http://www.osnews.com/story/15410/AMD_To_Drop_ATI_Brand Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Fri, 11 Dec 2009 09:57:22 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread?149865 http://osnews.com/thread?149865 AMD Radeon
ATI Radeon

All that matters is that AMD helps push ATI back to the forefront of the graphics market,

for the first time since the Geforce 2, I've moved my crop of machines from ATI to Nvidia, it just makes sense to me.

From the Radeon 7500 to the Radeon X850XL, I hit every good bump in the road.

now my cash has gone for the 7950 X2 for my gaming needs.

here is hoping for better performance and better linux support. Mon, 07 Aug 2006 19:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Devilotx) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149893 http://osnews.com/thread?149893 Hopefully this acquisition will lead to some linux drivers that are actually decent, for a change. Mon, 07 Aug 2006 19:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (gsus) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149899 http://osnews.com/thread?149899 i just hope drivers for all OS's are updated and are more optimized from now on. Mon, 07 Aug 2006 19:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (REM2000) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149908 http://osnews.com/thread?149908 That's what Intel did some years ago with some other graphic brand. I've forgotten the name yet ...

This is just logical.Edited 2006-08-07 20:10 Mon, 07 Aug 2006 20:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Manuel FLURY) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149911 http://osnews.com/thread?149911 AMD are going vertical! :3 Mon, 07 Aug 2006 20:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Kroc) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149912 http://osnews.com/thread?149912 Okay, take a company known for its processors and slap it's name on a graphics card...I'd hate to be in marketing trying to sell this. Mon, 07 Aug 2006 20:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (zizban) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149914 http://osnews.com/thread?149914 You know, I'm not entirely sure what makes ATI's binary drivers any worse than nvidia's. I'm using the latest ATI drivers (8.27.10). The installer for the drivers builds packages for lots of different distros, and the performance I'm getting is very, very good.

Now there is no doubt in my mind that ATI's Windows Drivers/Software are complete crap compated to nvidia's. I hope the improve that for sure, but both ATI and AMD are hardware companies, so I'm not sure why AMD would be any better at the software stuff than ATI. Mon, 07 Aug 2006 20:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Jack_Green) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149919 http://osnews.com/thread?149919 Tungsten, maybe?
ATI is certainly more recognized brand than those folks. Mon, 07 Aug 2006 20:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (siki_miki) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149930 http://osnews.com/thread?149930 What makes them worse than NVIDIAs?

Well, how about the fact that it took them over half a year to add support for Radeon X1xxx cards (R520)
Not supporting EXA.
Not supporting xv with x.org 7.1

And more.

I am glad that AMD actually chose to drop the ATI brand.
This means that tis actually AMDs brand and reputation that is on the line when your AMD Radeon works badly in Linux. Mon, 07 Aug 2006 20:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (mariux) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149935 http://osnews.com/thread?149935 Which one? Real3D or Chips & Technologies? Intel seemed to like buying clunky old graphics adapter firms Mon, 07 Aug 2006 20:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (MYOB) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149940 http://osnews.com/thread?149940 Chips and Technology (I bet choosing such a generic name was a great idea at the time. Pre-Google, that is...) http://www.chips.com Mon, 07 Aug 2006 20:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (zerblat) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149958 http://osnews.com/thread?149958 That's strange. nVidia distributes nearly the same driver (unified driver model) on Linux as they do on Windows, while ATi has always developed a separate fglrx driver based on their old workstation support for FireGL. You realize that nVidia has superior Windows drivers, so therefore it should follow that nVidia's binary Linux drivers are better.

Furthermore, nVidia supports the vast majority of their cards on Linux, whereas the Linux community has no reasonable expectation of having an R500 driver anytime soon. nVidia supports SLI (albeit rather poorly) on Linux, whereas ATi doesn't support Crossfire at all, and they also have better multi-head support for Linux.

You might want to read Phoronix for more information. ATi has been getting better, but they still trail nVidia quite substantially in Linux support.

However, the open source R200/300 driver is much better than the open source nVidia driver. You might also be interested in the Nouveau Project, which aims to reverse engineer an open source 3D-accelerated driver for nVidia chipsets. Mon, 07 Aug 2006 21:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (butters) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149963 http://osnews.com/thread?149963 Cirrus Logic, Trident or Tseng Labs are possible choices ?

I don't remember ;-) Mon, 07 Aug 2006 21:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Manuel FLURY) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149965 http://osnews.com/thread?149965 What makes them worse than NVIDIAs?

Not supporting xv with x.org 7.1

Well, yes but they plan to in the future. I mean, Nvidia doesn't support any of the the 7.1 features by that logic.

I think the current ATI linux drivers have gotten quite decent as far as features/ease of use/etc. goes. Closing in on NVidia anyway. It is the performance area where they get completely crushed.Edited 2006-08-07 21:29 Mon, 07 Aug 2006 21:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (smitty) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149971 http://osnews.com/thread?149971 That's strange. nVidia distributes nearly the same driver (unified driver model) on Linux as they do on Windows, while ATi has always developed a separate fglrx driver based on their old workstation support for FireGL. You realize that nVidia has superior Windows drivers, so therefore it should follow that nVidia's binary Linux drivers are better.

