Tom's HW Guide: Linux for gaming

Fraser Campbell fraser-eicrhRFjby5dCsDujFhwbypxlwaOVQ5f at public.gmane.org
Wed Aug 9 18:44:48 UTC 2006


Tim Writer wrote:

> Evan Leibovitch <evan-ieNeDk6JonTYtjvyW6yDsg at public.gmane.org> writes:
>
>> Those reading this list who are involved with ATI (you know who you are)
>> are invited to use this article to help prod the company to match and
>> surpass nVidia's level of support.
> 
> Here's a counterpoint:
> 
>     http://www.phoronix.com/redblog/
> 
> ATI is working very hard to improve their Linux support. They release a
> driver every month so improvements come quickly.

One of the presentations at OLS was titled "Open Source Graphics Drivers - 
They Don't Kill Kittens".  I didn't attend but others that did thought it 
was a good presentation.  You can read the paper (from March/06) in 
http://www.linuxsymposium.org/2006/linuxsymposium_procv1.pdf. The author 
has prepared an open-source driver for ATI R500 chipsets but has been 
waiting on ATI's approval to release it (for more than 6 month).

I'm not a graphics junkie so I'm a little out of my depth on this but it 
would be nice if my Dell laptop (ATI R1300 graphics) would just work at 
1280x800 as my previous Toshiba laptop had done (i915 chipset I think).

If the graphics drivers were fully open source and integrated with kernel 
and X the hopes for full out of the box support would be much greater. 
Looking at ATI's page I think there's a 23MB download that might improve my 
graphics, I think I'll leave it for another day ...

According to the paper I mentioned the support from both ATI and nVidia for 
free drivers is severely lacking (non-existant).

Perhaps the AMD/ATI merger will help as well once new products start coming 
online.

-- 
Fraser Campbell <fraser-Txk5XLRqZ6CsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org>                 http://www.wehave.net/
Georgetown, Ontario, Canada                               Debian GNU/Linux
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