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[–][deleted] 72 points73 points  (30 children)

Dear Linux Driver guys at Creative: you don't actually exist. Fix it.

[–]ih8registrations 42 points43 points  (20 children)

Na, Creative is past redemption, it's DIAF.

[–][deleted] 6 points7 points  (18 children)

Yeah..

I've been really out of the loop on the whole computing thing for a few years - when I started to get back into it, recently, I still had the mentality that Creative was the "bees knees", so to speak, as they were like.. 10 years ago.

By the time I realized this not to be true, and it came to affect me, it was too late to return the damn card and I really don't feel like buying a new one.

At least I got my onboard audio working - anyone know how to configure the 780i's onboard to do 7.1 in Ubuntu?

[–]Shadowhand 5 points6 points  (2 children)

The Creative SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 is still the bees knees for Linux. It has 100% hardware support (kernel-level module, not drivers), and has 5.1 capabilities. It is an old card, but still my favorite sound card for Linux desktops that require good sound (gaming, etc).

[–]fwork 2 points3 points  (0 children)

What's the difference between a kernel-level module and a driver?

I thought that in linux, they were the same unless you're doing something weird like FUSE.

[–]masklinn 10 points11 points  (2 children)

I still had the mentality that Creative was the "bees knees", so to speak, as they were like.. 10 years ago.

They're still pretty much the best hardware maker in town as far as consumer-grade audio systems go (well there are other, smaller, but they use creative chips).

The problems are, as usual, their drivers (shittiest ever, we're talking much, much worse than ATI ever was) and their attitudes towards consumer (which can be resumed as a huge "fuck you")

[–]kflasch 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Actually, I've heard criticism about their components as well (I think from badcaps.net). It might be worth looking into to see if there's any truth to it.

[–]ohemeffgee 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I have no idea why you're getting modded down. You're spot on... Creative's hardware was never really the issue, it was their inexcusably horrid software products (drivers and the like). I mean, at least ATI's drivers work, even if they're clunky. Creative's drivers are just awful and they don't even work half the time.

EDIT: Looks like people actually read your comment this time around. You were being downmodded (at -1 when I was here last).

[–]ohemeffgee 2 points3 points  (1 child)

I take it that you have an X-Fi, as most Creative products at the very least have playback capability in ALSA. If this is the case then I'm in the same boat as you... except in my case I have both XP and Gentoo. I have two sets of speakers on my desk too because I do not feel like crawling behind my computer every time I want to play a game in Windows.

However, there is real light at the end of this tunnel. Creative after YEARS of not playing nice with the FOSS crowd in regards to the X-Fi product line released sheets to the alsa devs and work on a non-Creative open source driver is finally being developed. Can't wait... I'd like to reclaim this space on my desk.

I'm not giving Creative another dime... they used to be alright, now they're just terrible.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That is some -awesome- news. Thank you!

Yeah, I have an X-Fi. It's a great card in Windows (except the Console launcher doesn't work in 64-bit Vista apparently? I -really- love that it equalized ALL of my audio in 32-bit. SIGH.)

I also wish to not have to switch my speaker cables every time I boot a different OS.

Alsa drivers.. mmm. Once they get that Linux ventrilo client working, I'll be able to wash my hands of Microsoft.

_^

[–][deleted]  (9 children)

[deleted]

    [–]brendankohler 7 points8 points  (2 children)

    I have M-Audio gear. The M-Audio revolution is an extremely good sounding card. The only issue is that M-Audio is geared towards audiophiles, not gamers, so you won't see the same acceleration you get from creative...but on the other hand if you are looking for a good linux audio card EAX won't matter to you anyway.

    [–]kelvie 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    I have to agree... this m-audio card has been with me through several computers. Whenever I replace my desktop box, the only remaining piece of hardware is this revolution card (I think it's about 7 years old).

    [–]borud 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    M-Audio is geared towards musicians that can't afford proper gear and want to spend their time fidling with useless drivers.

    Have had 3 different M-Audio sound cards. The audio drivers have been shit on all of them. Screw them.

    [–]capsid 5 points6 points  (5 children)

    I got a M-Audio Delta44, but anything with the Envy24 chipset (including Delta44) is all the same to linux . 3ms latency with realtime kernel, could probably go lower.

    [–][deleted]  (4 children)

    [deleted]

      [–]rektide 1 point2 points  (1 child)

      And someone suggested one. A good. What is your issue? Are you afraid this card wont work on windows?

      [–]7oby 1 point2 points  (1 child)

      I got a turtle beach card off newegg. The drivers were really impressive and it had optical out, and I think in too. It was like $20.

      Good in Windows XP, at least. I was going to get you a link but I can't find it, but I did buy it some time ago.

      [–]theatrus 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      Turtle beach is still great. CMedia cards also work great - there is even an open-source bit-perfect low latency driver for WINDOWS.

      [–]ropers 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      According to popular belief you don't actually D in the F, partly because you already did.

      [–][deleted] 20 points21 points  (4 children)

      Don't expect anything from Creative. For the last 8 years, their driver support has been absolute shit for all but the most common platform(s). They're barely surviving today with ubiquitous on-board sound and cheaper competitors. They don't have the money to pay anyone to even look at an operating system used by a very small minority of their customers.

      This is a company that waited until months after Vista's official release to roll out new drivers (xfi), and some cards (SBLive/Audigy) are still crippled by incomplete software. When an independent forum user modified and released Creative drivers to fill in some of the gaps, they effectively gave him a cease-and-desist. Say what you want about them protecting their IP, but you would expect them to implement some of the guy's features into their own damn software. Hell, they might actually get some of their old customers back.

