@cgutjahr

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I'm saying that OS4 came with Bill Toner's Radeon drivers included, which were - at the time of release - about as uptodate as Hans' drivers are now.

When A-EON purchased the ATI Radeon drivers from Forefront Technologies Inc. they reminisced how much work they did to create the drivers whilst working with ATI under NDA at the time. I would not want to minimise this huge effort because it was a great achievement at the time. Bill co-worked with Joshua Helms at Forefront to create this driver.

Rolling on a decade, the amazing work that Hans did on his own to create RadeonHD was a mammoth task in comparison. The complexity of the modern cards are an order of magnitude greater than their predecessors and comparisons are not valid. It always astonishes me that Hans pulled it off. AMD would have a large team of developers doing the same driver work for mainstream platforms.

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But the latter are not part of the OS but need to be purchased separately - which is one of many signs that the situation has gotten worse.

Of course the RadeonHD driver is third party and not part of OS4. There was little prospect of it ever being created as part of OS4 due to lack of resources and other reasons. That is not a necessarily a sign that things have got worse as many end-users are enjoying the benefits of modern graphics cards. Similarly modern shader 3D system, video acceleration and power management are here through third-party independent development.

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I said 'money' not 'beer money'. If money is required, there are ways to secure funding: a crowdfunding campaign, selling a collector's edition in a nice box...

I doubt any of your proposed initiatives would raise funds in the order of magnitude to pay a developer for several years to do this work. The "collector's edition in a nice box" was a tongue-in-cheek suggestion I presume?


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You're implying Hans is the only one qualified to do that job. At least four or five people have been doing graphic drivers

Mark Olsen is the other notable developer who has astonishing abilities to create these highly sophisticated drivers. I don't have first hand knowledge of anyone else working on graphics drivers at this level. Lets hope more talent comes through in our community in the future.

Last edited by amigakit on 04-Jun-2021 at 12:06 AM.
Last edited by amigakit on 04-Jun-2021 at 12:04 AM.
Last edited by amigakit on 04-Jun-2021 at 12:02 AM.

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