Re: radeon driver heading in wrong direction :-(.

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On 02/01/2010 05:49 PM, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 01, 2010 at 22:31:22 +0000,
>   Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> You are basically listing hardware that is either inferior in performance or 
>> is going to become obsolete in a year.
> 
> Obsolete? Not for Fedora. Maybe for playing the latest Windows based games
> or doing some sort of commercial rendering.

I think you are missing the point here.  Fedora is admittedly a bleeding
edge software distribution that does not support the bleeding edge of
video hardware.  How ironic is that?

>> You are basically recommending that Fedora users buy inferior hardware, for 
> 
> And much cheaper hadrware. And possibly passively cooled hardware that is
> quieter. (The 9200 was a really card for its time. It was inexpensive and
> didn't need a separate fan.)

And what you are saying is that someone can't get support for the video
card in his/her brand spanking new computer that they just bought at the
computer store....assuming it has the latest and greatest video card
from whatever manufacturer.  Weird.

When I bought my laptop, I didn't worry about video.  It was all
supposed to "just work".  I got stuck with a Radeon Mobility card.  At
the time (FC6), it required the fglrx driver to work properly for what I
wanted to use it for.  I wanted to play with MythTV and GoogleEarth.
At the time, the ATI radeon driver did *not* support 3D.  And this card
was *not* supported by radeonhd.  A year and some later, I upgraded to
F9.  I then had to wait 3-4 months for fglrx to work with F9 (and I
missed the actual release because there was *no* big fanfare about it).
 Now its running F11.  At some point I did convert from fglrx to the
radeon driver because fglrx would no longer run on the new F11 kernels
and the catalyst driver no longer supports my card (and my computer is
not yet 4 years old!)  The good news is that now GoogleEarth runs with
the stock radeon driver, but I can't tell you exactly when that happened
because there was no big fanfare about it when it happened.  If this
discussion hadn't have started up, I probably still wouldn't have known
since the old behaviour was that when GoogleEarth started up, it
locked-up the whole system, not something I would expect from a video
driver!  So, now it works.  It only took 3 plus years to get support for
a video card which was "old" when I bought it!  What *is* the
mean-lifetime of computer equipment these days?  I can't say that I've
ever used (for very long) a computer much older than 3 years old at work
before it was declared unusable (too slow) and I got a newer replacement
for it.

If Fedora wants to be taken seriously, its open source video drivers
must support video cards for what they are designed for:  each new one
is faster and more capable.  If we can't use the newer cards
capabilities within the limited lifetime of the hardware, it is a waste
of time.

The next capability I will want to use in a video card is VDPAU video
acceleration, for which there is *no* support in any of the open source
drivers, and is not currently a priority with the open source driver
people.  In fact, its not even on ATI's proprietary road map, yet.  So,
that means my next card will be a mid-high end nVidia card, and I'll use
their proprietary driver, and I'll be able to watch high end digital
video (H.624 and hi-bitrate mpeg4 stuff) on ATOM class processors!  I
can't do that today with today's hi-mid-range CPUs, but I can do it
tomorrow on today's low-end CPUs with the new video cards.

I don't need to play any high end Windows games.  That's not why I want
high-end video support.

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome@xxxxxxx
cummings@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
cummings@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)
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