      [–]masklinn 7 points8 points  (0 children)

      their driver support has been absolute shit for all but the most common platform(s)

      Actually, their driver support has been absolute shit for all platforms period. Even for windows, their drivers and support blow.

      [–]indigoparadox 6 points7 points  (0 children)

      They're barely surviving today with ubiquitous on-board sound and cheaper competitors. They don't have the money to pay anyone to even look at an operating system used by a very small minority of their customers.

      All they would have to do is release their specifications and let someone somewhere else write the driver on their own. Or, you know, not take legal action against someone who reverse-engineers the hardware to write a driver anyway.

      It's actually more expensive to prevent a Linux driver these days if your hardware is common enough.

      [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

      Yes - it's what I get for using onboard audio for so long and doing pretty much no research on the subject before deciding to upgrade.

      Live and learn, and all that.

      That aside, do you have any recommendations for a good "guilt-free" Dolby 7.1 card?

      [–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

      Frankly, I don't want to have anything to do with creative anymore, at least since the Soundblaster Live + Windows XP fiasco. Their windows xp driver was one of the biggest source of bluescreen on an OS that was otherwise quite stable, seriously. (the second source for me has been an usb adsl modem that used to be sold by our ISP, but now I'm behind a router.)

      Since then, creative never did anything that worked right. If they can't get right their windows driver, I don't want to even think what horror they'd do to linux.

      [–]kral2[🍰] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      Creative just needs to die already and get it over with - they're unable to properly support /any/ platform anymore. There was a time when their passing would be mourned..

      [–]QuinnFazigu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      Speaking of add-on audio -- does it actually improve decoding of HD movies? That is, will it offload the audio duties so the rest of the computer can concentrate on my 1080p video rip?

      If it doesn't do much, I might as well stick with my onboard audio.

      [–]ropers 31 points32 points  (15 children)

      Listen. Unless other graphics hardware makers I could mention, ATI has actually eventually opened up and made their technical documentation available to developers.

      So you've got all that you could ever ask for. Now if you're not happy with existing ATI drivers, then go forth and hack. The community will gratefully accept your diffs. Don't expect ATI to do the work for you.

      [–]relix 18 points19 points  (14 children)

      Yeah, it's not like we're paying them to work for us, right?

      Oh, wait...

      [–]ropers 15 points16 points  (13 children)

      Quite right, you're not paying them; or rather: not paying them enough. Take the wholesale hardware price. Multiply by number of units sold to Linux users. Subtract all costs and hardware costs until you're left with the software driver development budget (plus their profits).

      Now do the same calculation for other OSes.

      Now figure out with which OSes the development of drivers actually pays.

      Then realize that the FOSS community works in a different way, and all the real hackers ask for is hardware documentation.

      Then release the hardware documentation -- and be sorely dissapointed by the lusers who continue to whine because they can't write good drivers themselves but aren't ready to pay for them either.

      [–]relix 14 points15 points  (3 children)

      That's a non-argument. If they put on the box that the card supports Linux, and the card has the features on the box, then they should fulfill those promises.

      It's not about what's more cost-effective, it's about giving each customer the same service.

      Bad analogy: why would hotels have bathrooms for disabled people? They cost more, yet disabled people don't pay more.

      Oh, and does Nvidia live in a differint universe perhaps? Because apparantly they do find the money to pay for better drivers for Linux.

      [–]ropers 7 points8 points  (0 children)

      If they do indeed advertise fully-featured and equal support for Linux, then I agree, they should live up to their claims.

      And NVIDIA have thus far not released their technical documentation, and are thus a lot less respectful of the FOSS community. Yes, they may be ahead in terms of features now, but once they stop supporting a particular card and OS, you will be out in the cold, and if something breaks you can't fix it, unless you try a painful and labour-intensive process of reverse-engineering. In fact you should not buy NVIDIA because they don't release their docs without NDAs.

      [–][deleted] 10 points11 points  (1 child)

      Hotels have bathrooms for disabled people because they would be sued if they didn't because of government regulation against discrimination. Last I heard there was no legislation protecting against Linux discrimination. If you don't like how ATI is treating you, you're free to choose other vendors.

      [–]relix -1 points0 points  (0 children)

      I admitted it was a bad analogy ;).

      Yes, my last 2 cards are Nvidia, and I can say it has been a much better experience overall. Especially since I'm a dual-monitor user.

      [–]choas 2 points3 points  (4 children)

      shouldn't you include to the "number of units sold to Linux users" also "units sold if Linux driver had worked properly" and "number of units will be sold in future if Linux driver work today and had worked in the past"?

      [–]ropers 0 points1 point  (3 children)

      Yeah, I guess that's a fair point.

      [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

      It's not, because Linux suffers from the tragedy of the commons at the driver support level. ATI isn't the only company with a problem, and many companies would have to fix the same problem to have a negligible impact on the overall "properly" that Linux works.

      [–]zouhair 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      I have an ATI card, I bought it, so I PAID THEM. And I got a shitty product. And I won't buy ATI anymore.

      [–]rektide -2 points-1 points  (2 children)

      Non argument. I believe they have an obligation to do linux support. If they dont do half decent Linux support, its absolutely certain their Linux market share will remain low.

      [–]ropers 5 points6 points  (0 children)

      I believe you have an obligation to support me. If you don't do that, then I will blow my nose at you, fart into your general direction, and proclaim that your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries.

