Do the open sourced drivers perform well under intensive games? It seems a bit useless to have open drivers that perform only marginally better than CPU processing of GL commands. Don't get me wrong, I don't mean to dispairage ATi, it's open source efforts, or it's users, I'm just heavily skeptical of a third party competing with a manufacturer. There's also the truth of depreciation: the r200 is getting pretty old, and the r300 will probably begin to lose support from the most aggressive games starting next year or two (Battlefield 2 cuts off anything below a GF 5700 and Radeon 8500).
In particular, I was speaking to ATi's closed source drivers, which service Radeon 8500 and above. I've seen plenty of ATi horror stories on slashdot and linux gaming sites, probably slightly more than I've seen nVidia. Given the fast pace of 3d graphics cards, I'm not sure a volunteer open source effort can accomplish anything significant. One thing that appears obvious is that OSS consistantly trails behind industry leaders of various software components, with a few possible core exceptions like Firefox and... well mostly just Mozilla. The fact that it's much harder to innovate than it is to imitate appears to enable the Open Source community to play catch up with a moving target with only a few dozen contributers, and only when the list grows into the hundreds can a project really move past incumbants. Perhaps Open Source is a living counterexample to the Mythical Man Month argument?
Justin Dugger
On 8/9/05, D. Hageman [email protected] wrote:
On Sat, 6 Aug 2005, Justin Dugger wrote:
As long as you've got nvidia, you should be fine. I've only heard mediocre things from ATi. It can be a bit tricky to get nvidia working if your distro upgrades kernels faster than they provide precompiled interfaces. On the other hand, their configuration tools are quickly approaching Window's click and point interface.
I disagree with your comments about ATI. I think they are solid, reliable cards and the r200 DRI driver that ships with X.org gives good quality 3D graphics. I have found that most people that have trouble with "getting these cards to work" really don't have clue one about how all the parts of the system interact together. I am not saying that this is a requirement for running Linux, but it might be for running certain distros. I can say that RedHat/Fedora will pretty much configure it for you out of the box.
You can get a pretty interface to tweak the DRI driver(s) here:
http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/DriConf
The worse problem with the ATI set of drivers is the slow support of new chipsets. All of the new cards shipping from ATI now are from a series of chips they call the r300 series. A r300 series driver is in the works and is fairly decent now, but still in heavy development. I expect to see it put out to the general public in the X release.
I can't say anything about ATI's closed source drivers. I try to stick with open source as much as I can for my systems.
-- //========================================================\ || D. Hageman [email protected] || \========================================================//