On 17 Jul 2003, William Suetholz wrote:<large bit snipped>
<snipped>After all their drivers don't support XV at all, so you can't
use the multimedia capabilities of some of their integrated
cards like the AIW-PRO and 8500DV. I realize that in the past
they have provided some information to XFree86, and eventually
after having their multimedia stuff reverse engineered to the
group that was working on that. They have, however, never
provided complete information!
They've got the right to do that if they wish. Suffice it to say that ATI has provided more documentation for their video hardware than all other vendors combined, at least the docs that I have had access to from all vendors. With people like you bitching about it however, I don't see how that is intended to get anyone to release any documentation or specifications that haven't been released. They could theoretically release all documentation to everything, open source their proprietary drivers, sell their company and donate the money to the XFree86 project, and people would still find something to bitch thanklessly about and complain about some bug they find.
From an end-user's point of view, this argument doesn't cut it.
The reality however is that we live in a capitalist society and
have strict trademark/copyright/patent and trade secret laws
designed to allow companies to invent/create something and then own it, either permanently, effectively permanently, or for some period of time. With this legal climate, this erects walls for open source, and they're not going to be easy walls to work around.
We get what the lawyers say we can have basically, and we should be glad to get that, especially if the alternative is nothing.
The only time I use my Radeon is when I play DVDs. I shut down my computer, pull my best friends Geforce 2 MX out, blow the dust off my Radeon 64MB DDR, put it in the AGP slot, plug the SVideo cable in, power on and run mplayer. When the DVD is finished, I take my Radeon out and reboot with the Geforce back in.
The fact that ATI have contributed code for a 2D driver doesn't move me. In fact I don't even use the 2D driver - the only time I run X with my Radeon I use the VESA driver for it, as it's the only way I can get tv-out working in X, but admittedly that's only when I leave my girlfriend with the computer and she wants a gui interface to mplayer with tv-out.
Sure Quake works, and xscreensaver and the xmms plugins. Cool. But a majority of the games I have don't work: Tribes 2 ( crashes on startup ), Unreal Tournament 2003 ( previously required S3 Texture Compression, now has far too many rendering bugs to be able to tell what's going on) , Neverwinter Nights ( runs at 1 frame every 5 seconds - and yes I have DRI working ). While I certainly don't just sit here playing games all day, I bought my Radeon for 2 reasons, and 2D support wasn't one of them - $AUS 500 is too much for just 2D support. I wanted 3D acceleration, and multimedia ( tv in & out ). Of these, 3D acceleration doesn't work with my games, tv-out kinda-just-barely works on the console ( but I assume someone will eventually 'fix' this so it doesn't work at all ) and tv-in I believe works, ( but not if compiled with gcc-3.x. - I suppose this is fair enough ).
If ATI have provided more documentation than all other hardware vendors combined then that is an interesting statistic, but it doesn't address the above end-user issues. However I have read a number of threads in the Gatos mailing list about ATI not even responding to requests for documentation for the newer Rage Theatre chips for the past *year*. Responding with a reason why the documentation is not available would be something. Not responding at all ... that's something else again. Maybe there are legal reasons. Maybe they just want to protect their IP. Whatever. Respond. It doesn't matter to end users anyway. What matters is that nVidia's cards just work, and the reason is that nVidia have made the effort to make things work. ATI have made some efforts to make some things work.
The sad thing is that I would actually really like a Radeon 9800. But I would be a fool if I bought one. Previous experience tells me I'd be far better off with a GeForce - even my friend's hand-me-down GeForce 2 MX.
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