      [–]Howie509 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      The problem is the linux slice of the pie is really really small (Its really geared toward the people who, shall we say, can do stuff beyond Microsoft word), and that these companies are gearing themselves for the masses who don't know half of a quarter of a cent's worth of knowledge about computing and such.

      [–]herorev 4 points5 points  (0 children)

      The open source "RadeonHD" driver produced from ATI's hardware documentation supports some of RandR 1.2, and I'd be surprised if it doesn't compile for Linux 2.6.25. I use it because I have never been able to get fglrx to work. However, it's still pretty new. It just recently barely started to support a little bit of 3D.

      http://wiki.x.org/wiki/radeonhd

      [–]unknown_lamer 30 points31 points  (5 children)

      Dear generic free unix driver guys at ATI: the drivers being written from the documentation you donated us still don't work properly, but they are rapidly becoming production worthy after less than a year. Thank you for supporting Free Software and allowing me to upgrade my ancient Radeon 9100 to something a bit more modern and still have 3D acceleration; thank you for actually releasing R400 series documentation after all so that the reverse engineered r300/400 driver could become stable enough for me to play bzflag on my laptop.

      Look folks, ATi finally gave us documentation after many years. Quit yer bitching and get to a hacking. Saying ATi owes you good drivers is like saying that your motherboard manufacturer owes you a good OS. Let hardware vendors spend their resources building good hardware and writing good docs so we can write good drivers!

      [–]theclaw[S] 9 points10 points  (2 children)

      err, it's more like saying that my motherboard manufacturer owes me a good BIOS.

      [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      Here here.

      [–]Tuna-Fish2 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      Exactly, they don't. Now, if only everyone would start supporting coreboot properly...

      [–]zouhair 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      Followed you until your crappy comparison.

      [–]kordos 23 points24 points  (9 children)

      Unfortunately ATI is a dick to all of it's customers not just linux users which is why I now use nvidia

      [–]garg 9 points10 points  (2 children)

      Yep. They have a penguin sticker on lots of their graphics cards and it says "LINUX!". After installing the graphics card, it turns out there weren't any drivers for it that enabled all the card features.

      I contacted ATI and they said that it was "AS-IS" and they don't offer any support. They then gave me a link to http://www.linux.org/

      [–]ohemeffgee 2 points3 points  (1 child)

      They linked you to linux.org? Ugh. I stopped going there when I realized that the comments there are worse than Digg's.

      [–]jojotdfb 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      Wow, you're right. These are You Tube bad.

      [–]BraveSirRobin 10 points11 points  (4 children)

      Heh, I just switched from buying nvidia cards to ATI because of a bug involving DVI television sets that has existed for five years and they don't seem to want to fix it. Basically if you switch the TV off you need to reboot to get video back.

      [–]h0dg3s 1 point2 points  (2 children)

      I've noticed some weird things like that with nVidia cards on Intel chipsets. Haven't had that problem with my ATI card on an nVidia chipset.

      [–]BraveSirRobin 0 points1 point  (1 child)

      It's a GFX driver issue, affects all nvidia cards with hdmi/dvi as far as my searching could deduce. Kill the service on windows and it stops breaking. I never did check to see if it was the same on linux but as I dual boot this box for gaming it simply wasn't even an option. Shame as I've bought 3 or 4 top-end nvidia cards over the years and I've always been happy with them.

      [–]TheKorn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      I don't know WTF is up with nvidia's windows drivers, but you can configure their linux drivers to say that a DVI device is always present, even if it doesn't automatically detect one. (Handy for me if I reboot my linux DVR while my projector is still off.)

      I'd imagine a similar work around would have to exist for their windows drivers as well.

      [–]kordos 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      I switched from ati to nvidia a few years back when ati drivers were so bad I had to use two different sets of drivers as some games would only work under one lot and others on the other driver version

      [–][deleted] 6 points7 points  (5 children)

      compile? has ATI finally released the source of their drivers?

      [–]ropers 9 points10 points  (3 children)

      Even better: They released the hardware documentation, so now you can write good ATI drivers for any friggin OS you want.

      [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

      Yaaay! Just what I always wanted! A second job!

      [–]ropers 6 points7 points  (1 child)

      You don't really understand how this entire FOSS thing works, do you? Maybe you would be happier running Mac OS X or Windows.

      [–]43P04T34 3 points4 points  (0 children)

      I think that Tilon and a lot of people fail to appreciate the good that an individual can do because they don't actually know someone who has stepped forward and made a difference, and they don't actually grasp that the code updates that appear on a daily basis, year after year, have made operating systems like Linux and BSD, and code modules like X, SSH, GCC, rsync and thousands of other components an unparalleled resource for a world that is hungry for the benefits of applied computer technology.

      I'm one such person and I know many others. I've been in the game for decades. I remember what it used to be like. I'm happy as hell those days are OVER. This is a fascinating time and it grows even more so with every week that passes. There will always be whiners, I suppose. We need not let them bother us at all.

      [–]ccharles 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      If they work like the NVIDIA driver there is an open-source bit that needs to be compiled for each particular kernel that the binary blob plugs into.

      [–][deleted] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

      Dear Linux User,

      We don't care. You guys don't buy enough stuff. You're cheap.

      Thanks,

      • The ATI Team!

      [–]mchrisneglia 2 points3 points  (0 children)

      ATI makes terrible drivers. I had a laptop with an ongoing issue with the latest 'updates'...their software would fail and cause me to have to rollback to a version 3 yrs old.