Your logic assumes that he thinks the ATI Windows drivers are better than the linux ones. Which I think is reasonable, but if you are a huge anti-.NET person you might hate the ATI windows drivers and think the linux ones are great in comparison. Mon, 07 Aug 2006 21:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (smitty) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149984 http://osnews.com/thread?149984 sad thing is, I have cards from those 3 and the other two someone else mentioned in boxes I think I'm only missing a 3dlabs card... heh Mon, 07 Aug 2006 21:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (helf) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149985 http://osnews.com/thread?149985 Butters, the nVidia might be working great (Where the secret is the wrapper approach) on GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and Windy - but there's no support of any other platforms. nVidia refuse to release even 2D specs under NDA, which means that reverse engineering is the only way to get any support of nVidia graphics processors. THAT SUCKS! Mon, 07 Aug 2006 21:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (flywheel) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?150016 http://osnews.com/thread?150016 Works great on Solaris for me too. Working well on OSX also. WHAT other platforms? Amiga? Yikes. Mon, 07 Aug 2006 23:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (ormandj) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?150028 http://osnews.com/thread?150028 Intel IGP. Need I say more? Mon, 07 Aug 2006 23:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (r_a_trip) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?150030 http://osnews.com/thread?150030 I would say BeOS lacks 2D/3D support for obvious reasons, but Zeta has working 2D accelerated nVidia drivers. I'm not sure about 3D as I've not tested it. Mon, 07 Aug 2006 23:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Morgan) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?150035 http://osnews.com/thread?150035 Short of open sourcing their drivers, you won't see nVidia supported drivers for BeOS/Haiku anytime in the near (far...) future. It simply makes NO economic sense. A hobbiest might reverse engineer 2d stuff, and maybe even 3d - but if I was nVidia, and I wasn't going to open source my drivers, no way in heck I'd spend a penny paying an employee to port to BeOS/Haiku. The employee's time would be worth far more than the possible *profit* to be made from Haiku users purchasing nVidia cards only due to wanting to run Haiku.

We don't even know if Haiku is going to be 1.0 release quality in the next year or two or five.

I loved BeOS, bought it from R3 on. I REALLY wanted it to continue, watched Be, Inc. do the stupid migration to embedded stuff, watched Be, Inc. disappear and BeOS get sold. Watched nothing occur for years, then finally Haiku started moving due to Axel and a few others I forget the nicknames of. It's still moving along slowly, and I wish it the best, but it's got a LOT of catching up to do now. Remember, 1.0 is basically just going to be a bug-fixed R5. That's old stuff. Mon, 07 Aug 2006 23:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (ormandj) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?150096 http://osnews.com/thread?150096 It makes no sense to not release the specs unfortanetly. They could if they wanted to, but business is about information and keeping it. IF they can be given some compelling (ie financial) reasons to do so they will in a heartbeat. Nvidia has no reason to keep them a secret, their competitors know how to reverse engineer, anything they licensed could easily be renegotiated... Tue, 08 Aug 2006 04:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Tweek) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?150112 http://osnews.com/thread?150112 time to see if they are able to go ballistic Tue, 08 Aug 2006 06:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (hobgoblin) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?150131 http://osnews.com/thread?150131 Hm. I've never even looked at ATI or nVidia drivers. I just made sure to choose a card that's supported by the DRI drivers, let autodetection do its thing, and have been using my computer ever since. I've got 3D h/w accel (glxinfo tells me so)... no idea how, performance-wise, it compares with the proprietary drivers. I'm not too much of a gamer though.

It would seem that it'd be great for AMD to just pitch in and help out with the DRI drivers. Tue, 08 Aug 2006 07:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (JohnMG) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?150185 http://osnews.com/thread?150185 It's good to see that AMD is going to take total responsiblity for ATI's technology and it's implementation. By dropping the ATI name (and it does make me sad, ATI was a solid Canadian tech company) AMD is putting it's money where it's mouth is. I think we're going to get some goodness out of this. Tue, 08 Aug 2006 13:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (BluenoseJake) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?150213 http://osnews.com/thread?150213 I am happy they are dropping the ATI brand. I think they are going for IGP in the future. All in one solutions. uit's betttttttttttter. I think it's more efficient because you just have to buy one board and it is totally cheap. I can get an IGP board that runs faster then gforce 5 for like 50 dollars. Tue, 08 Aug 2006 13:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Bonus) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?150260 http://osnews.com/thread?150260 I agree. I found ATI drivers much easier to install under Linux then Nvidia's. Performance is comparable to Windows. Tue, 08 Aug 2006 14:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (MattK) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?150337 http://osnews.com/thread?150337 I remember reading about Torrenza, a co-processor like design for third parties that wanted to communicate directly with the CPUs via HyperTransport. I don't see why AMD won't produce a video chip that acts as a co-processor with an onboard memory controller and two or three HyperTransport links like Opterons. I think that may scare nVidia... Tue, 08 Aug 2006 17:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (BFGoodrich) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?150344 http://osnews.com/thread?150344 I personally hope they keep making cards for macs and supporting current cards with drivers because I prefer ATI graphics to Nvidia. Tue, 08 Aug 2006 17:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Stalinisto) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?150347 http://osnews.com/thread?150347 The ATI Windows drivers do not require .NET, only the new control panel which is completely optional. Tue, 08 Aug 2006 18:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Zoidberg) Comments