Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 13th May 2007 14:21 UTC, submitted by John Mills
AMD AMD will soon deliver open graphics drivers, said Henri Richard just a few minutes ago, and the audience at the opening keynote of the Red Hat Summit broke into applause and cheers. Richard, AMD's executive vice president of sales and marketing, promised: "I'm here to commit to you that it's going to get done." He also promised that AMD is "going to be very proactive in changing way we interface with the Linux community".
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kaiwai
Member since:
2005-07-06

I'll believe it when I can use them but having said that, I'd very much welcome better drivers after just having bought a ATi powered Thinkpad T60 (which otherwise has stellar Linux support)


True, but I think the the problem as far as I see it, you'll only start to see it when their new CPU/GPU thing gets going - being it a completely new idea, probably unencumbered by patents, which means that one will be back to square one unfortunately with Ati support.

Unrelated to this post, for me, I'd love to see Ati/AMD succeed and give Nvidia and Intel some much needed competition. At the same time, however, I am reluctant to believe Ati - they've had a good several months to get their 'ducks in line' and they've done nothing to improve the situation.

For me, it isn't so much needing to have open source drivers - that would be a perk, but not a necessity, the issued I have is their lack of updating their binary drivers and maintain them.

Having open source drivers won't fix that; if there is a massive delay between the product launch, specifications being made available, and updating of the source, you're still back at square one in regards to support - whether the drivers are open or closed source, you're still at the mercy of AMD/Ati.

ps. Remember, this isn't the first time they promised improved drivers.

Edited 2007-05-13 21:53

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