8.1 driver speculation

[yoshi314]

what do you expect of the next fglrx release?

for me - i don't care. i haven't used it since 8.39 or 8.38 and i don't have a good reason to regret it.

[Melcar]

More bugfixes, more stability, and why not, more bugs. This time around we don't have the Holidays to worry about, so hopefully some work gets done. *sigh* That's my problem... I hope too much. Thought I *really* hope the resolution issue with these current drivers gets resolved before them.

[givemesugarr]

in my opinion there would be only some minor bugfixes and slighter performance increase on hd series (if we are lucky we'll have xorg-server-1.4 running with compiz support). and i guess this tendency would go on for at least 3-4 months. for what i've seen around, the driver is not underperformant as it was some time ago, and if they really think to put it as default for the business editions then they'll really need to make it work well enough. for what i've read around sles and rhel were released not long ago, which means that the next sp would come towards the start of the second quarter of 2008. by that time, if amd really wants fglrx to be the default for this type of systems, fglrx would really be competitive with nvidia's blob. by that date also radeonhd would have come at least to the 2d acceleration and the xf86-ati would reach v7 and will work quite well for most boards. in that optic amd has only one choice: get rid of the annoying base bugs as the ones of tearing, watermak, resolution and such and will have a also a good performance. but if we are to think that we will have to wait for about 3-4 months for fglrx to get better and better maybe it would not be a stupid idea of thinking about nvidia hw.

[makoto42]

They'll fix a few minor issues, and introduce a max resolution of 800x600, but it will be ok, because they'll state it as a 'known issue', which makes everything ok.

But seriously, in context of my T60p (which I'm stuck with):
-Fix the stupid 1400x1050 resolution (among many others) that fglrx botched horribly for no explicable reason.
-Let Gutsy suspend (I know some have success, but my T60p with Mobility FireGL v5200 is *definitely* not ok, there seems).
-Unbreak the composite extension (on my T60p, composite will not exist and therefore compiz won't work, my only clue being:
II) fglrx(0): FIREGL Board Found
(II) fglrx(0): RENDER and Composite disabled when OpenGL Overlay enabled
despite what I tell it about the OpenGL overlay)

Fix these three issues *without* injecting other BS bugs, and I would feel better. Other things to see fixed that would be nice:

-The stupid -----\_____ tearing pattern I see all the time with 3D and video. I would be ecstatic to see this go away
-AIGLX performance increase. This is widely accepted to be unjustifiably slow.
-Fix the release notes indicated Xv video blockiness (I haven't noticed it, but I wouldn't be surprised if it started showing up for me randomly).
-RandR interface to multihead instead of aticonfig. aticonfig is annoying and clunky next to xrandr used to hotplug monitors
-fix "*ERROR* mutex id 0x00000002 not found in mutex list"


I'd love for them to focus on getting the glaring bugs resolved without worrying too much about performance and features, and then slow down release cycles so we can get decent drivers without always having to make tough decisions. If this weren't a laptop, nVidia would have been in a long time ago. Even without specs, the nVidia open source driver is getting further along than publicly available ATI open source drivers. It's not a good sign with respect to how much focus is on nVidia despite their currently less open-source friendly image. ATI has hardware that once again appears competitive with nVidias mainstream offerings at an appropriate price, get the specs released and a good driver, I might even tolerate Phenom for my next build for the sake of eventual CrossFire X.