To the AMD people: Money wasted.

[Mr James]

To any AMD graphics driver people:

Hello.

I am a linux user and the not so proud owner of an Asus HD5750.

Niether nvidia not ati has fully supported the FOSS drivers - a driver that provides the much needed KMS and is in sync with the rest of Linux development. ATI has provided some support and for this I thank you.

Now, Mr Brigman or any other person in connection with AMD, I paid good money for my card(s) and you as a company have stated that you provide support for Linux - a promise. While Nvidia does not support the open
source work, at least it provides a working proprietary driver - something you do not.

- 2D is horrible with tearing everywhere - my Nvidia card does not tear while doing anything.
- Videos are not watchable because of tearing - my Nvidia card is playing all my movies without tearing and without any glitches.
- Gaming in WINE is not a possibility because everything crashes at startup - not on my Nvidia. Though some say it is the WINE devs fault, were ATI to provide more info I am sure the WINE devs would get it right.
- Were you to collaborate more with the Linux devs, there would be no gap in which we have to wait and wait for driver support of some new XOrg update.

Not preaching, but the bible saying regarding religious leaders, that they niether enter the gates of heaven not let those going in to enter, is fully applicable here as you niether provide us with a
proper proprietary driver nor do you give the FOSS devs the kind of support to provide us with a proper FOSS driver.

Regarding the FOSS driver, you provide bits of documentation with some patches, put a dev or two to work on the driver a bit, then abandon the driver halfway to work on support for another card. The result
as the radeon feature matrix shows is 20 cards all incomplete, and all with limping experimental 3D (read "no good for games"). What the hell kind of support is that? You get us worked up about how the *next* (it's always
the *next* isn't it) card will have great support because you started working on it several months in advance. Guess what? The result will be the same as the other cards: semi-working, tearing, and with no 3D. And then you'll
talk about great support with the *next* card.

When you guys said "we provide Linux driver support", that was a promise you have yet to keep. When exactly can I expect a *FULLY* working FOSS or proprietary driver that does what I bought the card for in the first place?

I had already bought my ATI card (as I respected AMD during my Windows experience) when I came to Linux. Had I known I would be forever masturbating with the ATI cards, I would have gotten laid with an Nvidia card.

I, as most all, really hate buying something and not getting my money's worth.

Thank you.

[bridgman]

With respect, you are criticizing us for failing to live up to commitments we never made. I don't have time to go through your entire list, but as an example :

You get us worked up about how the *next* (it's always the *next* isn't it) card will have great support because you started working on it several months in advance. Guess what? The result will be the same as the other cards: semi-working, tearing, and with no 3D. And then you'll talk about great support with the *next* card.

What we claim (and I say this with great confidence because I was the one making the claim) was that support for the next generation would happen *sooner* (relative to hardware launch) as a result of starting work on it earlier, not that it would be "great" or even "better" (other than allowing more time for the community to work on the code). If you follow my posts, you'll know that what I talk about for initial support is delivering the *same* level of functionality on new cards as on previous cards.

When you say "tearing, no 3D" can you be a bit more specific ? All of the currently shipping GPUs include 3D support (except for the just-released HD6xxx parts which are not supported yet) and AFAIK the tearing concerns are with the proprietary driver under certain scenarios, not the open source driver.

You have to admit that your characterization of our open source efforts is unfair at best:

Regarding the FOSS driver, you provide bits of documentation with some patches, put a dev or two to work on the driver a bit, then abandon the driver halfway to work on support for another card.

We work with the community to make initial support available (working code and/or docs) and the open source community does most of the enhancement work. We were told multiple times "just give us programming information and the community will do the rest" - we are doing that and more.

The radeon feature matrix is community maintained. Right now nobody agrees on the exact criteria for moving from "mostly" to "done", so the last few generations of hardware are sitting in "mostly". I guess I could launch a community initiative to redefine the criteria on the feature page but it really doesn't seem like the best use of time to me.

Are there specific Linux games you are having trouble with, or are your issues mostly related to running Windows games over Wine (which brings another set of challenges) ?

[Qaridarium]

- 2D is horrible with tearing everywhere - my Nvidia card does not tear while doing anything.
- Videos are not watchable because of tearing - my Nvidia card is playing all my movies without tearing and without any glitches.

this is fixed in the catalyst 11.1 coming up next month.

