The ati petition

[Vladimir Dergachev]

>
> One things for sure, the present situation (and you are holding nvidia
> up as a shineing example, erroniously so IMO) has become intolerable

I don't. Personally, I want fully Open Source drivers and Nvidia is very 
far from this.

> for the user, who either breaks his system trying to install the
> nvidia stuff, or suffers thru the intolerably slow drivers we do
> have.  ATM I have an ATI designed card installed, replacing an nvidia
> that broke, and took the motherboard out as it did so.  An nvidia
> card that never was right from the gitgo 2 years ago.
>
> I'm sick of being treated as third class citizens in the video dept by
> all the vendors peddling such gear just because we're allergic to
> windoze.  The petition seemed to be somewhat better than a poke in
> the eye with a sharp stick, so I signed it.
>
>>        I strongly suggest the writer of the petition to read
>> through (if he or she has not done so already) the following link:
>>
>> http://dri.sourceforge.net/doc/vendor_relationships_paper.html
>>
>>        Also, it is important to note that Precision Insight (and,
>> in particular, Frank La Monica) had big problems persuading ATI to
>> release specs to allow 3d support for Rage128 and Radeons and
>> undoing the history of angry e-mails demanding documentation and
>> flat refusals to provide it.
>
> And then we should see some 3d support for radeons at some point?

Radeons, up to 8500 (i.e R200/RV250) *do* have 3d support. The question of
Open Source drivers for R300 and later cards depends on cooperation of FOSS 
developers. And it could appear faster if ATI is being *politely* asked to 
speed up the process by providing additional documentation.

I reacted to the petition because it is dangerously into a "bread and 
entertainment" stage - Slashdot discussion suffers from this too.

> Sorry, tuxracer still brings this machine to it knees at about 1
> frame every 2 seconds, and requires a reboot once you spend 10
> minutes finding the quit button with the mouse as the lag is truely
> surreal.  All other keyboard input seems to be locked out.  IMO, not
> a friendy game at all.  Games that reconfigure X, possibly even
> damaging the monitor when they do, should totally restore X to its
> original configuration when the exit.
>
> The machine?  AMD 2800XP.  Biostar M7-NCD-Pro Motherboard.  A gig of
> DDR333 dual channel ram, and an Extacy 9200SE 128 meg card.  I
> certainly ought to be able to run tuxracer.