Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 7th Sep 2007 21:03 UTC
The news already got out yesterday, but now it's official: AMD will open the specifications to its graphics chips. "AMD announced on Sept. 7 a major strategic change in open-source graphic processors support. The company announced it would provide open-source information and a development package supporting the ATI RadeonHD 2000 series ATI Radeon X1000 series of graphics processing units on Linux desktops." The new information is that AMD will partner with Novell's SUSE team.
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Member since:2005-11-23
RE[2]: Well, it's about time.
by WorknMan on Fri 7th Sep 2007 23:03
in reply to "RE: Well, it's about time."
Member since:2005-11-13
They are not opening up their drivers to any extent. They are just providing needed information to create new free ones.
If I were AMD/ATI (or any hardware manufacturer for that matter), this is how I'd do it. Why bother to write the drivers myself when there are hackers out there perfectly willing to do it for me ... for free!! You can't beat that with a stick.
RE[2]: Well, it's about time.
by galvanash on Sat 8th Sep 2007 00:52
in reply to "RE: Well, it's about time."
Member since:2006-01-25
They are not opening up their drivers to any extent. They are just providing needed information to create new free ones.
All I can say about that is Thank God! I mean have you actually tried to use ATI's Linux driver? As much grief as those drivers have caused I imagine the code would probably blind any developer who looked upon it. I have a mental image involving the Ark of the Covenant and a bunch of Nazis for some reason...
RE: Well, it's about time.
by Robocoastie on Sat 8th Sep 2007 01:48
in reply to "Well, it's about time."
Member since:2005-09-15
Yea but will this mean several drivers to choose from and confusion about which to use like can happen with kernels? At least with prop. drivers there's no confusion about which driver to use. I mean yea, open is nice because your hardware will always have a driver available (even if old).
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Member since:
2007-01-18
Not that I'm a huge fan of ATI, but it's about time one of the major graphics card makers open sourced their drivers. Well to some extent anyway.