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AMD Promises Open Source Graphics Drivers
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun May 13, 2007 01:42 PM
from the feel-the-love-linux-gamers dept.
from the feel-the-love-linux-gamers dept.
MoxFulder writes "Henri Richard, AMD's VP of sales, has promised to deliver open-source drivers for ATI graphics cards (recently acquired by AMD) at the recent Red Hat Summit. A series of good news for proponents of open-source device drivers. In the last year, Intel, the leading provider of integrated graphics cards, has opened their drivers as well. But ATI and NVidia, the only two players in the market for high-performance discrete graphics cards, have so far released only closed-source drivers for their cards. This has created numerous compatibility, stability, and ethical problems for users of Linux and other open source OSes, and prompted projects like Nouveau to try and reverse-engineer NVidia drivers. Hopefully AMD's decision will put pressure on NVidia to release open-source drivers as well!"
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Intel Discrete Graphics Chips Confirmed 159 comments
Arun Demeure writes "There have been rumors of Intel's re-entry into discrete graphics for months. Now Beyond3D reports that Intel has copped to the project on their own site. They describe it as a 'many-core' architecture aimed at 'high-end client platforms,' but also extending to other market segments in the future, with 'plans for accelerated CPU integration.' This might also encourage others to follow Intel's strategy of open-sourcing their Linux drivers. So, better watch out NVIDIA and AMD/ATI — there's new competition on the horizon."
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I could not read the summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll believe it when I see it (Score:3, Interesting)
The big question though is whether or not they will try for mainline inclusion, or if they will go with an out-of-tree effort.
Ethics? Still, nice to hear. (Score:4, Insightful)
Ethics? Yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
True, right now they don't care. But that doesn't make it any less important to develop Free drivers.
Richard Stallman had his realization that Free software is necessary based on his experience with a printer driver [wikipedia.org].
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you'd actually read the article you linked to, you would realize that the quote in question (about charging money for software being a crime against humanity) was not in fact said by Richard Stallman, but only attributed to him by someone else. There's nothing new here: people are constantly trying to claim that the GPL is somehow anti-profit. But the GPL has never been about restricting anyone's ability to profit: in fact, consider the following statement, from the GPL itself [gnu.org] (emphasis added):
Re:Ethics? Still, nice to hear. (Score:5, Insightful)
Under Linux, most things Just Work(tm) because people with those ethical issues took the time to do something about it. You can't possibly claim that GNU or Linux exist in an amoral vacuum.
Parent
Re:Ethics? Still, nice to hear. (Score:5, Insightful)
The last one is the most interesting, since fixing Minix ended up meaning completely re-writing it because (at the time) the license didn't allow redistribution of modified versions (only patch sets, and those were growing unwieldy).
To an outsider, it might seem that ethics or ideology were the motivating factors, but in reality it's just a desire for things to work. The problem with binary-only drivers is that they might kind-of work now, but at some point they might not and then there will be nothing we can do about it.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
On the contrary, Free Software has always been about ethics.
From the GNU Manifesto:
"Why I Must Write GNU: I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way.I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it wit
Re:Ethics? Still, nice to hear. (Score:5, Informative)
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This is great (Score:3, Insightful)
Some people will be sure to downplay this, but I think this is really the beginning. It will take time, but I expect that Linux desktop graphics will closely compete with the Windows desktop soon.
Nvidia, this is your wakeup call. Follow suit, or my next graphics card will ATI.
Don't Promise it. Do it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Promises are cheap.
Intel driver Open Source? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is it important to have more source you might ask. Well, for one thing it would be really nice if we can get rid of the video BIOS altogether. A full source driver which shows how to switch video modes is a very good start to accomplish this (although not necessarily enough).
And then you might ask, why do we need to get rid of the video BIOS? Well, when evaluating graphics chips for an embedded systems, I found out that the video BIOS can spend an insanely long time initializing stuff and displaying stuff that we don't want/need (some like several seconds). In general, video BIOSs are over-engineered and do waaaay more than needed.
If you are aiming to build a near-instant-on system, and/or something that doesn't look like a PC, you want this sort of flexibility. If AMD steps up to the plate, that would be awesome.
