Terry Makedon is f****** clueless

This will never happen, seems though that AMD now realizes they sell a lot of vapor and are starting to use that knowledge in a mocking fashion.

Because when you have a patent on something others can not use it unless you let them. It doesn't matter if you tell others how your thing works or not.

Are you trying to tell us that patent violations don't happen in the open-source community simply because something is patented? Dude, you're horribly naive.

of course nothing has changed as a result of the AMD deal.

things have, however, changed as a result of Dell deciding to go open source in a big way. AMD wants as big of a slice of that pie as they can get!

Do it, AMD. Nvidia's Linux drivers are fantastic and only getting better. Only embracing the open source folks can save your bacon now.

Also witness the big uptick in Radeon 8500 usage once the R200 open source drivers got to usability. It's not just Linux geeks, either, it's folks running FreeBSD/Solaris/et al, who have gotten no support from Nvidia historically, though NV seems to have finally realized and is moving to take over those niches, also. Last I looked, the R3XX/R4XX drivers were getting up to snuff and work had started on open source R5XX stuffs.

Heck, steal a page from Nvidia's book: When the open source forcedeth nForce ethernet driver started getting useful, NV dropped the closed source stuff they had on it's head and started contributing reams of code to the open source stuffs. It's now almost all their work, and still open. It works.

Just dump your buggy Catalyst backport down the drain and embrace the open source drivers out there. Get those all the code snippets and NDA docs they need to get 100% function, and worry about DRM junk later. If we really want DRM, we'll tell you. So far we'd rather have blunt force vasectomies, if the vocal users are a majority.

If nVidia really wanted to steal ATI's optimization ideas, they'd disassemble/decompile ATI's drivers. Lack of source code would be only a temporary roadblock.

Being patented and proprietary shouldn't stop them from open sourcing their drivers. They may not be able to use the GPL but I suspect they could come up with a license that would make the source available to the public and still protect their IP from competitors.

EDIT: And they can even get around the DRM issue. They just keep that code to themselves in their closed source branch. So if you want the DRM features you use the closed DRM driver(most people). No reason the rest of the code should be closed.

Where did he say it was easy? It's not easy, but it's not that hard relative to building a GPU or writing a GPU driver.

It's not that it would be easy, but if they already wanted to badly enough to risk a patent suit over it they would certainly be willing to spare the necessary man hours.

Edit: Oops meant for #18

would be nice if game developers move towards OpenGL and away from that awful "other" api. would be nice to support multiple shader models, rather than force people to upgrade every two months.

"Proprietary, patented optimizations..."

I wonder if he's talking about how when I switched from 6.9 to 7.2 drivers textures have become noticeably more blurry on my x800XL. The depth that they blur at is also messed up. Playing Company of Heroes the mountains easily show the effects of their "optimizations" resulting in half the mountain getting blurred when it's at the edge of the screen and another part not getting blurred.