"Dell knows it won't happen overnight, but along side wanting to ship audio/video codecs, Intel Wireless 80.211n support for Linux, Broadcom Wireless for Linux, and being able to ship notebooks and desktops with Compiz Fusion enabled, Dell would like to see improved ATI Linux drivers."
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Member since:2005-10-13
They've had well over 6 months to do something about it.
I guess I just don't think 6 months is all that long, given that this is a huge multi million dollar company and they're bound to be still working on getting integrated into AMD. Especially since AMD is fighting for their lives right now in the CPU sector and I doubt they're paying nearly as much attention to the GPUs.
Their Windows drivers are horrid
I hear that a lot, but I don't have any problem with their Windows drivers. In fact I think I prefer them to the competitions. I'm not sure if it is just a matter of being different than NVIDIA or what?
If I was AMD, as payback for the support by Sun, I would in return dedicate resources to developing drivers for Solaris
Since I'm not a Solaris user, I have to honestly say I don't care that much, although it would be nice. What I really want are some good open source drivers, though. Then they'd work on every OS that had a decent number of users.
Again, what I see from AMD's management is nothing more than clueless arrogance in the face of the titanic - they're ignoring the fact that they're declining, they're refusing to acknowledge
That's where we differ, I think. You see them as specifically ignoring the problem, whereas I see them as being too busy fighting for their lives in another sector to really get off their asses and fix this. IOW, lazy and distracted rather than just plain arrogant. Anyway, as I said, my patience isn't infinite. I'm giving them 12 months, and not a day more.
I say punish the whole damn company - simply fobbing off the responsibility to some other 'department' is a technique used by...
Yes, I know, but I like supporting "alternative" companies like AMD is to Intel. So I have some mixed feelings about them...
Member since:2006-02-05
I hear that a lot, but I don't have any problem with their Windows drivers. In fact I think I prefer them to the competitions. I'm not sure if it is just a matter of being different than NVIDIA or what?
I had an ati card way back in the day, and had nothing but problems with it. Bizarre artifacts on textures in games, certain games just not working, etc. When I started making real money rather then just minimum wage stuff during school, I bought a mid-range NVidia card that gave me great performance, and allowed me to play the newest games for years, eventually even compensating for a cruddy cpu. After about four years it died, and this time I went for a mid range ATi card, again, nothing but bizarre problems. On that card, I would get this wierd thing happen where the lower left hand corner of my monitor would jiggle up and down for no aparent reason.
Around that time I switched to linux full time. Enemy-Territory is IMHO still one of the greatest FPS games of all time. It took me about a month of serious research and fiddling to get it to do hardware ogl(i ended up having to do a manual compile, and then copy certain .so files to various locations the installer didnt put them). After all that work, I got far worse performance then windows, and significantly less stability. After about a year on that card, I bought another NVidia. The install on linux was incredably easy, and if anything I got better performance on ET and UT2k3 on linux then windows.
Now, thats just my experience. I have a friend who is a computer guy, but not a gamer. He had an aging GeForce 2 in his pc, but he wanted to play ut2k3 with me and another friend. Against my advice to pay the extra few dollars and go NVidia, my friend went out with him and got him a mid range ATi card. The performance jump was astounding between his several year old card and the new one, but he found he was regularily getting BSODs when he never had before, even after a total wipe/reinstall of xp. Since his machine was used primarily for work, not gaming, he ended up putting his ancient GF2 back into his PC, because the regular crashes were too much of an interruption, and the ati card became an expensive paperweight on his desk.
Last story, during my second round with ATi, I was at a friend of a friends house, talking about the major upgrade I had done on my pc. He worked at a local computer shop, and was planning his own upgrade. When he told me the components he was planning on buying, I asked him why not ati, as you get much more bang for your buck. He said that their shop actually has a policy to push NVidia, because they had yet to have a machine come back with an nvidia related problem, but had ati problems all the time.
All that to say, If ati works great for you, consider yourself lucky. People don't just bash it because its not nvidia, but because of regularily getting burned by shoddy hardware and drivers.
Member since:
2005-07-06
They've had well over 6 months to do something about it. Their Windows drivers are horrid, their Linux drivers are even worse, and heck, they're not even willing to support Solaris - Sun was one of the first businesses willing to give Opteron a shot in the server market.
I mean, I'm sorry, but I tend to operate on a 'you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours' basis. If I was AMD, as payback for the support by Sun, I would in return dedicate resources to developing drivers for Solaris - heck, it might even allow FireGL hardware to become an option on Sun's own Opteron hardware.
Again, what I see from AMD's management is nothing more than clueless arrogance in the face of the titanic - they're ignoring the fact that they're declining, they're refusing to acknowledge that their refusal to support those outside the 'Windows world' is harming their relationship with those who make decisions within large organisations; don't underestimate how personal prejudices can impact on decisions made for large corporations. If the CIO is unhappy with ATI's support for his Linux laptop, I can assure you that individual isn't going to be purchase a fleet of computers with AMD components anytime soon.
I say punish the whole damn company - simply fobbing off the responsibility to some other 'department' is a technique used by management when they don't want to take responsibility for decisions made. If these managers don't want to take responsibility for the decisions they made, then maybe they should hand in their resignation letter declaring they don't want the responsibility that comes with the job.