Current state of the binary?

[evanjfraser]

That was the idea when I bought my 5750 last year, but it's still not supported by the open source driver. VA-API still doesn't work with it, and I STILL have tearing issues during movie playback (with/without GL).

Since upgrading from my Nvidia 7900, I've completely stopped playing games under Linux.

AMD has been an unmitigated failure for me under Linux. I'm a total open source advocate, but it's time to face the reality. If AMD were serious about Linux support, it would be better than this.

Maybe I'm just moody today, but even I want to sell up and buy an Nvidia card now.

I don't want to sound like I don't appreciate Bridgman's or Gbeauche's etc efforts. I really do. Thanks.

[bridgman]

You don't need to "support" oss driver development because thats impossible as every buy is counted for win anyway because ati sold the chip only to oems.

Nope. If that was how we measured Linux market share we wouldn't be spending any resources on Linux graphics at all.

We know that a certain percentage of OEM products are either dual-booted with Linux & Windows or stripped and loaded only with Linux. Same for retail cards, a certain percentage of those are used with Linux. The challenge is that the credible numbers indicate a relatively small market share and the numbers which indicate a larger share don't hold up well when you try to validate them.

[bridgman]

evanjfraser, all I can say right now is that if you look at the delay between the introduction of each new HW generation and availability of open source driver support the delay has been dropping fairly quickly and will continue to drop in the future:

r5xx - launched 2005, 3D support in 2008/9 -> >3 yrs
r6xx - launched mid 2007, 3D support in late 2009 -> 2.5 yrs
r7xx - launched mid 2008, 3D support in late 2009 -> 1.5 yrs
EG - launched late 2009...

[monraaf]

That was the idea when I bought my 5750 last year, but it's still not supported by the open source driver. VA-API still doesn't work with it, and I STILL have tearing issues during movie playback (with/without GL).

Since upgrading from my Nvidia 7900, I've completely stopped playing games under Linux.

AMD has been an unmitigated failure for me under Linux. I'm a total open source advocate, but it's time to face the reality. If AMD were serious about Linux support, it would be better than this.

Maybe I'm just moody today, but even I want to sell up and buy an Nvidia card now.

I feel pretty much the same except for the part of buying an Nvidia card. Especially when there are again horror stories surfacing of Nvidia cards going up in flames.

http://www.dailytech.com/Article.asp...4&red=y#603720

When it's time to upgrade my system mobo/cpu I'll probably switch to the more open source friendly Intel platform.

[gbeauche]

I feel pretty much the same except for the part of buying an Nvidia card. Especially when there are again horror stories surfacing of Nvidia cards going up in flames.

http://www.dailytech.com/Article.asp...4&red=y#603720

I would blame the card manufacturer. NVIDIA (and ATI) are only selling chips with thermal specs among other things. Certain manufacturers are probably pushing ahead of the recommended designs (bad heatsink et al.)... The chip manufacturer could also be in cause if they underestimated the thermal impact.

When it's time to upgrade my system mobo/cpu I'll probably switch to the more open source friendly Intel platform.

Wait for Sandy Bridge then. On the other hand, with no real competitor, Intel will continue to maintain high prices...

[accumulator]

I think all mainstream video drivers have their problems. Remember Intel graphics on netbooks? Or that they cant ship with meego

I moved from NV to ATI a year ago, because 2D performance with compositing on NV sucked back then (prob solved by now?), and also because ATI opened up the specs.

All in all, I think ATI has worked better than anything else for me, especially since 10.7

[mugginz]

All in all, I think ATI has worked better than anything else for me, especially since 10.7

I wish I could say the same.

Just had another hard lock not to mention the behaviour of Blender is terrible with 10.7

I was hoping not to but it looks like I'm going to have to resort back to the 9800GT

[Kano]

@bridgman

Basically you can measure driver downloads for the newer products. Also U should have got stats how many binary drivers have been loaded. But it is definitely not possible to identify 1 user with 1 ati card as Linux sale.

What would dual boot count for you? Is it Linux or Win market share then... When you count it for both you will have got more than 100%

[bridgman]

Yep, that's one of the things we look at.

I don't think we have a way to determine if a user is running a dual-boot system so that's just one more layer of fog between HW vendors and Linux users.

[Agdr]

I don't think we have a way to determine if a user is running a dual-boot system so that's just one more layer of fog between HW vendors and Linux users.

Possible privacy issues aside, you could program the Windows kernel driver to check for any disk whether either the MBR or the boot sector of any partition contains strings indicating the presence of GRUB1 or GRUB2, and report it back while checking for updates. On Linux, check whether /boot/grub/{boot.cfg,menu.lst} contains a chainloader entry.

Obviously some configurations won't register, but they should be an insignificant percentage.