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I'm sad to say, but it's true. AMD has been claiming "this is the year we really open up" since at least 2007[1]. Well, I'm happy to hear them recommit, but I d
by appleflaxen 11y ago
I'm sad to say, but it's true. AMD has been claiming "this is the year we really open up" since at least 2007[1]. Well, I'm happy to hear them recommit, but I don't believe them anymore.
Now that they are losing ground in the marketplace on the GPU side with deep learning, and their CPUs can't compete with intel on the performance side, their claims ring hollow.
Imagine where we would be if they open sourced their drivers in 2007 like they said they would do.
1. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/05/amd-launches-the-hd-2000-series/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/05/amd-launches-the-hd-2...
- cylinder714 11y agoPoke around the site and look at the code on Github, with what looks like ISC/BSD licenses.
- Narishma 11y agoI don't think they ever claimed they would open source their drivers. They've certainly released a ton of documentation for their GPUs over the years.
- digi_owl 11y agoAnd likely all of it had to be vetted by lawyers before being released, to avoid lawsuits from third parties.
- broodbucket 11y agoWhich is probably why the open source driver is pretty good. radeon is light years ahead of nouveau.
- witty_username 11y agoYep, HW decode, works for games (FPS is 10-20% less, depends on game). Might even be better than the intel driver, I had a few problems with that, but I haven't had any problem with radeon.
- Nullabillity 11y agoHave you tried the open AMD radeon drivers lately?
- jethro_tell 11y agoI have not. Care to give us some insite? It's kind of an expensive experiment. It's not like trying out emacs for a week. Unfortunately, I know that an nvidea will work, so I buy that even though it's not open
- Nullabillity 11y agoHuge improvement over what they used to be, and these days I get way better performance with it than fglrx.
- ue_ 11y agoI can confirm that radeon gives much better performance than it did even a year ago. Anecdotally, I used to get a maximum on 30 fps on a 2003 first person shooter game. Now I can easily get 125 stable with the latest drivers, or at least 71 fps in maps that are foggy, smoky etc.
- throwaway2048 11y agothis is really unfair, they have documented their gpus extensively + provided developers for open drivers. They are currently in the process of integrating all the features from the closed drivers into the open ones.