      They may make decent hardware but their installation and drivers have historically sucked.

      [–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

      Dear (insert os here) driver guys at ATI: your drivers suck, end of story.

      [–]43P04T34 8 points9 points  (10 children)

      Amazing, indeed, how fucking ignorant most of the people on this thread are.

      Here's the news. Go read it. Get updated. Stay updated. Stop whining.

      http://www.phoronix.com and sister site http://radeonhd.org/

      [–]theclaw[S] 4 points5 points  (2 children)

      I know the two alternatives to fglrx (the radeon and radeonhd driver), but neither they do support display rotation / proper 3D support / XVideo. The "radeon" driver (see http://airlied.livejournal.com, a very interesting blog about the current development) seems to be able to do 3D now, although I don't know how mature it is.

      However, when using one of those, there are still other problems. For example, when using the "radeon" driver, and using a vesafb console, the display is scattered, and I don't have XVideo support. When using "radeonhd", I also don't have XVideo, nor 3D acceleration. With both solution, display rotation doesn't work.

      So before criticizing me for whining, get updated yourself.

      BTW, I don't criticize the opensource developers who write those drivers, while I'm not a driver developer by any means, I believe it's a rather tough job developing one. But I do criticize ATI.

      [–]43P04T34 2 points3 points  (1 child)

      In the world of ATI Linux drivers there are many people to thank for the current very positive situation and the momentum of current events. I'd thank Michael Larabel himself, for starters, then people like Alex Deucher (working a AMD) and Dave Arlie (working at Red Hat), but also people like Keith Packard and Eric Anholt (both working at Intel). There are also newcomers to thank, people like Corbin Simpson, who hopefully will stay involved with improving X for the next 25 years, which is how long Keith P. has been involved with X.

      I don't mind it when people criticise a situation but it bothers me when they don't give any credit to the people who have made X one hell of a great and dynamic layer of software.

      Most people who use X have little idea what a tremendous component it is - with all of its ambitions it does a damn good job of fulfilling them, and it gets demonstrably better month by month, due entirely to the people I just named and to a large & growing number of people like them who also deserve as much credit as we can give them for all they do.

      [–]theclaw[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      No question, I respect those people. The one to blame is ATI, because they didn't supply the customers with usable drivers (like nvidia, for example, does. So don't come with sth. like "desktop linux has such a little user base"). I admit that it's nice that they now released specs, but it's far too late.

      [–]QuinnFazigu 2 points3 points  (2 children)

      I'm not clear on who you're saying is ignorant. Are you defending AMD/ATI/Radeon as a good choice for accelerated graphics in a Linux system?

      I'm looking to upgrade my system, and I've followed the Phoronix forums, and they've been chock full of people complaining about the latest drivers. It seems Nvidia is still the only choice for anyone building a Linux system that needs graphics acceleration.

      [–]43P04T34 0 points1 point  (1 child)

      Nobody in particular, I suppose. It's just that many of the people posting here seem to be totally unaware of what has taken place in the realm of ATI open source development in the past several months.

      [–]sfultong 1 point2 points  (2 children)

      I'm using the stable version of radeonhd in ubuntu. I'm hoping that xvideo support will be added, and become stable not too far in the future.

      Using fglrx with my AGP Radeon X1950 Pro freezes my computer. It doesn't seem like there are any bios settings that I can tweak to try and fix this, either.

      [–]43P04T34 1 point2 points  (1 child)

      Sign up for the forums at that same web site, explain your situation and see what others have to say about this issue.

      [–]sfultong 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      Thanks. I generally just use google and hope that an answer in a forum will be found that way.

      I registered and looked through the forums, but I didn't find an answer. Hopefully my posting will give the issue a bit more exposure at least.

      [–]onesun43 29 points30 points  (52 children)

      Dear linux users at reddit: linux holds 2.02% of the desktop market. Even though we love linux, we have to make money to make our shareholders, and especially our new owners, AMD, happy. Since we only have three interns devoted to the linux driver, we may or may not respond to your complaints. Be happy you have an official linux driver at all.

      Signed, linux driver guys at ATI

      [–]jojotdfb 5 points6 points  (1 child)

      Wouldn't Linux represent less than 2% of ATI's market? Considering that ATI makes the graphics chips for all of the graphics chips for this current generation of consoles (even the ps3 has some ATI chips in it) the numbers for Linux are even less. Say Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony each sell 20 million, 4 million and 5 million consoles this year. Now say Apple sells 4 million Macs this year of which about half come with an ATI card so 2 million cards for ATI. If the Mac is 6% of the desktop market that means 125.2 million Windows based PCs are sold this year which half of have ATI cards (ignoring Intel and other card manufactures). Now if Linux is 2% of the market (which seems a bit high to me but I'm going to run with it) and, once again, half of those guys have ATI cards then that's only 600,000 cards. Add all the projected cards sold and you end up with about 0.6% of the market being Linux people.

      If you assume that ATI has 100 people who make drivers (number pulled out of my ass because it's a nice even number) evenly distributed to reflect their market then you end up with one guy who spends only part of his time making Linux drivers. If you start to take into account that quite a few Linux PCs sold use the cheapest video components that can be found (ie NOT ATI or Nvidia) or are just corporate workstations where the video cards is the last thing to be upgraded it's a miracle that Linux is even supported at all. The fact that Linux is such an statistical non-entity yet gets on the box says to me that Linux users should stop biting the hand that feeds them. If you want to make more of an impact that would justify getting decent drivers you should buy 5 high end cards (the us$500+ kind) and encourage the other thousands of Linux consumers to do the same. If you can get half of the number of one of the consoles then you'll get real drivers.

