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Open for Business has written an article on ATI and linux drivers. In the article they talk to ATI's Manager of Developer Relations, Michael Smith.
Smith, who seems understandably excited about the performance of ATI's drivers and hardware, explained the situation to us. On the top of my mind were the quasi-open drivers of nVidia and the Free Software drivers that have come from ATI's cooperation with the community in the past, and so we asked about the likelihood of full Free Software (or quasi-open) support for ATI's flagship cards in the future. According to Smith, the fact that the Radeon 9700 features a programmable architecture makes it highly unlikely that Free Software developers can fully support the driver without ATI releasing specific specifications that could potentially be risky to make available until the technology is no longer as crucial to ATI's competitive edge.
There are also real advantages to ATI's driver being separated from the XFree86 core distribution, Smith asserted, saying that "it's a nightmare for the XFree developers" to keep all of the different modules up-to-date. Practically speaking, he noted, it would be a pain for ATI's customers to have to download XFree CVS or wait for the yearly XFree release cycle to get the latest Radeon driver improvements.
Also important to ATI, apparently, is keeping the driver unified across the board. This is important, Smith said, both for developers working with ATI products and for ATI itself to be able to provide the high performance drivers it makes available for Linux in addition to Windows.
So when will we see this unified driver upgraded to support XFree86 4.3? According to Smith, it could be within a month. In our conversation, he mentioned that they already have the driver working in-house, and that the major hold up had been waiting for the new Red Hat release to be made available (Red Hat Linux 9 was released at the end of March).
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Rage3D.com
Open for Business has written an article on ATI and linux drivers. In the article they talk to ATI's Manager of Developer Relations, Michael Smith.
Smith, who seems understandably excited about the performance of ATI's drivers and hardware, explained the situation to us. On the top of my mind were the quasi-open drivers of nVidia and the Free Software drivers that have come from ATI's cooperation with the community in the past, and so we asked about the likelihood of full Free Software (or quasi-open) support for ATI's flagship cards in the future. According to Smith, the fact that the Radeon 9700 features a programmable architecture makes it highly unlikely that Free Software developers can fully support the driver without ATI releasing specific specifications that could potentially be risky to make available until the technology is no longer as crucial to ATI's competitive edge.
There are also real advantages to ATI's driver being separated from the XFree86 core distribution, Smith asserted, saying that "it's a nightmare for the XFree developers" to keep all of the different modules up-to-date. Practically speaking, he noted, it would be a pain for ATI's customers to have to download XFree CVS or wait for the yearly XFree release cycle to get the latest Radeon driver improvements.
Also important to ATI, apparently, is keeping the driver unified across the board. This is important, Smith said, both for developers working with ATI products and for ATI itself to be able to provide the high performance drivers it makes available for Linux in addition to Windows.
So when will we see this unified driver upgraded to support XFree86 4.3? According to Smith, it could be within a month. In our conversation, he mentioned that they already have the driver working in-house, and that the major hold up had been waiting for the new Red Hat release to be made available (Red Hat Linux 9 was released at the end of March).
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Rage3D.com