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nesister
Journeyman III

Bug fixing in OpenGL implementation

Rant >:|

Well ...

It's been two months and three catalyst releases since my report of three bugs, provided with simple test case code:

http://forums.amd.com/devforum/messageview.cfm?catid=392&threadid=140991&enterthread=y

http://forums.amd.com/devforum/messageview.cfm?catid=392&threadid=140992&enterthread=y

http://forums.amd.com/devforum/messageview.cfm?catid=392&threadid=140968&enterthread=y

Developers on on this forum seems to be very responsive, i had a quick answer in each of my posts. But come on, how do you expect people to use AMD/ATI hardware with opengl when it takes more than 2 months to fix showstopper bugs like this or this ? How do you expect GAMES to be developped with opengl if one of the major hardware vendor can't provide a working opengl (>= 3.2) implementation (even if you claim opengl 4.1 compliance in catalyst 10.12 ...) ?

I know, opengl games on windows count for about 1% so why bother. Not even talking about linux or other commercialy unsignificant O.S ... But hey,  there's a lot of people working with (at least) linux/opengl that you should care about. In universities , doing research and coming up with interesting algorithms. Other are just developers, trying to develop games with something else than directX, because portability matters and because they know windows is not the only OS to play games ... All those people stick to and recomends nvidia cards, because it works the way it should(tm).

Crap, I like AMD hardware, it pisses me off to be unable to use it for my researches because of that.

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7 Replies
aliloko
Journeyman III

I also prefer AMD hardware.

You complain about newer OpenGL version but it will eventually get sorted out. I would be soo happy if they released the better driver of today for older discontinued hardware like the X1000 series, Radeon 9800 etc... because the last drivers for these cards are full of it.

I think the driver developers are given too scarce resources and manpower. Also it seems like their test suite isn't as extensive as it could be.

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we took your reports seriously and many of them have been fixed internally already. unfortunately, there is a long latency  when we make a fix and when it make it to the end user (2-3 months once we actually have the fix), which can be frustrating for all of us.

I verified that those three were fixed (with the date), and should be available pretty soon:

http://forums.amd.com/devforum/messageview.cfm?catid=392&threadid=140991&enterthread=y  2010/10/21

http://forums.amd.com/devforum/messageview.cfm?catid=392&threadid=140968&enterthread=y 2010/10/27 

http://forums.amd.com/devforum/messageview.cfm?catid=392&threadid=140992&enterthread=y 2010/10/20 

 

you can have access to beta driver on linux through the beta program, or work with our ISV team which can provide them as well for critical issues that impact your products.

Pierre B.

 

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Yeah it is frustrating, but I have found that good bug reports do not go unnoticed which is good. My bug reports for glReadPixels and glBlitFramebuffer were fixed. It took about 5-6 months for the fix to appear in the production driver. Granted that is a bit long and annoying, but at least the bugs are getting fixed.

Generally speaking the GL driver has made a huge improvement since AMD bought ATI especially on Linux which is what I care about. There is a huge difference in features and performance from two years ago. Plenty of bugs still, but in many ways it seems AMD is playing catch up and doing it quickly.

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since you care about linux, I would suggest that you register to the beta program to get early access to drivers (this can give you 1-2 months heads up!)

Pierre B.

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Thanks for the feedback pboudier.

I knew that the bugs i reported were taken care of. I was more frustrated by the fact that bugfixes takes a long time before entering your official drivers. And by the fact that in the meantime, i was stuck with ugly hacks to make things work.

I'll apply to the beta program as you suggest.

Thanks again.

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the one thing to understand about this latency, is that AMD is delivering hundreds drivers every month to our various OEM programs, so there is a significant burden on our QA to deliver already.

Pierre B.

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I just wish AMD/Nvidia would tell MS to drop DX and just focus on OpenGL from now on. With so many devices now using GL as their main API(iPads,iPhones,many smart phones) PC's, Macs their is no need to waste resources on DX anymore, as a whole GL is probably more important that DX is now with the mobile market selling more units that PCs.... This would bring us better drivers for OpenGL/ES/CL

 

But what do I know to much politics and money at stake to make that happen. Here to wishful thinking!

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