The abrupt merging of Nouveau [LWN.net]

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

Posted Dec 16, 2009 6:39 UTC (Wed) by SEJeff (subscriber, #51588)
In reply to: The abrupt merging of Nouveau by Banis
Parent article: The abrupt merging of Nouveau

Funny... ATI didn't used to get it until AMD bought them but ATI gfx cards
run great on Linux desktops with fglrx. Once the open source 3d drivers catch
up enough to reliably run compiz on them I'll switch fulltime. Nvidia is not
the only video card company that makes hardware work relatively well with
Linux. Up until recently, Matthew Tippett was a very important resource to
help see this through.

Cluebat, you just got hit with it.

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The abrupt merging of Nouveau

Posted Dec 16, 2009 8:30 UTC (Wed) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]

I'd like to point out that once the open-source drivers catch up "enough" then fglrx will in all likelihood stop supporting your card. And in my case it took over a year before the open-source driver actually was good enough to replace fglrx for me, so I went a year with horrible 2d performance and very flaky 3d.

I am hoping that with nvidia there will remain the opportunity to use the proprietary driver even if nouveau is able to drive the same thing. More choice is for the better, even choice between free and closed.

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

Posted Dec 19, 2009 14:25 UTC (Sat) by anton (guest, #25547) [Link]

Actually ATI released 3D programming information for the r100 and r200 families of graphics chips (powering the graphics cards up to the Radeon 9250) a long time ago, and we have had 3D drivers for these cards for a very long time. Then they changed their policy, and did not release information for their later cards until they were bought by AMD. The r100 and r200 information reportedly helped in reverse engineering the r300/r400 and so we have enjoyed free drivers for these cards with 3D acceleration after a while.

Why did ATI change their policy in the unwelcome direction? Maybe the market force of the free software users is not big enough (or at least ATI management thought so); many Linux users obviously care little for free software and bought Nvidia based on the availability of their proprietary driver.

Why did AMD change the policy in the welcome direction? Apparently the market force of the free software users is big enough for AMD to care, even if ATI didn't.