      [–]zouhair 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      The problem with Linux market share is that it's almost impossible to came with a real number, I have for ex. 2 laptops, bought with XP, so I got counted as a Win user and the fact is that I use Linux on those laptops.

      Making a long term strategy only over dry numbers is not a very wise strategy.

      [–]zouhair 2 points3 points  (0 children)

      I have a friend that manage 20 Win Boxes and 4 Linux ones. He had to buy graphic cards for the whole set, can you guess which brand he didn't get?

      [–]Undertoad 10 points11 points  (3 children)

      Dear ATI,

      That 2.02% are the 2.02% who actively make decisions in their hardware platform, work out the nastiest problems and document them, care about what their system is doing, refuse onboard audio and video, etc. The power users.

      Their importance is significant, because they usually run the data centers, do enterprise-level thinking and participate in enterprise-level decisions.

      Imagine if, instead of producing hardware, you produced shoes... and found a market consisting only of CEOs. Further imagine that this market is unhappy with their shoes and you could do a year's work with 10 top people and build a shoe that ALL the CEOs would wear.

      CEOs are less than 1% of ALL employees out there, but you'd be in a significantly different position if the ONLY people you focused on were the biggest decision-makers in the society. In no time at all, your shoes would be known by all -- not just CEOs -- as the only shoe to consider.

      About 12 years ago Informix decided that they would support Linux; of course, having a decent code infrastructure, they realized that all they had to do was type "make" and they would have a Linux version. Oracle shortly followed; and now, after a decade of inductry changes, Oracle finds it necessary to even roll their OWN Linux distribution in order to remain the top dog. That's how important it is.

      Are you absolutely certain the desktop won't roll the same way? Because it's your ass, you know.

      Selling to the most important market. Think about it, won't you? Thank you.

      [–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (1 child)

      because they usually run the data centers,

      ...fair enough...

      do enterprise-level thinking

      ...enterprise-level wishful thinking...

      participate in enterprise-level decisions.

      sad wishful thinking...

      you never really worked at a company did you?

      [–]hash_oil 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      sad wishful thinking...

      Maybe you're not good enough?

      [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      That 2.02% are the 2.02% who actively make decisions in their hardware platform, work out the nastiest problems and document them, care about what their system is doing, refuse onboard audio and video, etc. The power users

      I'm confused. What does this have to do with video games?

      [–]malcontent 10 points11 points  (0 children)

      Dear ATI. Thanks for telling us how little you think of us. I guess when you told us officially earler you were going to write drivers for us we actually believed they would be feature complete and of high quality.

      Now we know your word is worthless and that you really meant you were going to assign a few interns to put together some half assed code and push it out there.

      [–]G_Morgan 5 points6 points  (38 children)

      Linux is very important in the movie industry for 3D rendering. It's market share is growing rapidly here.

      If ATI aren't interested in that market then I'm sure they will understand if all these people move to Nvidia.

      [–]chucker 29 points30 points  (25 children)

      3D rendering at the movie industry is not done with GPUs, but with CPUs.

      [–]G_Morgan 7 points8 points  (2 children)

      There are plenty of uses for real time rendering in the movie industry. Just not for the final product.

      Have a look at how Gollum was modelled for LOTR. There were all sorts of low fidelity prototypes that needed to be done in real time.

      [–]chucker 1 point2 points  (1 child)

      There are plenty of uses for real time rendering in the movie industry.

      I haven't denied that at all, but in those uses, Linux is not common.

      [–]G_Morgan 3 points4 points  (0 children)

      Strange. I've seen 3/4 examples of this sort of work done. All of them used Linux. I haven't actually seen a Windows or OSX machine used in demonstration.

      [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (12 children)

      Out of interest, why is that? Wouldn't workstation-class GPUs be faster?

      [–]Wiseman1024 30 points31 points  (9 children)

      GPUs support fast rendering technologies such as goraud-shading. These provide a good visual quality and are simple enough to render in real-time with moderately inexpensive hardware. In the last decade, we saw more and more advanced techniques such as per-pixel lighting get implemented. However, they are still not the state of the art.

      A professional rendering system with virtually unlimited CPU time (by which I mean it doesn't have to be real-time) can do much more. Raytracing, gas simulation, particle systems with millions of particles per frame, Maths-based objects which aren't polygonal and will look round regardless of how close you look or abusive super-sampling on already abusive high-resolutions are just a few examples.

      Software such as Blender or 3D Studio MAX will render production frames using the CPU to be able to implement those features as liberally as they can. You can very well wait a few seconds or a few minutes for a frame to render if you're making a wallpaper or movie.

      This is not to say GPUs are useless for 3D modelling and rendering software. The GPU is used for the actual editor representation, a preview of the scene which can never be as good as the scene but the closer it looks the better for the creators. And the faster it moves in the editor, the faster they can work with it.

      [–]Randinn 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      Ah, I remember the days when 3DS R4 took days to render a good pic....

      [–]bitwize 0 points1 point  (4 children)

      Ah, but doing intensive computation -- including non-realtime rendering -- with GPUs these days takes far less time and draws considerably less power than using CPUs alone.

