3 ms·

Driver support for what? I don't see either company supporting kms, gem, wayland, etc.

Tuna-Fish 16y ago
AMD does help the development of the open-source radeon driver that uses kms, has been modified to use the gemified ttm (which is assumed to be a step in moving to gem support once everything fits), and certainly supports wayland. AMD also makes and supports the non-foss fglrx driver, which they cannot open-source due to licensing restrictions. The open-source driver is not yet even near to fglrx in functionality or speed, but it does seem to be slowly catching up. Some features will probably never work with the open-source drivers -- notably the video decoder, because AMD is afraid that if they release it's specs, the HDCP key embedded within can be stolen. (That this point is completely moot as HDCP is broken doesn't seem to matter to them.)
- vetinari 16y ago
  I've always considered ATI's excuses for not providing access to certain parts of hardware to be bullshit. In past, they tried to avoid publishing specs for TV-out, due to Macrovision (or so was the excuse). In the end, it was reverse engineered, later TV-out got obsolete and today, nobody cares. ATI however grew an user base that will not purchase ATI card again. Today, they make life more difficult to those, who want to use UVD. UVD is quite simple functionality, basically you provide compressed buffer and the card decompresses it. You can put the result back to system ram, into texture, whereever, it has nothing common with the output (In theory, it may flag originally AACS-ed buffers and enforce secure video path for them, but in practice nobody cares, the pirates have better ways to capture content anyway). So they again are losing those who want to build video players for the living room due to the theoretical attack that nobody cares about. So they think Zacate will be more popular that Atom+Ion? I doubt it and quick look at xbmc forums confirms my opinion.

AMD does help the development of the open-source radeon driver that uses kms, has been modified to use the gemified ttm (which is assumed to be a step in moving to gem support once everything fits), and certainly supports wayland. AMD also makes and supports the non-foss fglrx driver, which they cannot open-source due to licensing restrictions. The open-source driver is not yet even near to fglrx in functionality or speed, but it does seem to be slowly catching up. Some features will probably never work with the open-source drivers -- notably the video decoder, because AMD is afraid that if they release it's specs, the HDCP key embedded within can be stolen. (That this point is completely moot as HDCP is broken doesn't seem to matter to them.)

vetinari 16y ago
I've always considered ATI's excuses for not providing access to certain parts of hardware to be bullshit. In past, they tried to avoid publishing specs for TV-out, due to Macrovision (or so was the excuse). In the end, it was reverse engineered, later TV-out got obsolete and today, nobody cares. ATI however grew an user base that will not purchase ATI card again. Today, they make life more difficult to those, who want to use UVD. UVD is quite simple functionality, basically you provide compressed buffer and the card decompresses it. You can put the result back to system ram, into texture, whereever, it has nothing common with the output (In theory, it may flag originally AACS-ed buffers and enforce secure video path for them, but in practice nobody cares, the pirates have better ways to capture content anyway). So they again are losing those who want to build video players for the living room due to the theoretical attack that nobody cares about. So they think Zacate will be more popular that Atom+Ion? I doubt it and quick look at xbmc forums confirms my opinion.