[mythtv] MythUI OSD branch and the way forward

Lennart Sorensen lsorense at csclub.uwaterloo.ca
Mon Mar 29 22:12:11 UTC 2010


On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 09:02:49PM +0100, Stuart Auchterlonie wrote:
> When I bought my perfectly good ATI card, NVidia plain refused to deal
> with anyone in the open source community, nor would they entertain the
> notion of releasing functioning drivers for the linux platform.
>
> As such the open source ATI driver was far better than the nvidia equiv
> and if you really wanted to, ATI had released a functioning driver for
> linux.

I have yet to encounter an ATI driver for linux that worked well.
They recently discontinued supporting the video cards we bought less
than 2 years ago.  Nvidia still supports the ones we bought 6 years ago
in their linux drivers, and the nvidia drivers work (the ati ones last
I fought with them crashed if you didn't explicitly set X to 24 bit in
the config file, and took the whole machine with it).

So they are promising open source support for drivers.  Until I see open
source drivers written by the community (ATI has proven to be incompetent
at it after all), I still won't care.  It is a shame though given ATI
clearly makes very reliable video cards, accompanied by awful drivers.

> Oh how the times have changed. 6 months or so after that time nvidia
> changed their tune, and i would have been better off buying an nvidia
> card. On the bright side, ATI have now released the programming specs
> for cards of my era, and apparently even have a dev working on the open
> source driver. Thus the drivers for that are coming on rapidly and now
> actually have decently functioning GL.

I switched to nvidia when ATI stopped supporting a 2 year old top of
the line card after promising to fix known bugs in the driver.  That was
12 years ago.  Nvidia has never done anything like that.  They do
eventually move cards to legacy series of drivers, but even then keep
maintaining those as needed for years.

> The intel based video card in my main frontend is however a different
> story.....

Well intel's are tricky.  Many have excellent support, and some have none.
Their performance has never been that great though.

I would love an open source openGL driver for linux, but until I see
one, I will keep buying what has working drivers, and so far that's
only nvidia.

-- 
Len Sorensen


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