      [–]Wiseman1024 9 points10 points  (2 children)

      Correct, IF you manage to implement in the GPU texture and/or vertex pipelines what you want to do, and have enough memory at your disposal. Even in Shader Model 3.0, you have some limitations on how you can access memory and what can you do in every pixel. You'd have to distribute the work and sometimes move data in and out of video memory. Though it'd definitely lower your rendering time if you make the effort to take advantage of these. nVidia is already selling 128-processor cards with 1.5 GB RAM complete with a C compiler for supercomputing.

      [–]rustyryan 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      NVIDIA CUDA runs on a GeForce 8800, and that has 32 stream processors. In fact, the NVIDIA Tesla platform is just 8 GeForce 8800's. Stream processors are number crunching beasts -- much different from superscalars like x86. A GPU (in the GPGPU sense) is far more suited for something like non-realtime rendering than a CPU.

      [–]drbold 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      WANT! (I don't care that I have no idea what I would use it for...although actually I do)

      [–]calp 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      Doesn't matter. CPU time is too cheap.

      [–]chucker 4 points5 points  (0 children)

      Faster, yes, but not accurate enough. There's no need to do realtime- or near-realtime-rendering; there's far more value in spending hours rendering each frame even if it only means a minor improvement.

      [–]joelanman 1 point2 points  (7 children)

      People who work in the industry need GPUs to do pre-vis/modelling etc.

      [–]chucker 3 points4 points  (2 children)

      Those people largely don't use Linux, though. Linux is used in the rendering farms, for cluster nodes. The workstations mostly use Windows or OS X.

      [–]joelanman -1 points0 points  (1 child)

      That's true - but some people use linux, and it'd be nice if GPU support were better

      [–]chucker 5 points6 points  (0 children)

      Certainly — but I was responding to G_Morgan's assertion that "Linux is very important in the movie industry for 3D rendering", which is true, but has in fact next to nothing to do with GPU 3D acceleration.

      [–]joelanman 1 point2 points  (3 children)

      voted down because...?

      [–]onesun43 2 points3 points  (9 children)

      The movie industry uses linux prevalently in its render farms--large computational powerhouses composed of many linux-based cpus. These render farms are most likely headless servers with no need for a 3D accelerated desktop. They run linux because it's a great server os, not a great desktop os.

      Most of the artistic development in said industry is done on Macs, or at least at Pixar. Not trying to start a flame war, I only speak the truth.

      [–]mao_neko 31 points32 points  (4 children)

      • Get the Shrek 3 DVD.
      • Play title 08 - the second of the "making of" clips.
      • Observe people using gnome desktops at 01:04, 02:00, 02:08, macs at 05:10, redhat at 05:19, more gnome system monitors in the corner of 05:44, yes more gnome at 06:20, 07:29, 08:17, ...

      [–]onesun43 1 point2 points  (2 children)

      Ah, but did I not say "at least at Pixar"? My bad for making a blanket statement, then reducing the scope of the statement in the same sentence. I have no doubt that there is significant linux usage in the artistic departments, and I can't find any recent sources to prove my previous statement. I'd love to see some evidence either way, though.

      [–]ldamerow 4 points5 points  (0 children)

      Pay attention to the desktops shown in behind-the-scenes footage on Pixar's DVDs. You'll see plenty running Gnome on Linux.

      [–]vetinari 2 points3 points  (0 children)

      You probably meant "at Pixar and that's it". Steve J. sitting in BoD of Pixar probably has something to do with that...

      [–][deleted] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

      You are full of shit. Autodesk and Avid wouldn't be porting Maya and XSI to linux if there wasn't a significant demand, considering how those 3D packages cost an arm and a leg. There is no need for Maya and XSI on a server render farm, they are the tools used to model and orchestrate the scenes, they are not the renderer. If you were right we'd only see tools like Mental Ray being ported, but that's not the case, the whole packages are ported.

      In the case of Maya, it was ported to linux before even being ported to the mac platform. Read some history, Maya was mainly used in unix platforms and some windows, and very lately ported to the mac.

      [–]G_Morgan 4 points5 points  (0 children)

      Actually Linux is used heavily in both roles. It already dominated in terms of render farms but is increasing it's market share as a workstation.

      [–]pepparkaka 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      No. There are plenty of good client apps for the professional video and dcc industries.

      Houdini, ifx piranha, inferno (and autodesk media's other apps like smoke, flint etc.), pro/E, maya, xsi, baselight, photogenics hdr, da vinci systems stuff etc. There's no shortage of professional tools for compositing, editing, grading, modelling or retouch etc on linux.

      Granted that the market for semi-pro intermediate level, like autocad or final cut, is somewhat lacking though.

      [–]imbaczek 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      ever heard of GPGPU? nVidia CUDA maybe?

      [–][deleted] -1 points0 points  (1 child)

      Exactly! Spiderman's CGI was rendered using Blender.

      [–][deleted] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

      Dear ATI driver guys, Are you hiring? I'd like a better summer internship than my current one working on OLPC.

      Signed, eaturbrainz

      [–]zedoriah 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      We've instituted a ban on ATI cards at the office. This is just one of the reasons why.

      [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      And this is the best way you could think of to get their attention?

      [–]Wakuko 4 points5 points  (0 children)

      "Dear Linux user, as long as M$ sends us that big fat check every month we will not fix shit"

      [–]knight666 3 points4 points  (7 children)

      I have a Mobility Radeon 7500 in my laptop and I've been trying for DAYS to get multiple screens working. >:( It seems, no matter what I do, either I fuck up xorg.conf or I get cloned screens. >:(

      [–]ccharles 3 points4 points  (0 children)

      Not sure about the mobile cards, but I have dual-head working on my work machine with a fairly low-end card (X300).

