Drivers for linux are rubbish

[albatorsk]

Is that supposed to reflect poorly on AMD or on you? Because, from my POV, it doesn't reflect poorly on AMD :-)

Yep, completely my fault for not fixing Vega Prime

[WildcatWhiz]

Fglrx is slow resizing windows on desktops that use compositing.

It is said that is xorg fault and not totally fglrx. Anyway the error is this:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/lu...6?comments=all

You have to update your xorg using this ppa:

https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-wey...ver-nobackfill

I notice that all the time in KDE. Thanks for the patch, I'll give it a whirl.

Now please...Proceed with fglrx bashing.

[cutterjohn]

It's highly amusing how these threads bring out the AMD fanbois while nVidia has no need for this sort of thing, as they understand R&D, design, and quality drivers unlike crapMD

[cutterjohn]

no amateur hour with nVidia or Intel.. but then I guess that you get what you pay for...

[cutterjohn]

But given that the competition (nVidia) doesn't require work arounds just to watch tear free video I still think AMD need to keep working before I'm going to be impressed in any way.

I'm sitting here now with a lowly 9800gt running two 24" Acer LCDs. The one on the left is currently streaming TWiT episode 251 via SMPlayer in a window (not maximised, but works just as well full screen) tear free while at the same time running Blender across the two screens and about a million other apps. No fiddling required. Just works. Starting a VLC window plays back tear free at the same time, and again, no fiddling or settings changed.

All with Compiz enabled. In fact there's absolutely no feeling that Compiz is waying down the system in anyway. Just the way it should be.

These days you shouldn't have to be worrying about work arounds just to get video playback the way it's meant to be. When looking at the way fglrx is moving along I'm fairly sure it'll be in a fit state 'real soon now'tm but I totally understand anyone who wants to label fglrx as amateur hour because when compared to the competition, it currently looks like it is.

Hey fanboi! nVidia drivers actually fucking work while AMD's are an amateur nightmare and closed source. Thier OSS drivers are half-baked and nothing more than a political ploy for the OSS zealots and will be nothing more than that, ever.

[cutterjohn]

Since I can't edit, AMD's drivers are such a POS that there is no way in hell that I'l ever touch one of their products ever again! Oh wait, you can try XYZ workaround or use their half-assed OSS driver and wait, if you have a GPU older than about 2y you're FORCED to use their half-assed OSS driver?! WTF?!

AMD has, evidently, stumbled upon some sort of master marketing strategy which no one with a couple of neurons to rub together can possibly fathom! Brilliant! (excepting fanbois)

[cutterjohn]

Hell! I don't know how much they pay bridgman but how he can sit around and spout crap like workstation blah blah is great, I don't know since there isn't a while helluvalot of difference between consumer 3D and workstation!

AMD just need to get their shit in order.

[bridgman]

In the case of tearing (yeah, I know, I'm stuck on this one issue) it's so obvious to most people that vsync should be implemented in the driver. Yet, for AMD, it's a feature that's simply not requested by their customers, so it gets no attention. I can't understand this.

Hell! I don't know how much they pay bridgman but how he can sit around and spout crap like workstation blah blah is great, I don't know since there isn't a while helluvalot of difference between consumer 3D and workstation!

Cool... it's not often I get to use the same answer for multiple questions...

Huh ?

albatorsk, I don't think anyone has said that tear-free Xv has not been requested, just that (a) other things were requested by a larger chunk of our customer base so we worked on those other things *first*, and (b) since the 2D acceleration code is being replaced it didn't seem to make a lot of sense to add features to the old code then promptly throw it away and have to do all the work again on different code.

cutterjohn, the differences between workstation and consumer are mostly outside the 3D area, although workstation 3D workloads tend to have a much higher vertex shader component while consumer workloads tend to be much lighter on the vertex shader workload while making much heavier use of textures, for example.

The main differences between consumer and workstation use cases have tended to be :

- consumer users frequently run compositors, workstation users generally do not

- video is an important use case for consumer users, but much less so for workstation users (with the obvious exception of the video production industry)

[mugginz]

It looks like an important half has been left out there: "Using an OSS driver which isn't supported by nvidia in any way..."
radeon seems to do just fine for that too...
You gotta keep the comparison fair all the way through

If pingufunkybeat hadn't said...

Competition (nVidia) does not work well with KDE4, and since the drivers for older cards are considered legacy, they likely never will.

...then what you suggest may be valid.

My statement was clearly directed at what he said.

Also, have I at any time even tried to assert that nVidia is more open than AMD?

The quality of the blobs as opposed to who's an evil company are two different topics in my view.

[mugginz]

@ mugginz, panix buy and nvidia card and be happy with the driver support / features they are offering. If you like their support buy nvidia.

• I like AMD more than nVidia as a company.
• nVidia cards currently work better than AMD ones with Linux
• I like AMD's cards better than nVidias cards (from a hardware perspective.)
• FGLRX is currently not sufficient for me
• FGLRX improvement is currently on a trajectory that might mean it soon will be sufficient for me.

Given the above I think it's quite reasonable to try to wait as long as possible to see what happens with FGLRX.