A Fresh Look At The AMD Radeon Gallium3D Performance

[schmidtbag]

although the gallium drivers are doing amazingly well, why is this project still being continued? isn't amd going to make their video drivers open source anyway?

[allquixotic]

although the gallium drivers are doing amazingly well, why is this project still being continued? isn't amd going to make their video drivers open source anyway?

You mean fglrx, the proprietary drivers? No, absolutely not. They have no plans to do that. I'm 99.999999999% sure. If you think they have plans to open source Catalyst / fglrx, I need an authoritative citation.

The gallium3d drivers are AMD's open source video driver effort.

[schmidtbag]

You mean fglrx, the proprietary drivers? No, absolutely not. They have no plans to do that. I'm 99.999999999% sure. If you think they have plans to open source Catalyst / fglrx, I need an authoritative citation.

The gallium3d drivers are AMD's open source video driver effort.

oooo ok that makes more sense now. lol so now i flip around my question - if amd is helping contribute to the open source drivers, why make proprietary ones? its not like they have much to hide.

[allquixotic]

oooo ok that makes more sense now. lol so now i flip around my question - if amd is helping contribute to the open source drivers, why make proprietary ones? its not like they have much to hide.

Several reasons:

*For the proprietary Catalyst drivers, they share 90% of the code between their Windows drivers and the Linux drivers.

*They compete the most with Nvidia on the performance of the Windows drivers (for gaming and stuff).

*There are secret algorithms and patented optimization technologies in fglrx (this is publicly unsubstantiated, but I'm pretty confident of the truth of this) that they aren't willing to expose to the general public. They call this their "Intellectual Property".

*They are willing to disclose most of the hardware details about their cards to enable us to write good open source graphics drivers, but there are still a few things that they won't disclose. Those things get used to their full potential in Catalyst / fglrx. Example: UVD2

[bridgman]

oooo ok that makes more sense now. lol so now i flip around my question - if amd is helping contribute to the open source drivers, why make proprietary ones? its not like they have much to hide.

I think this is the 26th time I've answered this question

Proprietary Linux drivers allow code to be shared across OSes, including OSes which require robust DRM and the associated secrecy. Proprietary code-shared drivers allow PC hardware vendors to bring more features and performance to OSes with smaller market shares than they could if all the code had to be developed for (and supported by the sales onto) a single OS.

If a hardware vendor was writing a driver exclusively for Linux/BSD/Solaris etc.. there's a good chance it would be open source. If the driver shares code with other OSes with hard DRM requirements, then more of the code has to be kept secret and distributing most of the code in binary form ends up as the only practical solution.

[bridgman]

If you think they have plans to open source Catalyst / fglrx, I need an authoritative citation.

Me too

[Kano]

the oss driver support is very basic when you compare opengl features. xvba nobody really needs without full h264 l5.1 support. if you want to play a game (or at least look at the heaven demo) with tesselation then you are lost without binary driver. it is fun to test oss drivers, with my intel atom netbook with gma 945 even gl2benchmark runs correctly. fbo (test 4) does not work with snb and other oss drivers do not even show the reference pictures correctly. i really would like to see it running with every oss driver.

http://kanotix.com/files/hellfire/contrib/gl2benchmark/

runs with debian squeeze, use pbuilder or debuild -b for ubuntu or debian with newer openscenegraph. the build dep is just openscenegraph, should be available everywhere. the version does not matter. if you just do "./configure && make -j4" then you can start it from the dir using:

OSG_FILE_PATH=data src/gl2benchmark

Use cursor keys to try all 4 tests - if you want fun enable interactive mode If you want to package it for a non debian system just add a simple startup script like i added in debian/gl2benchmark.sh. really nice for some rendering tests - speed is not that important, but of course you can compare that too. i found a fglrx rendering issue (which was in the opengl code on win too) with that tool, fglrx needed 10 or 11 month to get a fix. btw. it is of course crossplattform, you can build it with any os where you install osg.

[Qaridarium]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37168 is fixed, so now I can use r600g full-time Awesome!

me to ;-) hon runs well now on the radeon driver. by using oibaf's PPA

[bwat47]

although the gallium drivers are doing amazingly well, why is this project still being continued? isn't amd going to make their video drivers open source anyway?

Catalyst isn't going anywhere. AMD is however supporting the development of the oss drivers by releasing (most of) the specs for their hardware.

[deanjo]

including OSes which require robust DRM and the associated secrecy.

*snicker* and yet it is so easily defeated.