TV Out: Possible in our lifetime?

[The_Monkey_King]

Not to be too harsh here, but I've always wondered if ATI really wanted to steal customers from Nvidia and Intel, they would have like-for-like drivers for both Windows and Linux.

I know Linux has really exploded in just the past three years and ATI/AMD is making an effort to create the drivers and help the open source community. But I get this feeling that all companies are dragging their feet when it comes to Linux. Is there a virtual gun to their heads with Microsoft's finger on the trigger? Do they pay to make demands or do they extort these companies with the idea that if they provide like-for-like capabilities at release, MS will withhold support or information?

All I want is to experience component, full 1080i output from my HTPC (Gigabyte - GA-MA69GM-S2H [RS690] + SUSE 11.0, RadeonHD drivers) in the same way I do when I boot into my WinXP-64 partition.

[agd5f]

Not to be too harsh here, but I've always wondered if ATI really wanted to steal customers from Nvidia and Intel, they would have like-for-like drivers for both Windows and Linux.

I know Linux has really exploded in just the past three years and ATI/AMD is making an effort to create the drivers and help the open source community. But I get this feeling that all companies are dragging their feet when it comes to Linux. Is there a virtual gun to their heads with Microsoft's finger on the trigger? Do they pay to make demands or do they extort these companies with the idea that if they provide like-for-like capabilities at release, MS will withhold support or information?

All I want is to experience component, full 1080i output from my HTPC (Gigabyte - GA-MA69GM-S2H [RS690] + SUSE 11.0, RadeonHD drivers) in the same way I do when I boot into my WinXP-64 partition.

fglrx is moving to a common code base with our windows drivers, so you should start to see better feature parity there. On the open source side, we currently have limited developer resources and we are working on better feature support, but it may take a bit longer. Our current focus is 3D and once that is further along, we can start filling in things like tv-out.

[The_Monkey_King]

Hmmm...I looked on the Radeonhad OpenSUSE list and found a link to the Radeon drivers wiki. It shows the development tables for features for both ati and hd.

http://wiki.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature

[Kano]

Is there any reason why ATI could not hire more developers to get things done faster?

[airlied]

Is there any reason why ATI could not hire more developers to get things done faster?

I assume they have to deal with all the problems any company has, like budgets and head count figures... open sourcing the drivers isn't yet a major profit centre so I could imagine it would be hard to justify lots of developers on it.

Also more developers may not get the job done faster, it normally slows things down to start off with as it diverts people from doing the job to teaching other people what the job is.

Dave.

[stan]

I agree with The_Monkey_King -- I think it would be more logical to ensure that there is at least *some* signal coming out "through all the holes" (ie. TV-out, DisplayPort, HDMI, DVI) before attempting 3D optimizations. It would make AMD/ATI cards all the more flexible and applicable to a variety of uses. I'd rather be able to set up MythTV than have that one 0.5% faster FPS.

[bridgman]

I think we're all in agreement here, with the possible exception that we see getting *some* basic 2d/3d/video acceleration on 6xx/7xx as higher priority than TVOut.

[duby229]

I think we're all in agreement here, with the possible exception that we see getting *some* basic 2d/3d/video acceleration on 6xx/7xx as higher priority than TVOut.

I dont know. 3D support is still months away, which puts tv-out even further then that. I kinda agree with stan on this one.

[bridgman]

Sorry, I'm talking about documentation here. We are already programming the tvout hardware according to the information we have been able to dig up so far and it's not working properly. I want to get the 6xx 3D documentation out the door before we go back and focus on digging up more tvout information.