Re:Intel driver Open Source? (Score:5, Informative)
Look into the new "modesetting" branch of the Intel driver, currently moving towards the default. It moves all the work of modesetting and other related hardware manipulation from the video BIOS into the driver, and avoids the video BIOS entirely. This does indeed give the benefits you describe in your post. Some of this modesetting code also moves toward sharing between drivers, to support modesetting for all Xorg video drivers. (Some of it consists of driver-independent code, such as dealing with funky monitors.)
Parent
Vague... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm certainly not going to go out and start buying ATI cards until all the details are worked-out.
Slashdot greatest hits (Score:3, Interesting)
Elsewhere on the web folks are wondering whether this means that the a new GPGPU will be accessible but the actual graphics driver itself will remain closed. AMD/ATI has also announced open source drivers before which translated into more stable and more frequently released Linux binary x86 drivers...
So, I guess next time I recommend PCs using ATI! (Score:3, Interesting)
A couple years ago I turned a CFO projected enterprise $8M deal into a $5.5M deal while getting hard-drives sizes doubled, RAM doubled, all CRTs swapped to same size LCDs
Maybe next time I will look at the MB-graphic or cPCI cards and decide ATI is easier to support over the lifecycle requirement. It will have to prove a better business decision, but I will look, and if all is about equal well ATI will win my recommendation.
I still have another year before I need to seriously start thinking again about big problems, but I won't forget to look at the ATI and NVidia lifecycle supportability issue. The recent distributed content management and storage network was set too a non-proprietary architecture for lifecycle compliance requirements
I am seldom questioned
I don't think everyone understanding the argument (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
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Dual head (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Nice (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
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Many developers do exactly that. Some traditionally PC-only developers have been looking towards the consoles to keep them afloat (id). Other publishers (EA, Ubi
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nice (Score:4, Informative)
As they said, the console market is far larger than the PC market, and that console titles outstrip sales of PC titles significantly (and that they sell for more). World of Warcraft and Linage don't change that. Selling a million plus copies of a game in the first year is expected of a half decent console game (games EA's Madden do that and more in their first couple of weeks - games on the PC don't sell that well with anything like that frequency (nor do they tend to retail for as much).
Added to that, is of course the risk factor.
You might imagine that releasing an MMO is a better way to make money than a console game, but that's not borne out. MMO are far risker projects, requiring many times the capital investment, much longer development cyles (years longer), a more complicated business structure and business plan and have massive monthly outgoings (rather than just paying a small amount for a tiny helpdesk team and letting the staffers go once the game is out). When the risk is higher, you of course keep less of the return (and again, there is a lower return when you have high on-going costs).
As EA has discovered, it's a lot more economical to stick to releasing incrimental upgrades of existing tiles (from Madden and Fifa to the Battlefield series) than to take risks with PC MMO's, which ultimately fail far more often, and bring in less profit as a percentage of both investment and revenue even when they are successful. EA have even shut down 'successful' PC MMO's down, because they were not successful enough by their standards - there just wasn't enough of a return on their investment, that is, they were better off spending that money in developing a new console title, because it was almost certain to give a better RoI.
The overall numbers of gamers for Lineage 2 and WoW is large, but it's probably not as profitable as many think - a third of WoW subscribers are in China, and they pay just a fraction of the amount US and EU players pay. Several million more people in the US, EU and AUS have played the likes of Halo 2 on the X-Box than have played WoW on a PC or Mac.
All the above is is why there are so few MMO's, compared to console titles, as a business MMO's are simply less profitable (because they bomb more often every n attempts, and when the do go wrong they do so more spectacularly, in that a bigger hole is left in the publisher and/or developers wallet).
Parent
Re:Nice (Score:5, Funny)
[looks down...]
Logitech.
[looks over at the 'ol Windows98 box...]
Logitech.
[goes downstairs, looks at wife's laptop...]
Logitech.
'Nuff said.
Parent
Re:Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
* Loki Software proved the lack of market for Linux games 5 years ago when they shut down in 2002.
I think we also have to take into account the fact that the Linux landscape has changed drastically in the last five years. How popular was the iPod in 2002?
