quake00.png
http://fina-fisken.net/gallery/d/1591-1/quake06.png
And so forth. I'm hoping that the performance will improve with the open sourcing of the drivers ... But the drivers are already in such a sorry state that it's impossible to make them worse.
e: Aw hell, I'm only saying that ATi doesn't even support some cards so it's not hard to outperform them on THAT level. The newest ATi cards are better with the propriety drivers. Some support > No support leads to OS-drivers > propriety.