On Thursday 04 December 2008 22:15:11 freebsd-current-request_at_freebsd.org wrote: > > I'm not referring to ATI/AMDs proprietary drivers. They are providing > > open documentation now, as well as information that isn't yet public > > when I ask for it. So, I'm speaking about the open drm/mesa/Xorg > > driver, which afaik is working pretty well on r500 and below now. > > > > robert. > > Well, yeah. I was referring to the proprietary drivers though, because > all you get is 2D acceleration with the open ATI/nVidia drivers. > Given the fact that r500 is rather old too though... that lags a lot > more behind nVidia -- but I'm sure that's due to volunteering and lack > of man-hours because nVidia has a few devs dedicated towards > maintaining their driver on *BSD. Actually, no. The subset of ATi cards Robert refers to has direct rendering support on the to-be-committed (after the ports repo is thawed) Xorg 7.4, DRM kernel update (which is already in -HEAD) and new Mesa. I have personally tested R200-R480 cards here with good results, after some time messing about with nVidia hardware under the same illusion that they are better supported. Even the troublesome RS48x (Radeon XPress 200/1100M IGP) which I had abandoned all hope of ever seeing DRM working upon now works with the open driver, although there are still rendering issues with some 3D workloads using ports' Xorg and Mesa. nVidia's team consists of Christian Zander and another guy (whose name eludes me right now) as far as I can tell. "Our" team consists of work already done by Eric Anholt, by whose own admission no longer uses FreeBSD and most of it over 24 months old, and Robert. Also, the open ATi driver/DRI/DRM works (again, verified here) to the same standard on amd64 as it does on i386. This is not the case with nVidia's proprietary driver, so quite how nVidia's offering leads the OSS ATi driver escapes me right now. Robert's work in this area over the past few months has brought this hardware, along with many of the Intel IGPs, almost bang up to date. Only the R6/700 cards lack 3D/2D accel/possibly Xv (I could be wrong on that last item, but the man page still says no support) but this work is ongoing. One more little niggle in nVidia's direction: The OSS ATi driver integrates with the base system and ports' Xorg without having to faff about. nVidia's screws up the system config with odd .so files and symlinks to the point that manual intervention is required to upgrade xorg-server and get the linuxulator working. Not optimal, IMHO. Bottom line is we have rather good support in -CURRENT for ATi cards and similar in -STABLE with Robert's patches applied. This is probably set to get a whole lot better when 7.1-RELEASE shows up (I doubt the DRM kernel stuff will be MFC'd to 7.1, but I'd like to be wrong) and we get the new stuff into ports. When one compares the resource gap between Robert's dedicated volunteer efforts and two full-time paid nVidia devs with full docs, this is nothing short of amazing and I, for one, am very grateful. -- Matt Dawson ku.gro.sonorhc_at_ttam MTD15-RIPE
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