A Happy Four Years To An Open-Source ATI/AMD

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Happy Four Years To An Open-Source ATI/AMD

It was four years ago, on the 6th of September 2007, that I exclusively broke the news on AMD's open-source strategy that would end up greatly changing the open-source Linux graphics driver landscape...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTg4NA

[mcgreg]

Thank you AMD And everybody who works on the Mesa/Gallium/DDX and DRM Drivers.

As an owner of a AMD 6850 and E350 all that is really lacking is a decent working dynamic power management and audio oder HDMI.
Besides that, I am very pleased with the current state.
The only way for me to really say "thank you" is to continue buying AMD Hardware. Looking forward to get a Bulldozer

Gregor

[bulletxt]

I must admit I'm proud of being an AMD customer. Hopefully the open driver will get better and better in the near future.

[Adarion]

I also see a good way of improvement over the past years. I followed this development, well, and even though there are some bumps on the road (UVD, power management on par with fglrx and recent opengl support) I am happy with my choice to use AMD-ATI stuff in my boxes. Ok, I use AMD for many years now anyway, but often in combination with nvidia chips. And since the announcement of specs release I turned to using AMD-ATI chips for the GPU part.
Hopefully I'll also call an APU soon my own.

Thanks to all the hackers and workers over there. And to Michael for covering this issue and probably also applying a certain kind of public pressure.

[rohcQaH]

Four years in which I changed from a mix of Intel and AMD CPUs with nVidia GPUs to full AMD+ATI machines, using a full open source software stack. Thank you AMD!

[monraaf]

As an owner of a AMD 6850 and E350 all that is really lacking is a decent working dynamic power management and audio oder HDMI.

And video decode acceleration! By ignoring this aspect AMD is missing out on a large part of the Linux HTPC market.

[locci]

Thanks amd.

The main reason I bought an amd video card, is the open source driver.

[FireBurn]

Me too bought an RS690 and now an RS880 because of the great open source support. I'm guessing my next purchase will be a bulldozer or at the very least a laptop with discreet AMD graphics

[lienmeat]

I'm happy that things have improved for open source gpu drivers in general, not just for ATI/AMD. I have a sore spot though. I hate that I pretty much cannot do anything productive OR entertaining on the open source graphics drivers out there today. What I mean is, they don't perform even close (most of the time) to the official proprietary drivers. They don't do decent video playback, have poor FPS in games or just don't render correctly, don't do good for workstation usage, and from what I last understood, don't do opencl. They only thing they CAN do is a basic composited desktop, which is the least of my worries. Now, if X allowed me to switch drivers on the fly, without restarting X, and losing all my running GUI apps, I could live with that. Supposedly Wayland will be better suited to this task, but I'm gonna bet right here and now it's gonna be 5 years before that feature works correctly and is default on ANY distro.

I'm not a fan of Intel's graphics capabilities (well, sandy bridge is ok, for now), but they seem to be much more on track to having similar functionality to the windows equivalent driver than ATI/AMD or Nvidia opensource drivers ever thought about being, and this "fact" makes me sad....as I have an ATI card (4850) that I WISH I could run the opensource driver on and be happy with it...but I just can't...I've tried, it has it's gotchas. To be honest, the binary driver has it's issues, but they don't get in my way as often.

Don't be mad, just sharing my perspective and experience.