AMD will deliver open graphics drivers

[Vassili]

AMD will soon deliver open graphics drivers, said Henri Richard just a few minutes ago, and the audience at the opening keynote of the Red Hat Summit broke into applause and cheers. Richard, AMD's executive vice president of sales and marketing, promised: "I'm here to commit to you that it's going to get done." He also promised that AMD is "going to be very proactive in changing way we interface with the Linux community".

source (http://www.osnews.com/story.php/17902/AMD-Will-Deliver-Open-Graphics-Drivers)

[G3XC]

Nice!!

[safan80]

I will be watching to see if they actually go open source!

[Theli]

Now, if only Creative Labs were to follow...

[XS2K]

Good news for Linux users,ATi has been slacking in this area....

[nox_uk]

the reason i chose nvidia... linux drivers. Will be keeping my fingers crossed now, there are some very clever people out there (myself not included) and i'm hoping they will work their magic.

Nox

[rozzyroz]

is that going to be all platforms?

[saaya]

nice!

[nn_step]

is that going to be all platforms?

virtually yes.

AMD's CTM is powerful enough that you can write wonderful drivers for the cards but I am impressed that they went the extra step :D

[freecableguy]

Open driver source for Windows 32/64??? Bring it.

[Metroid]

That will be great. I will make my own drivers :)

[perry_78]

This could be a good sign for us osx86 users who have crappy issues with x1400 cards :)

[SaFrOuT]

YES

finally i will be able to use my Ati cards in Linux and live haply ever after :)

[JAWS]

Very nice to see! :banana: Thanks for the link!

[del_fuego]

Best bit of news i've heard about AMD/ATI all day ;)

A definate step in the right direction.

[Vassili]

The day that the drivers are open-source I'll buy a new ATI card. :D

[rozzyroz]

virtually yes.

AMD's CTM is powerful enough that you can write wonderful drivers for the cards but I am impressed that they went the extra step :D

thats awsome! i was just thinking how something like this would really benifit consumers when i was reading the hd2900xt review. i hope nvidia follows suit so we could get rid of some of the restrictions with sli platform choice.

[Warship]

Finally! At last good gfx performance in Linux!

[SunFlowerSeeds]

Nice AMD. Go extra mile for the benefit of the community. If you do release the code for Windows and that will be great. We could expect tone of tweaked driver.:toast:

[erwinz]

nice AMD.. :D I hope everybody do the same.. :D

[stealthbomber]

Now, if only Creative Labs were to follow...

Damn right, my EMU card needs proper linux drivers! :mad:

[ahmad]

I am sure they are dying for someone to come up with the optimizations they haven't been able to do on their last launch.

[pH(x)]

I am looking forward to UNIX-Crossfire.

[verndewd]

Open source drivers are a pretty sweet idea, It will be interesting to see what drivers come out of the deal.

[Metroid]

This is a nice move and it is mainly concerned to resolve driver issue to what the company can not deliver on time.

[nn_step]

I am sure they are dying for someone to come up with the optimizations they haven't been able to do on their last launch.

well that is one of the benefits of open source, with enough eyes any problem is easily found and fixed

[aMp]

Very interesting theory from the guys at Ars (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070514-amd-launches-the-hd-2000-series.html):

It appears that on all of the benchmarks run so far, both DX9 and DX10, all of the graphics calls are going to the [Compute Abstraction Layer, or CAL] via the DirectX and OpenGL CAL bindings, where they're dynamically farmed out to the available stream computing resources on the GPU. If the CAL/HAL [Hardware Abstraction Layer] stack, which is a brand new piece of software that probably has quite a bit of optimization overhead left in it, doesn't do its job optimally, then the graphics code that's running on it won't be able to get peak performance out of the hardware.

People who really want to max out the R600 will write directly to the GPU hardware using CTM, bypassing the [abstraction layers] entirely. This is probably behind AMD's recent promise to open source the R600 drivers—they may be hoping that developers will step up and use CTM to write card-specific drivers that are fully optimized, game-console-style, so that all of the R600's potential can be unlocked.

So games use the DirectX abstraction layer to talk to the R600 drivers, which can only control the hardware through another abstraction layer. In theory this could leave tons of room for driver optimization.

On the other hand, ATI's software guys had, what, six extra months to hammer out the drivers while the hardware guys respun the chip? I wonder how much extra performance can really be wrung out of this architecture.

[nn_step]

The idea of the abstraction layers is to keep the games platform independent. Otherwise we will be forced to return to having games that only work on some cards and not the rest. I'm not saying abstraction is bad, I'm just saying that not having abstraction is a very very bad thing.

[aMp]

Of course it is, but that's what DirectX/OpenGL are about. The issue here is that R600 and its drivers add another layer entirely.

[nn_step]

I'm going to have to argue with that point, since there are only 2 layers of abstraction for DX10 for the R600.

[iddqd]

meh, marketing move more than anything else.

market analysis shows people think open sauce = good.