[GW-C] Re:Tom's HW Guide: Linux for gaming

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Aug 11, 2006 at 11:44:58PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> I'm glad to hear that.  ATI lost me as a customer after a few too many
> disappointments.  I was biased towards the home-town team.  Some
> things that I think I know:
> 
> - the fastest 3d card with open source drivers, of any brand, is the
>   ATI Radeon 9250.  Get them before they die of old age.
> 
> - In January, I needed a video card that supported Dual Link DVI.  At
>   that time, reasonably-priced ATI x1000 family cards (like the x1300)
>   would not work in Linux with an open source driver.  Not even as a
>   2d card.  (Well, the VESA driver could do it, but only at
>   resolutions wired into the cards BIOS extension, and those did not
>   include the resolutions I needed.)  At the time, 6 months after the
>   product was released, ATI had not disclosed enough about the new
>   fiddly bits for 2d output to enable the open-source Radeon driver to
>   support these cards.
> 
> - at that time, the ATI web site claimed that the proprietary X
>   drivers supported any card newer than the 9600 (I think that was the
>   number).  Pre-sales support repeated this misinformation.  I bought
>   nice fanless x1300 card and discovered the mistake.  Was the site
>   corrected when I reported this?  No.

This has unfortunately been very common for ATI over many years.  Try
getting a driver for a laptop with an ati chipset in it from ati.  If
your laptop maker doesn't care and doesn't update the drivers, too bad.
ati doesn't make drivers for laptops for windows.  For linux they do
somewhat.  I did find the omega drivers that someone else manually puts
together using bits and pieces of ati's drivers for windows and makes
them work with laptops.  This really should not be someone's hobby.
Nvidia has no problem providing drivers for laptops.

> - the open source drivers for nVidia cards are limited to 2d.

They do however usually work with new cards fairly quickly.

> He is asking for approval because an NDA is involved.  He does claim
> that nothing scary is revealed in the code.
> 
> Maybe somebody inside ATI could champion this (you know who you are).
> Many of us would be willing to help.

Well I did see this:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/08/02/32OPcurve_1.html
One can always hope there is some truth to that.

> A decade ago I tried to talk to some ATI engineers that I had met, but
> there no interest.
> 
> Intel is the best player, as far as revealing graphics chip details.
> They have released open-source drivers and are maintaining them.  The
> most recent message from them was written by Keith Packard (one of the
> key X folks).  If he is working for them, that is an even better sign.

There appears to be some binary only HAL involved in the new "open
source" intel drivers.  I haven't quite figured out what that does yet
or if it is required for the drivers to work.

--
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml