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

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Thursday 23 July 2009 20:48:44 jdow wrote:
> From: "Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday at crashcourse.ca>
> Sent: Thursday, 2009/July/23 10:56
>
> >  apologies for the unduly harsh tone but, seriously, will there ever
> > be radeon drivers available for fedora that aren't complete junk?
> > this has been going on for some time now, and nothing's changed.
>
> Hell no. This is X-windows. I've had drivers crashing left and right on
> my old laptop since FC5 or so. And it's just been getting worse with time
> not better. Now I understand why ATI drivers are crap on Windows, too.
> They must play the Adaptec game, you pick your chip rev for the bugs you
> are willing to work around. Over the last 5 or so years I have developed
> an intense hate for ATI anything, even now that they are related to AMD.

+1

It seems that radeon driver works for some cards (typically old/low-end ones), 
but in general it is basically a complete gamble. Proprietary ATI drivers Just 
Don't Work (tm). And it's been like that since I got my first ATI card (at the 
time of FC2).

The situation is really sad --- ATI claim to support open source, yet they 
release the code only for obsolete cards. Intel cards are open source, but 
that still doesn't mean that bugs get fixed, and the driver is extremely 
unstable. This leaves us with nVidia --- yum install akmod-nvidia and 
everything Just Works. Yes, it's closed source, but it works, contrary to both 
ATI and Intel.

I really don't understand why so many people hate nVidia. It has good support, 
they demonstrated very good cooperation with KDE4 developers recently, the 
driver works with both high- and low-end cards... Yes, it is closed source, 
but so is ATI (except for the old X-family cards). And people at nVidia are at 
least honest about not giving the source.

If you want a high-end graphics card to do 
3D/gaming/googleearth/Compiz/whatever, nVidia (with binary drivers) is 
basically the only choice. ATI drivers don't work with 3D, open-source radeon 
driver doesn't support HD cards, and Intel just doesn't have high-end graphics 
cards.

I know, nVidia also had its bad moments, but on large timescale they 
demonstrate stability. ATI has never demonstrated any. I'll never buy ATI 
graphics card again.

Best, :-)
Marko