[ut2003io] radeon

[Michael]

On Fri, Sep 27, 2002 at 10:21:39PM -0700, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> well... yes and no.  binary only drivers suck, but it certainly wouldn't
> stop me from getting a kick ass video card.  i'm a ... an open source quasi
> fanatic.  a zealot who can still drink a big fat cup of realism.

Yeah but the DRI drivers suck more. ATI's fault, they don't allow hyperz
to be implemented for starters, that makes them fairly much a waste of
time for games. If you think they don't perform very well, get rage
tweak pro and disable all the fast z clear, hierarchical z etc in
windows and see the performance is about the same. It's politics that
slows the DRI driver afaict.

> what i object to most is using hardware which can be pulled from
> underneath me.  suppose X 5.0 is released tomorrow and debian puts it
> in right away, and nvidia decides not to release new drivers.  or for
> some reason the drivers get delayed.

Haha, suppose X was released and Debian put it in within a year ;o)

Seriously though, Same thing could happen with the X licensed source. Do
you have specs for the ATI card? Ever looked at the source? So you're
going to update your radeon driver from X4 to X5? Forget X 5 though,
think 'new card comes out and DRI team do a major change of their
internals for features' or OpenGL2.0 perhaps..Are you _really_ going to
make that driver work?

Don't get me wrong, I think all else being equal a GPL licensed version
would be heaps better - but things aren't equal - and ATI would be
better, imho, making things equal (in fact given the 9700pro they should
be making it a heap load faster)
 
> way back when, when 3dfx ruled the world, a new kernel version came
> out that had changed the layout of the file operations table.  entries
> were moved around for some reason.  this happened in a stable kernel.
> a few drivers were affected.  the 3dfx kernel module broke.  i was
> able to fix it.  in fact, it was easy.

Quite, I've got a '{' in the kernel, what if it'd been 150 lines of
change? That said, you can get specs for 3dfx cards but I don't
notice the myriad folk all making the tdfx driver's bugs disappear.
 
-- 
Michael.