will we ever have radeon drivers that aren't crap?

[Tom Horsley]

On Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:56:12 -0400 (EDT)
Robert P. J. Day wrote:

>   what's the story on video drivers these days?  and why are they such
> unmitigated trash?

Because they decided to invent the DRI2 layer since the original DRI
layer didn't actually work very well if you wanted to do something
like run a opengl app in a desktop that also had desktop effects
turned on, so basically everything got turned to trash due to the
obsession with getting windows to shake like they are made of
jello :-).

On my system, I can get the radeon driver to work reasonably well
if I switch the acceleration to XAA from EXA (despite the fact that
the radeon man page claims XAA is the default, it apparently isn't).

I suspect a year or two will see drivers that have reasonably
stable DIR2 implementations, though I wonder if the performance
will ever get back to where it used to be.