Parent
Re:Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux is a MUCH better desktop OS than it was 5 years ago. Coincidentally, that was about the same time I tried to use Debian as a desktop. It stunk and I quickly dropped it. Then 2 years ago, I found reason to try it out again. Slackware was pretty good, but still iffy for a desktop.
Now I've got Kubuntu. It's amazing, and definitely a good desktop OS. The home PC I have ordered was chosen based on the idea that it would only run Linux, and Windows didn't matter. (This one is going to be my 'game' PC in the living room now.)
Loki was too early. If they tried the same thing now, they'd have a LOT better success.
As for the 'waiting' issue... Was that the only issue? Or did Loki fail to advertise that they were going to be releasing that game in a few months? Because if I didn't know about it, I'd just pick it up for Windows, assuming Linux would never get it. Maybe there were other issues as well, that don't come to mind immediately.
Loki didn't prove anything except that they didn't make it.
Parent
Re:Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, you are incorrect. Loki Software died mainly because of managerial incompetence and mismanagement. You can read about some of that here. [linuxtoday.com]
And, as others have pointed out, the Linux desktop has matured a lot in the last 5 years. Even if Loki died because of a lack of customers (which is not the case), the same would not necessarily happen today.
Parent
Re:Nice (Score:4, Informative)
Loki had a lot more problems going on than the lack of a Linux market at the time. They tried to be too big, too quick and go for too many AAA titles at once. Between having to pay large upfront license costs to port games (often six figures or more) and royalties from every sale on top of that, they just didn't have a business plan that met their market. They would have been much better off as a porting house rather than a self publisher (much like Ryan Gordon/icculus does now).
On the other side of the scale, LGP is working on a lot of B grade games. Some of them are very good but they're very, very slow and methodical in their porting. I've beta tested games for them which took more than a year to release after I got the first beta. They need to get stuff out the door if they want to be serious. Throw in Tux Games charging $50 [tuxgames.com] for the exact same box you can buy in the discount bin for $15 (ok, here's $18.82 at walmart [walmart.com] and you might skew the numbers because people aren't buying from them so they "don't get counted" as a Linux sale. In fact, you can pick up NWN, Quake 4 and Doom 3 from Walmart for the price of one game from Tux Games with shipping.
IMO, a lot of the problem is simply the game industry not understanding the linux market properly. A market exists but you can't go at it Loki style or you're doomed to failure, not because of the market, but because the business plan doesn't add up. Software houses should look toward portability when they design a game and the cost of a single developer to handle the Linux port of it would be pretty cheap in the overall development of the game (I haven't exactly done a poll but I wouldn't be surprised if you could find Linux geek willing to work for less than the average game coder just for the privilege of being able to get paid to program a game for linux). Another part of the problem are the publishers who dictate to the game houses what they're going to release so even if they want to do a linux version, it may not be possible.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I do my fair share of gaming under Linux.
And I'm not here for the free ride. The free part just makes the decision to switch easier.
There are quite a few large open source games.
Ever played Bzflag? God that game is addictive.
There is also Nexuiz which I hear is pretty good.
Then you get the small really really fun games like Frozen Bubble.
Re:Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
Having solid drivers isn't just "an edge case". Go install the default ATI or Nvidia driver on a recent linux distro then upgrade it to a non open source one from the company. It's like day and night. I noticed a huge difference between having a default driver vs company made one, silly things like dragging a console with transparent background is no longer a pain, it's smooth. The desktop feels fast and I don't even have any 3d desktop installed.
Then you got things like multiple monitor support. My Feisty install without closed source drivers just wouldn't work. It kept resetting the screen resolution after reboots, wouldn't recognize my second monitor, I couldn't even force it, it was a black screen. Once I installed the closed source driver, shazam! All my video worries are gone. Now I am happily using a 2560 x 1024 dual monitor setup with hardware acceleration.
Also you got 3d desktops like Beryl. With eye candy being a major selling point in some operating systems, 3d features will become important if desktop linux wants to get more popular. I hope all graphic card companies will develop good drivers for Linux.
Parent
Re:Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed... this is why I was excited about possibly having open-source drivers, and posted this article. My current box has onboard NVidia, and a low-end ATI discrete PCIe card... frankly, I can't wait for *one* of them to have open drivers. Although using the binary drivers improves 3D performance and a lot of strange display bugs, as you point out, it's a huge pain to keep them up-to-date with kernel upgrades since they can't be bundled with the main kernel. I don't like putting a big binary blob in my kernel, which by all reports is out-of-date with respect to a lot of other kernel subsystems, and may open up security holes.
