"...the open source driver is not very fast because there just aren't enough volunteers."
I'm sure that is part of it, but also writing a high performance/low latency GPU driver is really hard. So when you find someone who can write such drivers, they have no time to 'volunteer' because of all the money people are throwing at them.
It would be fabulous also if AMD would dedicate a resource to walking through their specs and then writing a paragraph about each register and how it was used. The original Voodoo library for the 3Dfx cards was done that way and it really helped. We need GPU documentation for someone who hasn't designed a GPU before.
Yes, but to be fair, it is more the hedonic treadmill than when goalposts get hiked around in a debate as a bad-faith debating tactic. I'm using the ATI drivers right now and I'd have loved to have had this quality of driver ten years ago at the height of the "if only they'd release documentation" phase.
I really resonate with this comment. The drivers that exist today are so much better than the ones we had before. They aren't as good as the ones on Windows or MacOS but they actually do 3D acceleration and handing multiple monitors, which they did poorly or not at all before.
So in that regard things are much better. But the grass is not only greener on the Windows side of the fence they have better shader support to make it wave :-) One of the things I had hoped various FOSS organizations might create would be the equivalent to a University 'chair', a position paid for by an endowment to the organization, to encourage some expert in the chair's area of interest in working full time on that.
NetApp supported a group at UMich for a long time who were making the NFS drivers in Linux better and Trond Myklebust who was the kernel gatekeeper. Sort of a public/private partnership. That effort was working because everything needed to succeed was pretty much available (docs, sources, examples, etc).
I had a marketing VP at S3 (back when they were making graphics chips and not an IP holding company) tell me that they didn't release documentation because they didn't know if they were violating someones patent and this way even if they were the patent holder didn't know either, it was better for everyone.
Now later events have born out the notion that patents are the center of the dispute here, between the SGI patents, the Microsoft patents, the 3dfx and nVidia patents, and various other players, clearly that has had a tremendous chilling effect on open communication.
Of course Voodoo graphics were introduced in 1996, so in 2016 3D video card patents start expiring and by 2020 most of the DirectX 9 pipeline's concepts will be public domain. Sadly we have to wait until 2025 for shader technology to unlock sufficiently.
"Even with documentation, the open source driver is not very fast because there just aren't enough volunteers."
IMHO we don't need more volunteers. We need more full time workers here. Graphics hardware is very hard, low rewards, very low level and very taxing for your health(it is not healthy to be in front of a screen all day doing nothing but solving errors, and seeing new errors appear).
Only students are smart enough and willing to do the necessary work because they learn a lot.
But as experienced students get hired, they are not going to continue contributing as they program enough in their real job. If they do, the time that they dedicate is nothing compared with a pro.
I would love to see some kind of partnership where it's not Microsoft or Apple or Oracle engaging in curriculum-capture (cf. regulatory capture) with universities, but open-source software.
I have heard good things about ATI on Linux, but perhaps the problems are only a personnel issue? Suffice it to say that if I'm going to be keeping Linux on my desktop that my next video card will be ATI, which means that my current frustrations are due to Nvidia ownershp.
I couldn't complain enough about Linux with Nvidia cards... The worst part is, my card is something like 8 years old now (The old Dell is still going strong as ever now) so it's a legacy card they won't even open source, it's not like they are ever going to make money from the drivers for Gforce4 ever again...
I have a 2 year old laptop with Nvidia. The driver installer is surprisingly smart (and not in a bad way). I have working accelerated OpenGL 3.3. It doesn't suck, as far as tained kernel modules go.
I wouldn't expect miracles with an 8 year old card though.
Nvidia does a decent job with new GPU's when it comes to 3d and basic graphics. It did a good job with the old GPU's too, but I guess the old drivers aren't maintained a lot.
However, the Nvidia binary driver still lacks some features when it comes to multiple displays, etc. HDMI connect/disconnect does not work on a laptop. There's no Xrandr support yet, so hotplugging displays and screen rotation, etc is not quite there. X has to be restarted more often than I want.
I've heard they're working on Xrandr and other stuff. I still think that they should be open sourced, though.
Even with documentation, the open source driver is not very fast because there just aren't enough volunteers.