ATI drivers going open source!

[Sef]

AMD/ATi are failing and need to get a leg up on Nvidia in this market.
By opensourcing their drivers they become THE throat to choke for 'good' 3d graphics cards for Linux. If they actually follow through, no one in their right mind would buy an Nvidia card over an ATi card.

Unless of course Nvidia open-sourced their video drivers.

BTW ATI has made many promises like this dating back to the 90s with their All in wonder cards

AMD is much more receptive to open source than ATi.

[Adamant1988]

Unless of course Nvidia open-sourced their video drivers.

Which they may be effectively doing with the renouveau project, there have been rumors about Nvidia quietly helping the project under the table. We'll see how this plays out.

[jrusso2]

I hope this means the ATI drivers will improve by being open. ATI has opened their drivers before and those drivers are still around and never were any good.

Intel opened their video drivers yet those are not very good.

What gives?

[Adamant1988]

I hope they'll do more than throw some specs and code at us and tell us to have fun. I would like to see a company ACTIVELY DEVELOP with the community...

[gnomeuser]

I noticed that the date of publishing was May 9th, 2007. Why hasn't any of the largerr newssites picked this up?

Likely because this was all based on comments made at the Red Hat Summit, I think outside the community everyone is waiting for an official statement stamped by ATI.

[Extreme Coder]

This is the shiznit!
They better also release the source to the bit older cards, like from Radeon 7500 to Radeon 9200. My other gripe with fglrx(other than it being crappy) is that ATI decides to drop support for cards produced 1 hour ago. Atleast nVidia still supports the GeForce 4xxx and 5xxx till now.

Extreme Coder

[jiminycricket]

I hope this means the ATI drivers will improve by being open. ATI has opened their drivers before and those drivers are still around and never were any good.

Intel opened their video drivers yet those are not very good.

What gives?

Actually the free ATI drivers are good. Can you believe that they support AIGLX Cards as old as the 7200 can claim that thanks to Xorg hackers.

fglrx can't claim that. legacy nVidia cards can't either.

[earobinson]

They have said this before and it has never happend, Ill beleave it when I see the code.

[Polygon]

They have said this before and it has never happend, Ill beleave it when I see the code.

are you referring to the time when amd first acquired ati and there were lots of rumors saying that amd was going to open source the ati drivers? Cause amd said quite clearly back then that they couldent cuase the drivers had third party parts in it and they couldent open source those.

[borris.morris]

SWEET!!! Was getting really ticked off at ATI. Now (hopefully) I'll be able to use my Radeon 9250 (haven't had the money for a new card).