radeon driver heading in wrong direction :-(.

[François Cami]

On Sun, 31 Jan 2010 16:01:45 +0000
Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko at gmail.com> wrote:

> As for 3D and closed source drivers... If you buy a nVidia card, you can use 
> their closed source drivers, and they basically Just Work. If you buy an ATI 
> card, you can use... oops, sorry... you *cannot* use their closed source 
> drivers, because they do not support your version of X. Or you can opt for 
> open source radeon driver...

Which works perfectly fine, 2D and 3D wise, with the occasional bug, on my:
* RV200 (Radeon 7500)
* R200 (FireGL 8800)
* RV350 (Radeon 9550)
* RV370 (FireGL V3100)
* RV410 (Radeon X700 Pro)
and I should say the few bugs I've encountered were all fixed within a few
days of my reporting them. I use the V3100 at work (my workstation there
always runs the latest Fedora) to light up a 2x1600x1200 setup and I
obviously need it working reliably.

Of course, I use neither IGPs nor the latest cards.

> oops, sorry... you *cannot* opt for radeon(hd) 
> driver because ATI did *not* disclose the specs for their HD family of cards. 

They did.
They also pay people (Alex Deucher for instance) to develop a free driver.
See:
http://www.botchco.com/agd5f/?p=43
http://www.botchco.com/agd5f/?p=47
http://www.botchco.com/agd5f/?p=48
So we get specifications and a free driver.
 
> <sarcasm>
> And as you know, ATI is very open-source-friendly, unlike those nVidia guys...
> </sarcasm>

ATI provides specs and code hand in hand with the Xorg devs.
NVIDIA provides a binary blob.
Who's most opensource friendly?

François