Has anyone here gotten the 2900 card and tried out the new tessellator unit with OpenGL? Does ATI even have support for this yet?
I’m guessing you are refering to the GS-NPatch-Tessellation example?
If so the ‘GS’ part indicates that it is running on the Geometry Shader unit and not the programmable tessellator of the card.
ATI still has no advanced opengl support for latest cards (they didn’t even bother to implement the FBO multisample/blit extensions), and there is no evidence that they will in nearest future. I tried asking Humus on the b3d forums if some support is planned, but he seems to have just ignored the question.
Maybe they are just waiting on LP now? shrugs
Well if ATI does drop GL support than I guess they just made my decision for me on what I want to program on. Nvidia all the way.
Well if ATI does drop GL support
Considering that they still have a seat on the ARB, I doubt they’re dropping GL support.
More than likely, they’re dropping support (or rather, not supporting) for things that current GL-based products don’t use. The batch of recent extensions, for example, aren’t used by anything of importance yet.
And since they’re still working on stuff for the ARB, odds are they’re throwing their actual development budget behind a Longs Peak & Mt. Evans implementation.
AFAIK, ATi just rewrote OpenGL drivers for Vista and is working on LP/ME rather than OpenGL 2.x, which is not such a bad choice IMO.
As mentioned by some ATI folks, they have a completely rewritten driver that is supposed to be released “soon”. I would think that they don’t care to implement stuff in their “old” (current) driver, and instead will finish their new one.
LP is one additional reason not to waste your resources on implementing stuff, that won’t last long.
Apart from that, i’d like to say, that i don’t think ATI’s drivers are that bad. I work with an ATI card, but need to develop for nVidia at the moment, and from my experience nVidia’s drivers have at least as many subtle bugs, that ATI’s have. So, from my experience ATI isn’t that bad. It might have been a while ago.
Jan.
Originally posted by Mars_9999:
Well if ATI does drop GL support than I guess they just made my decision for me on what I want to program on. Nvidia all the way.
I’m trying to work out where in anything that was said before you got the impression ATI were ‘dropping OGL support’… doing so would be so many levels of stupid it’s just unreal, certainly with ET:QW around the corner which is a major OGL game.
Vista does indeed have an improved OGL component, for example when changing the render target count it no long does the dumb rebuilding of the shaders which was seen on XP. Although the lack of PBOs makes me sad 
To Bobvodka,
Read this post to see why I said my statement.
Originally posted by Zengar:
ATI still has no advanced opengl support for latest cards (they didn’t even bother to implement the FBO multisample/blit extensions), and there is no evidence that they will in nearest future. I tried asking Humus on the b3d forums if some support is planned, but he seems to have just ignored the question.
Read this post to see why I said my statement.
That still doesn’t suggest them dropping OpenGL support.
As I said, they’re clearly not working on 2.1-based features and extensions. The reasoning could be to put their effort behind Longs Peak.
If they are that’s great.
Also, Humus has said before he can’t comment on internal AMD/ATI things which haven’t been made public, so while it could be considered ‘rude’ to not reply I dare say he is busy and as he can’t comment just put it to one side.
End of the day, they wouldn’t be putting the effort, man power and money into a new LP spec if they didn’t intend on supporting it (certainly from a cash angle as AMD aren’t rolling in the money either…)
for all the demos and other info Humus has released, I’d say it is rude calling him rude for not replying to everything like demanding him being an official spokesman about everything related to ATI.
Yes, it’s true. And I can understand if he can’t comment on it (I sure won’t if I would work for ATI). But still, something like “sorry, I can’t comment” would be nice. I won’t ever dare accusing Humus of being rude, he is a nice and talented guy, but I do consider ATI being ignorant of OpenGL. Well, they have their own problems now… I would be happy if they could provide good LP implementation.
Well, they have their own problems now…
I guess these problems have a name: GeForce 8800 and GeForce 8600.
ATI seems to have skipped mid-range DX10 GPU’s (X2600) and went straight for X2400. I guess that’s a reasonable move, since NVIDIA has allready taken a lot of market with 8800. Competing with NVIDIA in mid range and then in slow GPU’s could be risky, so I think they simply moved into market, where NVIDIA is not present yet (no 8200-8300 GPU’s).
Humus is anything but rude. I have talked with Humus in the past on various items concerning OpenGL and he is always helpful and knowledgeable. Whether it’s ATI or Nvidia it would be nice to have at least some kind of heads up on the status of OpenGL for developers.
It is not a secret what features DX10 or DX9 hardware has… so any new on what may be coming or a ETA would be nice is all most people are asking for. But I never got a red firetruck for Xmas either as a kid…
IMO, the problem is with GL. There isn’t a company behind it. D3D has a single company behind it and they make sure a single D3D implementation is released. It makes it a whole lot simpler.
Has Intel released GL 2.0 drivers for their chipsets? Do they support FBO and all the newer extensions?
It’s the biggest weakness of GL.
What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger…