Originally posted by bobvodka:
[b]Well, to be honest, someone somewhere should have said something to the developers, heck even that reply from devrel could have been better than the vague ‘yeah, it might have been fixed, we don’t know’ which I got. It comes across as not caring and in this game PR and talking to the devs is worth a lot; basically a more definative answer such as ‘there is a new version in the works, which will be released soon and for all platforms, which will address this issue’ would have been enough.
Now, to be fair, I’ve just checked the state of things out wrt the Vista driver and while it leaves me with some screen corruption (which given the newness of the drivers and the arch. is fair enuff… and it goes away when a repaint is forced by dragging a window around) MRT, FBO and GLSL appear to work at a decent framerate (although I think there might be a z-buffer issue in the 7.2 drivers as I’m pretty sure I could see into a cube I shouldn’t have been able to see in to, I’ll swap to XP x64 to confirm at some point), so I’ll refrain from yelling about this for now.
Still, this is a good reason behind why it’s important to talk to the developers, lets face it if I hadn’t have kicked up a fuss like this about it we woudln’t even no now would we? [/b]
I mostly agree. We have been communicating this to tier-1 developers though, but not to the general public. The rumour of the “OpenGL rewrite” has been out there for years though, but like many other internal processes, we don’t always comment on what’s going on inside the company. I agree though that we should have been more forthcoming in telling the less privileged developers as well, such as on forums like this. I have several times raised concerns internally about short-term goals vs. long-term. It’s been a hard time for myself as I’ve had to balance the interests of ATI versus the interests of the developers I work with. One reason why the project has mostly been kept secret for so long is that occasionally deadlines were pushed forward. Again, not unheard of in the software industry, but it makes it a bad idea to talk too much about the new driver when schedules can change and promises would be broken. Also, telling a developer that a bug will be fixed in the new driver is not useful if that driver won’t be released for another year. It’s also a bad idea to reveal such an interal project before we know its status. In the event that the project would fail and be cancelled and focus shifted back to the original driver, it would not look good outside if we had told the public that a new redesigned driver was in the works.
Since the driver was just recently added to the Vista driver package (previously no ICD was included at all since the legacy driver doesn’t support Vista) we have now started telling people about it. I agree that it would have been useful for people to know earlier about this project. However, we didn’t want to give any promises until it was actually shipped.