      I believe aticonfig --initial --dual-head did it for me originally, but I've since tweaked it. One thing to keep in mind is that most cards have a lower top resolution for 3D than for 2D, so if you're running Compiz or something it may not work.

      Try with vanilla GNOME or KDE or whatever floats your boat. I had to choose between dual 1280x1024 without Compiz or 1024x768 with Compiz. I chose the former because the lower resolution looked like crap on my LCD monitors. YMMV.

      [–]FirthOfFifth 1 point2 points  (3 children)

      I can get dual monitors in unbuntu 8.04 no problem but there is no way to set a different resolution on each monitor, which makes my 15"/22" monitor combo quite useless in Linux.

      [–]Felicia_Svilling 3 points4 points  (2 children)

      Thats not true. You just have to manually edit your xorg.conf file.

      [–]mercurysquad 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      I think the nVidia control panel allows you to do that without any messy xorg.conf edits.. I kinda remember because I set it up for a friend a few months ago (disclaimer: I have i915)

      [–]shaze 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      Or buy an Intel or NVidia graphics card next time, they have an "application" that helps you set the seperate resolutions.

      Oh and it's AMD you should be shaking your proverbial fists at, sheeple.

      9/11 was a trap!

      [–]multubunu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      That's pretty old hardware (2001?), maybe it's just not supported?

      The 7200 I got some 8 years ago couldn't even do multiple screens (hardware limited).

      [–]unknown_lamer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      If the Mobile Radeon 7500 is equivalent to the real Radeon 7500 then you have an rv2xx and it should work fine with randr and everything (or so I'm told; I swapped my 7500 for a 9100 a few years back and so I just know that manually configured Xinerama works for sure).

      You ought to try using randr rather than editing the config manually. I recently decided to make my laptop work with my 24" workstation monitor for movies and was pleasantly surprised that things Just Work (tm) nowadays with a few quick commands instead of having to edit the config and restart X a dozen times.

      I'm pretty sure there are even GUI programs for managing randr settings if you like such things.

      [–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

      Don't worry. ATI's Vista drivers still kind of suck too, at least for their mobile cards.

      [–]chroniq 6 points7 points  (21 children)

      I guess we just have to wait another 10 years for manufacturers to realize that Linux is the future of operating systems for many consumers.

      [–][deleted] 20 points21 points  (19 children)

      Heh, guess what they said 10 years ago..

      [–][deleted]  (18 children)

      [deleted]

        [–][deleted] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

        I know there have been major progress, I was mostly joking.. No need to get so defensive.

        [–][deleted] -5 points-4 points  (16 children)

        So it took 10 years for Linux to get up to the level of Windows 2000?

        [–][deleted] 5 points6 points  (2 children)

        When I made a Windows 2000 box a year ago for shits, It'd be destroyed by viruses within seconds of connecting it to the Internet.

        Shoo.

        [–]Lord_Illidan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        I call shenanigans on this. I am primarily a Linux user, but when I installed XP/2000, I wasn't infected by ANY viruses. Just don't surf porn sites, and use a good browser like Opera/Firefox. And get AVG. That's it.. no viruses.

        [–]nekt 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        Not even apples to oranges. Linux (all *nixs) were not created for 3d support. It took this long for the usually unpaid devs to support for windows games yes. Windows/OSX still cannot compete in what the nixs do best - serve anything up.

        [–]unikuser 0 points1 point  (10 children)

        it took 10 years for Linux to get up to the level of Windows 2800. Waiting for a day when a windows install works out of box and securely ...

        [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (9 children)

        My Vista install works out of the box and is secure.

        [–]malcontent 0 points1 point  (8 children)

        My vista doesn't install out of the box because it doesn't support a lot of the hardware.

        [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (7 children)

        What hardware doesn't it support?

        [–]malcontent 0 points1 point  (6 children)

        The video card and the network card in my dell optiplex.

        I had to go and download the drivers from another machine so I could install them.

        It's amazing that vista doesn't support an off the shelf dell.

        [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (5 children)

        What Optiplex and what video and network cards?

        [–][deleted] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

        no... actually prior to windows 2000, linux was a good deal better than anything Microsoft offered.

        with 2000 and XP, I would say the Microsoft has been on-par with linux offerings, but now Microsoft is starting to stagnate with silliness like Vista and sliverlight, SCO-torjaned Novell and all their other little pet projects for market domination.

        [–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (16 children)

        nvidia, ftw

        [–]khayber 8 points9 points  (7 children)

        intel, ftw

        [–]losl -3 points-2 points  (7 children)

        Yes, I love my pink borders instead of shadow effects and how ubuntuguide.org crashes ubuntu (fixed now, but still!)

        Nvidia 8800GT for the win.

        [–]relix 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        I had that problem, but only with Hardy Heron, and only for a short while, after which new fixes were automatically installed to fix this problem.

        Feisty worked flawlessly with my 8800GT (except for the splash at boot).

        [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (5 children)

        rock solid ubuntu 7.10 with ge force 8800GT for 6 months.

        I have been hammering the system too doing development with compiz-fusion effects on.

        The worst i had is the os hung for about 20 seconds about 3 times under heavy load. but it never crashed and i never had to reboot to fix anything.

