radeon driver heading in wrong direction :-(.

[François Cami]

On Mon, 1 Feb 2010 22:43:06 +0000
Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Monday 01 February 2010 20:46:52 François Cami wrote:
> >
> > Of course, I use neither IGPs nor the latest cards.
> 
> Of course you don't, because the latest ATI cards don't work on F12.

The reason _I_ do not own anything more current is that I don't
need any faster card than the ones I have.

> There is no functional driver, nor open nor closed source.

For the latest hw generation running on the latest Xorg, yes, you
are correct. This is simply not true for cards older than six
months. This card is also supported on Xorg 7.4 by the Catalyst
proprietary driver, if proprietary is your thing.

> > > oops, sorry... you *cannot* opt for radeon(hd)
> > > driver because ATI did *not* disclose the specs for their HD family of
> > > cards.
> > 
> > They did.
> 
> Ok, let me jump through another hoop here. The latest desktop graphics card 
> model I can find on the ATI website is called "ATI Radeon HD 5970". They claim 
> it to be the fastest graphics card on the planet.

Let me quote you again:
"ATI did *not* disclose the specs for their HD family of cards."
You never said HD5970 there, only HD.

The first HDxxxx were released four years ago. We have specifications at
[0] for all of these _except_ the latest ones.

Cleaning up video card specifications for public use takes time and effort.
I do not think it would be financially wise to delay a hardware release
until both documentation and a Xorg driver are ready, neither should you.

> > 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.
> 
> So where is the driver for the above card?

Can't you read the latest post?
  
> > ATI provides specs and code hand in hand with the Xorg devs.
> > NVIDIA provides a binary blob.
> > Who's most opensource friendly?
> 
> And who supports their own hardware at all?

Who is closest to the Fedora objectives at [1]?

> Opensource-ness is immaterial here

I don't think so. Being able to have working 2D/3D on a lot of hardware
out of the box, without any third party support is a boon for any Linux
distribution. The current situation is way better than a few years ago.

> ATI doesn't have *any* drivers which would work in F12, for their own 
> latest&greatest graphics card.

True. However, both X.org 7.5 and F12 were released at about the same time
this hardware was. Getting a driver in a working shape takes some time. 

Moreover, according to Wikipedia [2] [3] and others, it seems that
NVIDIA has not released any really new hardware for a long while.
If this is true, you are comparing apples (really new hardware
on new Xorg) to oranges (refreshed old hardware on new Xorg).

F

[0] http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/
[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_200_Series
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_300_Series