will we ever have radeon drivers that aren't crap?

[Terry Barnaby]

On 07/29/2009 02:52 AM, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 09:51:25 +0100,
>    Anne Wilson<annew at kde.org>  wrote:
>> On Tuesday 28 July 2009 04:11:36 john wendel wrote:
>>> The one and only time I ever had an ATI card was when I was running
>>> Windows 98 (the last version I ever owned) and the ATI driver wouldn't
>>> get out of 640x480 mode. I gave the card away, and vowed to never buy
>>> ATI video again. I suggest you do the same.
>> It's unfair to compare ATi so long ago with ATi now.  But then many people are
>> running ancient cards and expect them to work with modern drivers.  It's
>> unrealistic.  ATi are working better with Linux these days, but it has only
>> been this last couple of years.  Anything older than that, you just have to
>> accept what it gives you.
>
> Why? The important parts of the spec for the older radeon cards are available.
> In fact the r200 specs have been available for a very long time.
>
Having a quick look at the subject, it does look like things are moving in the 
right direction at AMD/freedesktop. As stated AMD have released a lot of 
detailed documentation for their chipsets (90% of the battle ?) and there
appears to be quite a lot of work going on. Some catch up work to 
DRI2/Gallium/KMS/Gem and other future graphics API's has been just done as well 
as tidying up the code so that more code is shared between different chipset 
varients. It looks like the large amount of work/changes being introduced for 
Intel cards (by Intel ?) has caused a bit of a rumpus in the graphics scene :)
 From what I can see, people are saying that the ATI drivers should improve
and have better (reliability/performance) in the medium term. There are
statements of 6 to 9 months, but I guess that depends on how many people
are working on them and the quality of bug reports ...