| From: Phil Meyer <pmeyer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> | > So for us AMD/ATI X1000 (R6) owners, we are less than second class citizens | > currently. | > | > There is work going on to support these cards in open source drivers, and | > AMD/ATI have even hinted about providing code to open source, but today it | > is all vapourware. | I almost got that right. :) | | Please see today's article for better clarification that I can do. | | Especially the summary on page 4: | | http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=730&num=4 That is more optimistic than I feel. Have a look at Dave Arlie's blog. http://airlied.livejournal.com/ He produced drivers that he'd like to open source but ATI is stonewalling him. He used a tool under NDA to figure out modesetting so he has asked for their approval. Note: his driver does not use their code. They won't even say "yes" or "no" after about a year. ATI's headquarters are a few miles from here. I used to be a loyal ATI guy. Not anymore. Example misplay, from 2006 January. I bought a monitor that needed a dual-link DVI interface to support it. The PC world barely knew the term dual link -- no local retailers did. I found that the ATI X1000 series were the only ATI PC cards to do it. The web page said that the proprietary drivers supported "Radeon 9600 and above", which ought to include the X1000 series. I checked with ATI pre-sales tech support and they read me back the web page. So I bought an X1300. Surprise: the proprietary driver did not support it. The VESA driver worked, but not at the 2560x1600 resolution I needed (surprise!). The X1000 family wasn't supported by the proprietary Linux driver for about the first year of the family's availability! I ended up buyin an expensive high-end nVidia card (all of their line that would support dual-link DVI at the time) with most capability wasted because I'm using the open source nv driver. More whining about closed source drivers: - I have a PCI nVidia 5200 card for my MythTV box. The proprietary drivers released recently no longer support this card. The old ones have a bug which causes a third of the picture to be lost. Never to be fixed. Beware closed source. - I have a PCI ATI Radeon 9250 for my myth box (because the nVidia card is useless). I could not get TVout to work with the proprietary driver. - I use the open source Radeon driver, with a patch to get TVout working. The patch isn't clean enough to be accepted by xorg and I fear that the patch's author isn't maintaining it any more (I am concerned that he has health problems).
