"Last October we had compared the performance of the open-source R300 display driver against the closed-source fglrx driver for ATI Radeon graphics cards. In that comparison a Mobility Radeon X300 was used with X.Org 7.1, but we have decided to take another look at this driver comparison under X.Org 7.2. In this last comparison, the fglrx binary blob had greatly outperformed the open-source driver. While the fglrx driver remains faster, has the performance delta between these two drivers decreased?"
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Member since:2006-06-08
"butters"
"I'm not a part of your "we." I use Linux because of its technical merits, many of which are directly related to the fact that it's free software."
If you use Linux you are part of "WE" does not matter why you use it, you use it!
Do the math any one demand equals more money so if the people who are demanding the product wants it and is willing to talk about it then they will get their way.
What I really dislike are all the people who started out using MS and still make allot of money because of MS talk about the company like it is the worse thing that ever happened. Can they do better yes and they should.
I love open source for many of the same reasons many of you do my question was not about open source in general but about open source drivers.
For all the people who thing closed source software will go way THIS WILL NEVER HAPPEN.
Member since:
2005-07-08
I'm not a part of your "we." I use Linux because of its technical merits, many of which are directly related to the fact that it's free software.
The fact of the matter is that delivering binary drivers is really hard. It's got to be just right, specifically linked to a particular set of object files. If any of the symbols change, it breaks, and you can't fix it. You're stuck waiting for somebody at the green or red company to get around to rolling a new binary, by which time it might be broken again.
Delivering open source drivers is a lot easier. Unless the relevant APIs change, which is relatively rare and always announced ahead of time, the driver source will build normally against new versions. And obviously, the Linux kernel community likes to pull drivers in-tree whenever possible, so open source drivers will be automatically included with Linux distributions and will be updated by the kernel maintainers to reflect any API changes that may occur.
In addition to being much easier to maintain, open source drivers are vastly easier to debug and support. The proprietary nVidia driver is almost as big as my entire kernel image, and there's no viable way to figure out what's wrong if it doesn't work. You might be able to get support from your Linux vendor or from nVidia, but not very likely, and certainly not if you have any other proprietary drivers loaded.
Let's back away from the issue of drivers and talk about the general impact of OSS on the technical capabilities of the free software stack. The fact that we have and share source code allows free software developers to innovate at a pace unmatched in the proprietary software industry--at a fraction of the cost. Compare Linux to proprietary UNIX, which has been relegated to niche markets because it lacks an agile, nimble development ecosystem.
I didn't start using Linux because it was free. I started using Linux because it was fun, reliable, understandable, and most importantly, not Windows. The free software aspect was one that I grew to appreciate over time, but primarily as a means to these ends.