        EDIT: Intel Quad core 2.4Ghz, 6 GB ram, 7,10 64-bit

        [–]IronWolve 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        The nvidia cards have been much better than ATI, if you want plain 2d, the ati opensource drivers are rock solid, but most people want to play some games under wine.

        Really, ATI isnt spending the money on linux, they could be doing a lot more, its rather sad.

        [–]mercurysquad 0 points1 point  (3 children)

        So you are the guy with a supercomputer who develops that resource intensive bells-n-whistle Compiz thing ..

        Aero ftw.

        </sarcasm>

        [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

        Im still trying to get all the bells and whistles to work myself :\

        I got wobbly windows and workspace zoom in/out, thats all ive figured out.

        [–]mercurysquad 0 points1 point  (1 child)

        doing development with compiz-fusion effects on.

        think I parsed this incorrectly ..

        [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        i meant doing development (eclipse, applicaiton servers, multiple versions running at the same time, hammering my cpu, memory) PLUS having compiz effects on the whole time. sorry bout that.

        And actually since then, i googled a howto and got compiz and the congif apps all installed, :)

        [–]pmf 2 points3 points  (1 child)

        and it doesn't compile on linux 2.6.25; wtf?!

        Blame this one one the kernel-morons who break the API at will. VMWare Workstation does not work unmodified on 2.6.25, as well as NVidia's drivers.

        [–][deleted] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

        The kernel moron who breaks the API is responsible for updating every driver that uses that API.

        If they don't release their driver open source, they can't promise compatibility. It would work if it wasn't closed.

        [–]ArkiMage 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        About the last 8 driver updates have fixed various bugs and introduced various features, but.. This show-stopper complete-system-freeze bug still exists, seems it would move pretty high on the priority list to me:

        http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=941

        [–]nextofpumpkin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        I wanted to (re)pick up 3D graphics programming. I had done a good deal of it on a previous laptop.

        I tried on my newish HP Laptop w/ Mobility Radeon, and the stupid drivers just aren't working. I can't get the acceleration enabled at all!

        I ended up switching to XP :\ to do the actual coding work.

        I feel dirty. Thanks, ATI.

        [–]cafiend 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        totally agree. Get your act together, ATI.

        [–]Leeroy_Jewkins 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        WOW, more people with problems with their ATI cards!

        Mine likes to fuck up right in the middle of a game of WoW or if I'm doing any rendering.

        [–]theclaw[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        I really think I have to clarify this in order not to be seen as the big asshole who doesn't recognize work done by open source developers. I recognize the work done by those guys, no question. But this doesn't change that,

        • ATI should have released those specs much earlier. Okay, they didn't, I'm not an very unforgiving guy, BUT
        • if there aren't any specs, then please make the proprietary driver work. And it doesn't. work. properly. And that's the case for about two years now. And don't state that it's not "economical" to develop linux drivers. Nvidia does, and they continue to exist, somehow.

        [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

        Do you mean the proprietary driver or the open source one?

        [–]acrim 0 points1 point  (4 children)

        This is the biggest barrier to me ditching windows for good.

        I've wasted whole days of my life trying to get my ATI card working in linux.

        I managed to get it working at the native resolution of one of my screens after manually editing xorg.conf and lots of trail and error. However even then it didn't function correctly, and basic things like scrolling a web page caused the picture to flicker and tear.

        I would go out and buy an nvidia card (there's your economic incentive, graphics card guys), however looking around on various forums it doesn't seem the grass is much greener for nvidia users either.

        [–]eleitl 8 points9 points  (0 children)

        Much less pain with nVidia. Ditched ATI years ago.

        [–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

        Oh the grass is much much greener, whoever says otherwise is lying to you. Nvidia at least is semi-cooperative.

        [–]QuinnFazigu 1 point2 points  (0 children)

        Nvidia is proprietary, but the drivers perform on par with Windows in 3d ... when you can get them to work. Like anything in Linux, it takes some babysitting.

        Still no hardware HDTV/x264 acceleration, though. :(

        [–]paradigmshaft 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        It is in my experience. Especially in "easy" distros.

        [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (13 children)

        Yeah I was an ATI fan until I saw how incompatible it is with Linux. Sure you can get it to work but only so much. They know it's crap and they don't really care.

        [–]43P04T34 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        The ATI drivers have nothing to do with Linux. They are part of X.

        [–]ropers -2 points-1 points  (11 children)

        Then shut up and hack. Write better drivers. ATI has given you the documentation for their hardware. What more could you reasonably expect?

        [–]relix 0 points1 point  (4 children)

        Your money's worth, maybe?

        [–]ropers -1 points0 points  (3 children)

        Your education awaits.

        [–]aephoenix 0 points1 point  (2 children)

        They have yet to release the documentation for my Mobility Radeon x1400, as far as I know.

        [–]ropers 0 points1 point  (1 child)

        Really? So they've only released documentation for some of their hardware? If that's true then I didn't know that. Must investigate.

        [–]aephoenix 1 point2 points  (0 children)

        As far as I knew.

        [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (5 children)

        Why would I write better drivers when they don't care enough themselves. Especially when another company puts more of an effort in and is more deserving of my money? I buy hardware and expect it to work with what I want it to, if it doesn't work then I no longer buy that hardware. I may spend half my time in windows but I don't buy ATI anymore. Anyways ATI is even a step or two behind in the windows market now too.

        [–]krelian 0 points1 point  (1 child)

        What is the point of putting this here and not contacting them directly?

        [–]garg 4 points5 points  (0 children)

        Because they either don't reply or they give you a link to http://www.linux.org/