“Direct from ATI/AMD HQ…”
Is this meant to tell me you are a PR guy and now got the answer from the people, who know what they are talking about? (Sorry for being so rude, but i hate PR guys, and they definitely do not belong in a technical discussion).
“• Regarding the problems mentioned (image up-side-down, render-to-texture), we are not aware of any problems. Please send any sample code and we can help you debug the issue.”
I would, if i needed to, but since we have a bit of control over the hardware used in the end, it is simply easier to tell people to use nVidia hardware. It should run on ATI’s Radeon X1xxx series pretty fine, though (last time i checked was ~4 months ago).
I assume you are having a closer look at these forums for a longer time, so you might have noticed, that i have been always telling people “ATI isn’t really worse than nVidia - both have their problems”, because i was actually using ATI for a long time and have usually had no more problems than with nVidia (cards i used: Radeon 9600, Mobility Radeon 9700, Mobility Radeon X1600). Most other people kept complaining about ATI, although they all used mainly nVidia, so when they made their app work on ATI there were of course a few issues. Now i switched to nVidia and can assure you, i was right, ATI was not worse than nVidia.
All until the 3xxx and 4xxx series. Seeing that the 3xxx series has the same MRT/uniform limitations as the 4xxx, i really DOUBT that those are limitations “which will be lifted soon”, because the 3xxx series is out quite some time.
Also i don’t quite get were there is a problem to support 512 or 4096 uniforms, if the hardware can do it? I have no knowledge about hardware, but even if the driver would need to do some bookkeeping, which might not be efficient enough to allow all 4096 uniforms to be used, it should still be possible to allow at least 2048.
Performance is an entirely different matter. No one said the cards were slow. They are pretty amazingly fast in fact. The 4xxx series is definitely worth it’s money for gamers and D3D developers. But for OpenGL developers the situation isn’t really great, simply because there are so many problems regarding unsupported framebuffer formats, depth/stencil issues and of course a long list of unsupported extensions.
“• Regarding the missing extensions, we plan to support these features once they are standardized by the ARB and not using proprietary extension. These extensions are being standardized and we will support them soon.”
That is great to hear, i actually assumed, that ATI is simply waiting for GL 3. Of course 2.1 with standardized extensions is also good, for starters. But still, it is not there YET, so people WILL complain.
Oh, and btw: 2 of your 3 links are broken (404, etc.). And the ONE link that is working tells me that AMD improves performance on Linux considerably. Sorry, but i am used to too much PR talk, i really don’t believe this. Simply throttle the drivers more and more over a year or so, and then release it’s full speed again and you got a nice PR statement! If AMD did it or not, i don’t care, those are simply news that i don’t buy, no matter whether they are true or not (it’s not AMDs fault, it’s the whole industry, that i don’t trust).
“it is difficult to believe that the ATI drivers
are horribly broken or non-functional, as the drivers have been tested by dozens of third party software developers for hundreds
of applications”
Yes, the older drivers are very good. And even the new drivers are certainly quite good, if you only use 95% of it’s feature-set, or only develop on ATI, so that you know it’s kinks. The problem is simply, that when a new hardware generation is released, and your app worked well on the previous generation, you simply expect, that the new generation has no NEW/OTHER issues than the previous one. You expect that new features might not work well, but all OLD features should work as on older hardware. THAT’s the real problem with the 3/4xxx series. It introduced several problems/changes that the previous generation did not have. And THAT’s what pissed ME off, because i simply expect a working app to continue to work on new hardware from the same vendor, only faster.
Well, we will see, whether ATI gets it done “soon”. “Soon” does have quite a different definition in the OpenGL world…
Jan.