Press Release said:May 4th, 2006, Morrison Colorado
3D Nature, a leader in photorealistic landscape visualization, together with a prominent group of 3D visualization developers and users, have taken the drastic step of publicly declaring ATI's Catalyst OpenGL display drivers as unsuitable for professional realtime visualization needs.
All past and current ATI Catalyst drivers for all ATI Radeon series display cards contain several critical bugs that render the hardware unusable in professional 3D visual simulation applications. ATI has been aware of the problems since 2005 but has not fixed the most critical issues, has not announced an ETA for fixing them, or even acknowledged them publicly in their Known Issues for current releases.
The two critical failures are referred to as "VSYNC spinlock" and "compressed SGIS_generate_mipmap failure". Both are documented extensively on the OpenSceneGraph web site complete with screengrabs and sample code to reproduce the problem.
VSYNC spinlock refers to the situation where the display driver continuously runs the CPU during a wglSwapBuffers() function call when vertical retrace synchronization (VSYNC) is on. This leaves the CPU unavailable to perform other work during this period when it should normally be idle, drastically impairing the performance of modern multi-threaded visualization applications. Other modern display card hardware drivers (3D Labs, NVidia) leave the CPU available during this operation.
Compressed SGIS_generate_mipmap failure described how the very-common mip-map generation extension, "GL_SGIS_generate_mipmap", is completely broken when using texture compression. Most modern applications generate mipmaps using SGIS_generate_mipmap to improve texture anti-aliasing in 3D scenes. Texture compression is also commonly used to reduce the memory consumption of textures in the scene in order that more or more detailed textures can be resident in the display card, improving scene detail and performance. It is very common to use both of these techniques together in professional visual simulation applications to extract the maximum visual quality and framerate from a given graphics subsystem. The failure of this combination of features on ATI cards means that texture compression is unusable, severely impairing scene performance. Again, other manufacturers do not suffer this problem.
ATI has been aware of these these issues for quite some time, and has internally filed them as "EPR #151824".
Joining 3D Nature in their protest of ATI's neglect are numerous luminaries of the realtime 3D visualization industry:
Fredrik Ahl, Scalo AB, www.scalo.se
Don Burns, Andes Computer Engineering, www.andesengineering.com
Carlo Camporesi, Institute of Technologies Applied to Cultural Heritage, Italy
Jan Ciger, OpenGL developer
Ben Discoe, project lead, "Virtual Terrain Project" www.vterrain.org
Murray G. Gamble, Director of Modeling & Simulation, Aerospace and Cognitive Engineering (ACE) Laboratory, Carleton University
Roger James - CTO - Virtual Outlooks Ltd.
Gert van Maren, Head of Development, K2Vi Virtual Reality Software, www.k2vi.com
Robert Osfield, Project Lead, OpenSceneGraph, www.openscenegraph.org
Gordon Tomlinson, Consultant, www.3dscenegraph.com
James A. Zack, President, Xtra-Spatial Productions, www.spatialexperts.com
Collectively, we call upon ATI to address these issues immediately, in order that their hardware may be made suitable for professional visual simulation uses.
Current information about this issue will be found at: http://www.3DNature.com/ati.html
About 3D Nature:
Since 1992, 3D Nature has developed and marketed professional photorealistic 3D landscape visualization software including World Construction Set, Visual Nature Studio, Scene Express and NatureView Express. http://www.3DNature.com
I didn't alter the original title of this Press release but I did emphasize the important terms of this PR: Catalyst OGL Drivers and Professional needs.
Why did I do that? Simply because Ati professional cards (FireGL) do not use Catalyst drivers...
And according to what I heard, these issues, shown in this PR, do not occur with the FireGL parts and their drivers.
So, in other words, Ati's professional solutions are suitable for professional needs.
The gaming parts (cheaper than the professional cards...) are not... Obviously. But they never been advertised as being suitable for professional needs in the first place.