AMD and ATI merging: good or bad for consumers?
 

Forum regular goingpostale1 wants to knox what you think of the ATI & AMD merger.

:-) from /.

Hopefully AMD will get ATI to make some decent Linux drivers for ATI video cards.

Aren't Linux users supposed to know a bit about compiling and such? :p

Seriously, many people blame MS for their bugged software, choose to go Linux, and demand that industrials follow their moods? When I see how quickly and how well people get the bugs out of Linux, why did noone optimize the ATI drivers for the community?

To go back to the news:
I'm wondering what that merge will give AMD or ATI. AMD ain't the healthiest brand economically speaking, and ATI has done better too on that field. Will that merge help both out of the little financial problems?

I remember a news post (don't know if it was here) about someone who made a linux ATI driver, but didn't get any feedback from ATI for publishing it, son in facht someone did.
But were talking about graphics drivers, those drivers are pretty complex, especialy of you realise that they have to support every ATI card (means every PS model, every DX standard, every OpenGL standard, ...).


About the merge, I don't know what will happen. AMD is a real daredevil, they have absolutely no money, but they still continue to build FABs and they even buy ATI for a few million. I hope for a double comeback, but I'm afraid it won't in the next 5 years :( .

while I'll probably sound like an *ss, I take risk.

Linux is not big business for the desktop market, and even in the server market linux has many competitors; there's no point in investing pleny of manpower into developing good linux drivers if there is only a small percentage of linux desktop users using your product. If you rather spend those resources to improve other areas (anywhere!) for a popular product (say... Windows?) you will get a larger return of your time/money investment. If they have infinite resources, they can do the necassary development but they are not Intel nor nvidia:)

ATI was known in the past (several years ago now) for having rather poor drivers; but they invested more resources and their driver team is now running at full speed, almost on par with NVIDIA, which is quite a good thing, and this made their products stand out as the people who kept away from ATI product because of driver issues, now have no reason to do so. it's was not only the Radeon 9700 Pro hardware which helped ATI take the performance crown, but also the improved Catalyst drivers to go with it proved a success. Windows will remain the main OS on desktop for several years to come, and even with Linux making small inroads here and there, it's largely for none-gaming desktops which don't require high end VGA cards or drivers to support 3D renderning to go along with it:)

bad thing. AMD <> Intel and ATI <> Nvidia keep the market somewhat competetive, and you could pick your CPU/video card like you want to without noticing that much difference. now AMD goes with ATI, Intel is probably going to cooperate more with Nvidia. yikes :/

Intel has already been working with nvidia for years now, there's a reason there is an nForce4 SLI Intel chipset and an upcoming nForce5 SLI INtel one; I don't think this will change very much it the imminent future.

i'd say bad on short term, and a chance of being good on the long term.

they have to merge i think,..