- Gaming in WINE is not a possibility because everything crashes at startup - not on my Nvidia. Though some say it is the WINE devs fault, were ATI to provide more info I am sure the WINE devs would get it right.

i pay crossover for wine support and i wrote bugreports.

and i can tell you its not easy.
wine's directX implementation do not have some features for exampel Geo-Instancing thats why arma2 shows more than bad graphic errors.
but this is also on nvidia card.. just an exampel.

wine in general is a big fight.

[crazycheese]

I think the "effect" that Mr James expects is "gfx hardware on windows" experience:
you buy card, you already have the driver, the driver supports that card, you barely have any issues(maybe very few and minor, which are wiped out after time). You replace the old one, replace the driver and ready to go.

This is currently not happening on amd side, neither in catalyst, nor in foss.

Although HD4770 does get 60 fps fullhd on openarena(with minor gamma bug) using opensource drivers only. Still, not near possible 300+fps and by far not near feature-rich.

The situation is, with both drivers, amd looses to nvidia. And 5xxx/6xxx gen are not usable on opensource at all. 4 developers ain't realistic to finish the driver, maybe after 10 years.

But nvidia is not perfect, with it not only unsupporting opensource, but actively shutting it down; and ignoring optimus support requests. Well, something you might expect if you were using windows, not linux.

[Qaridarium]

And 5xxx/6xxx gen are not usable on opensource at all. 4 developers ain't realistic to finish the driver, maybe after 10 years.

? i do have an hd5670 and the opensource driver works what is your problem???

works mean you need to install 2.6.37/.36 kernel because older one do have an crash bug.

and 4 developers are not the same as 4 developers.

means you can put the world best 4 developers into the linux team and 1000 worst developers into the windows team and the linux team beat the windows one..

do you really think the linux devs are not the best of the best ?

be sure the linux guys are the best of the best...

[kernelOfTruth]

also there's STILL graphical and text corruptions in combination with KDE4 on nvidia cards (I, e.g., see that with my 8400GS) since years (!)

so it isn't that much different compared to AMD

besides that the catalyst driver in general is getting better and better (stability-, feature-, performance-, etc. -wise)

[crazycheese]

? i do have an hd5670 and the opensource driver works what is your problem???

OpenGL and power management. Do they work?

and 4 developers are not the same as 4 developers.

means you can put the world best 4 developers into the linux team and 1000 worst developers into the windows team and the linux team beat the windows one..

do you really think the linux devs are not the best of the best ?

be sure the linux guys are the best of the best...

This is exactly my problem and root of problems in opensource radeon in linux.

Because they four are like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTXlWYdodnc and still: http://www.amd.com/us/products/deskt...-overview.aspx

Click on any card, look in the black box, what do you see? Linux somewhere?

Not that nvidia is much different though.

[Qaridarium]

OpenGL and power management. Do they work?

yes because its a DESKTOP/WORKSTATION power management don't care i have 4 pices 120mm² fans 1 in the power suply 2 on the cpu 1 for case general i can not remember any noice from the graphic card...

on notebooks you can use low profile for maximum life time on accu

OpenGL yes 2.1 with some openGL3 stuff

This is exactly my problem and root of problems in opensource radeon in linux.
Because they four are like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTXlWYdodnc

very good example because Xerxes won the fight but lose the war.

and he lose the war because if 4900+300 man can fight 100.000 man every Greek man can fight again Xerxes and in the end Xerxes lose because of this.

[crazycheese]

yes because its a DESKTOP/WORKSTATION power management don't care i have 4 pices 120mm² fans 1 in the power suply 2 on the cpu 1 for case general i can not remember any noice from the graphic card...

on notebooks you can use low profile for maximum life time on accu

OpenGL yes 2.1 with some openGL3 stuff

Man, you forget, I dont have personal power plant in the backyard
I really want Evergreen to push the Hz down unless its used.

Didnt know about Evergreen 2.1/3.0 OpenGL support, thought its only 2D. Great news indeed. So, that means I can upgrade the card(5850 or 5870), if power management works.

6850/70 is not supported, right?

[jntesteves]

I think there are only 2 fulltime developers from AMD working on the FOSS driver right now. (unless Bridgman does programming too?)

Hope they hire some more soon.