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Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. I wonder how much business they could generate by open-sourcing the driver for ATI hardware.
by fapjacks 12y ago
Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about.
I wonder how much business they could generate by open-sourcing the driver for ATI hardware.
- bjwbell 12y agoNone. From what I know & I used to write graphics drivers, AMD's closed source driver is horrible. An absolute mess, http://richg42.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-driver-quality.html http://richg42.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-driv... Their open source driver is actually more reliable. Qualification: I'm only talking about the opengl driver. I don't know anything about their DirectX driver.
- qb45 12y agoIn some recent HN discussions of the new graphics APIs (Mantle, Vulkan) it has been claimed that OpenGL and DX3D are too detached from actual hardware to program efficiently and hence GPU manufacturers hire engineers whose sole job is running popular games, finding out what they try to achieve with particular API calls and writing special, game-specific implementations of some API calls, optimized for particular game's needs. Add to this the fact that scoring few FPS more in online reviews can convince many customers to choose one GPU over another, and you can start to imagine why GPU vendors are reluctant to release their sources.
- fapjacks 12y agoRight, exactly. But in the face of annihilation, open-sourcing the driver may provide enormous opportunity for developers generally, such that people may choose it over nVidia. It could be an angle worth looking at.
- 4ad 12y agoReleasing open specifications would be better than releasing the drivers.
- Narishma 12y agoThey already release those. http://developer.amd.com/resources/documentation-articles/developer-guides-manuals/ http://developer.amd.com/resources/documentation-articles/de...