I don't do 3D anything (word processing, programming, web browsing mainly), but baseline unaccelerated SVGA is definitely *not* acceptable: 2D graphics acceleration is necessary for a smooth and productive desktop experience. The open-source 2D acceleration is actually pretty good at this point, but of course it simply DOES NOT WORK with a lot of the latest ATI cards in particular.
The current pace of open-source driver development is positively glacial, largely because most of the people who have sufficient documentation to easily improve the drivers are under NDA. Read this incredibly frustrating blog entry [livejournal.com] from a developer who's under NDA with ATI... using only a few hundred lines of code, he has patched the open-source Radeon driver to support most of the newer ATI cards... but ATI has spun its wheels for months without allowing him to release the code.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Are we sure about this?
Mainstream gaming (Score:4, Interesting)
IMO, using binary blobs that run in the card, not in the kernel (i.e. downloadable firmware), are a reasonable way for vendors to hide trade secrets while keeping the card updateable and the kernel driver open source. As long as shared memory between the graphics card and main system is restricted to a window, bugs in the firmware shouldn't cause security holes in the kernel. In fact, one benefit of micro-kernel architecture is that isolated drivers that run in their own process and address space, can run in an intelligent I/O card instead.
The IBM Series/1 was built on the principle. All I/O was done by intelligent cards with a common API: submit Device Control Block with command, memory block, and parameters to start an operation. Receive vectored interrupt and find results in updated DCB and memory block. Interrupt included address of DCB, so interrupts were trivially "object oriented".
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Re:Mainstream gaming (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
3D should not be about gaming only. Right now there are 3D-based window managers, and it's not inconceivable to have more real 3D-based applications. The fact that some mainstream cards have problems with drivers does nothing to help these use cases.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nice (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
3d acceleration and the Video acceleration is used daily by EVERY linux user (short of text based server installs.
What you just said is as redicilous as saying "Vista users dont need anything but 2d Svga."
I run Wxvga all the time WITH 3d and guess what I dont play games in linux at work.
And I am not a "edge case" but a typical linux user.
Parent
Re:Nice (Score:5, Informative)
Pixel and vertex shaders are a whole new ball game. There's a lot of text on my screen. All of it drawn from truetype fonts. A truetype font is basically a series of bezier curves. Microsoft Research released a paper a few years back where each of these curves was approximated to a triangle [microsoft.com]. A vertex shader program then inspects each of the rendered triangles and corrects the error between the triangle and the bezier. This allows an entire font to be uploaded to the GPU and rendered at any resolution with very little CPU load or RAM usage (compare this with Apple's hack of just storing a table of glyphs in the video RAM, which doesn't scale very well).
Pixel shaders can be used for a lot of things. With pixel shaders you can perform a lot of convolutions in hardware, giving some nice effects. You can use a pyramid algorithm to perform a number of things, like bi-cubic filtering, blurring, etc in a fraction of a second.
Sure, you could do a lot of these on the CPU, but the GPU is going to do them a lot faster, and probably use less power (important for mobile users).
Even without needing the 3D support, it's useful to have all of the features working correctly. Power management is a big one, since the kernel needs to be able to save the state of the GPU somewhere before turning it off, and Linux uses a lot of hacks to try to avoid needing to do this.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
there are a number of reasons why this would be in ati's interest:
opening u
eye candy and scientific workstations (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Seeing is believing (Score:4, Insightful)
Punish that damn ATI for not having an open source driver. Punish them by buying hardware from another company that doesn't have open source drivers!!!
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Why should he believe the promises of an PR person and let that influence his buying decision?
I just ordered parts to build a new PC and the GPU is an onboard Intel X3000. Why? Open source drivers. If ATI has open source drivers the next time I buy parts, I'll pro
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'm sorry, but that's a really stupid attitude, since you're a *consumer* of their products. You benefit from your favorite company's *innovation*, not from their sales figures.
Hoping that your favorite company's competition continues to fail basically ensures that your favo