ATI and Linux Article
June 1st, 2007 by CrusaderPhoronix.com has a new article up examining the state of ATI’s Linux support:
Last year when AMD announced their acquisition of ATI it led many to wonder how this would impact the quality of their Linux support and driver. Some had even speculated that AMD would be opening the code to at least a subset of their graphics drivers, and while this issue has come up again more recently, we will cover this particular topic in a different article. In this article we will be exposing what truly consists of the ATI/AMD driver development cycle and ultimately what they are really doing to improve their image in the Linux community. We have been granted unprecedented access to share with you their once unknown driver development model.
June 1st, 2007 at 10:55 am
So ATI has fallen way behind on nvidia, especially in the price/performance per watt ratio, which really really matters to me.
A 7600GS or 8500GT right now is a great buy for nvidia with solid drivers and is very very fast and stable (from my experience). I’m not sure ATI can right now on the hardware side even compete with these products.
With the new xorg drivers for radeons that makes an 9550/9600/x300 product look attractive, but I seriously doubt those make ATI any money anymore.
At this point the only thing that could vault ATI over NVidia is if they released totally open source drivers for their new cards that could match at least 50% speed of the closed source nvidia drivers.
And with the microsoft vista DRM deal this will never ever ever ever happen.
June 7th, 2007 at 8:36 pm
All this talk is really neat, but even if your card runs on zero point energy and teleports asian hotties to your house, it still won’t mean anything without drivers, hardware specs, and cooperation with the people Microsoft is trying to kill. So far I’ve heard that ATI has great hardware in theory- but nobody by MS drones can use it so who gives a flying ****.
I’m personally sick of seeing ATI driver questions posted on Linux forums- I don’t know about you guys. But everyone and their mother is wondering why their super cool card is a literal paper-weight. Search stats on linuxquestions.org would be quite revealing.