R600 Open-Source Driver WIth GLSL, OpenGL 2.0

[barbarbaron]

On the closed source side, other than video playback which is still WIP, what features do you feel are missing ?

All features will be missing when AMD will drop support for these gpus not only accelerated video as they did to our r300-r500 ones. And the users will be left an OGL 2.0, GLSL, MOSTLY working sorta OSS driver. They will be waiting for gallium3d to fix problems as we do now. This* is the AMD strategy.

[bridgman]

All features will be missing when AMD will drop support for these gpus not only accelerated video as they did to our r300-r500 ones. And the users will be left an OGL 2.0, GLSL, MOSTLY working sorta OSS driver. This* is the AMD strategy.

Ahh, so the features will be missing in the *future*, not today. OK, that makes sense.

How do you propose that we stop people from improving the open source driver ? That seems like it would be an important part of our strategy.

[barbarbaron]

Simply you wont stop them, but it will take ages to implement already. The point is to drop linux support as early as possible to cut-down development costs and hinder linux gaming and adoption at the same time. A very wise plan but I refuse to be a part of it.

[bridgman]

There's a couple of flaws in that plan as you describe it.

As long as we are offering closed source drivers at launch time with full 3D support then the gaming side won't be impacted, so the plan fails there.

The major Linux distro seem pretty happy with our current plans (they *like* open source drivers), and since they have the most to gain from further Linux adoption it seems unlikely that our approach is hindering Linux adoption. Guess the plan fails there too.

Right now some of the distro packagers would like to see better fglrx support for their distro, which is fair, but as the open source drivers improve that seems to be less of a concern. So... other than gaming and increased Linux adoption, both of which seem to be covered, what else do you see wrong with our plan ?

[barbarbaron]

As long as we are offering closed source drivers at launch time with full 3D support

No you don't. Support comes slowly and painfully and stops at some point, be it video playback or some OGL functionality and the ati linux user community is well aware of it. People are not stupid.

[bridgman]

Ahh, so if I understand it the key components of your plan are :

1. The closed source driver will never improve. It may have improved in the past but those improvements are going to stop for some unspecified reason.

2. If the driver does get good, that doesn't matter because at some point in the future support will be dropped for the (then) older chips. This is how we demonstrate that we hate Linux and love Windows, despite the fact that we reduce support for all OSes at the same time.

3. The open source community is incapable of making rapid progress on the drivers despite documentation, support and help from AMD developers. The rapid progress over the last two years is irrelevent, since building a new stack from bottom to top was the easy part and adding features to that new stack will be the hard part.

4. Despite the fact that the closed source drivers have seen a lot of bug fixes and features related to gaming, game developers will be scared off by past problems anyways, or will anticipate the inevitable removal of support in the future and decide not to support native Linux gaming as a result.

Is that about right, or is your version of our plan just based on the assumption that if there were problems in the past then there will always be problems in the future ?

If you want to say "I don't like your drivers" that's fine, we know there's still work to be done, but you are claiming that our support for open source driver development is part of a company-wide conspiracy to hold back Linux adoption and kill native Linux gaming. You have to admit that's a bit much to swallow.

[curaga]

This is hilarious Carry on guys. I needed that.

[smitty3268]

bridgman, I think you're missing the point. barbarbaron doesn't think you are diabolical geniuses, just diabolical. You can't do anything right, and that includes screwing your linux customers. But you'll surely get the kinks worked out of your master plan sooner or later.

[elanthis]

You know, the best way to deal with trolls is the same as the best way to deal with "your mom' insults. Just say "yup' and then carry on.

[pedepy]

wine tries to detect what Video card you have and reports that to the directx side. It defaults to an Nvidia card if it can't work out what card you have, which is currently the case for the open radeon drivers.

If you hack the detection routines to add support for VENDOR_MESA and R600 (for example) in the render string, then you can absolutely get it to report that you have an ATI card on the directx side. I've done it.

ehm, how did you do that ?

it's seems really odd wine wont detect the open source drivers as ati and fallback to nvidia. a little retarded, even.

wine, you're retarted.