R500 initial driver release [LWN.net]

R500 initial driver release

Posted Jun 12, 2007 23:17 UTC (Tue) by proski (subscriber, #104)
In reply to: R500 initial driver release by tcoppi
Parent article: R500 initial driver release

Otherwise it would hurt the image of AMD as a company. If the company is so protective of the information essential for writing free drivers for their video cards, can I expect them to be more cooperative when it comes to the processors?

Perhaps most gamers don't care about licenses of the software they run, but many system administrators do.

(Log in to post comments)

R500 initial driver release

Posted Jun 13, 2007 8:14 UTC (Wed) by karlmag (subscriber, #4415) [Link]

I can both second and third the point about sysadmins caring about
licenses.

One of the things that creates most trouble in my experience is to try to
sanely support a bunch of different Ati and nVidia cards with their
closed source drivers. Users wants/demands/needs accelerated 3D on most
part. I believe I have seen most kinds of weird crashes and stuff
like "it works with vga cables, but not with dvi". It stops being fun to
try to track down and fix it after a fairly short while.
Ideally I just want to initialize a network installation, walk away and
never hear about that machine again. (It will figure out which driver(s)
to use and which monitor(s) it has all by itself.)
To get there, it would be better if the developers could spend time to
just write driver, then use any extra time to do new and better features
instead of having to use that time to reverse engineering the hardware.

So many thanks to the folks working hard to giving us these free drivers
despite not having optimal basis to work from.

-- KarlMag