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Open. Closed.

Make sure they don't just give you a copy of RenderMonkey.. You have to be careful or they'll cheat you out of what they agreed to give you.

The press release gives more information. These are unified drivers for ATI cards on Linux--COOL.

I like how their license agreement on the download page is in a text area in a form. I erased all of the text and wrote "ATI will give me one BILLION dollars," and submitted it. And they accepted it! Thanks to UCITA, that's valid, too. (I think. OTOH, who the hell can figure out UCITA?)

Ooh, I submitted it again and now they owe me a monkey. Pay up, ATI!

-Waldo Jaquith

Please, anyone who would be interested in these drivers for PPC go here and let them know. If enough of us do so, they will quickly realize that supporting linux isn't only about x86.

That was my plan too.

Using this component to feed a widescreen TV.

Yes, I tried all the drivers and went around and around with their tech support. They even had me try drivers for the 9500.

Anyways long story short. I could find no one anywhere that was able to over come the overscan issues which renders the output almost useless. Try using Windows missing at least 5% around the perimeter. It's a real adventure

While the output was decent enough to be legible for email etc. it was unusable due to the overscan.
ATI has left us hanging simply saying to keep checking back for updated drivers.
Definetely a product released that shoulldn't have been and my last ATI purchase (of course, I had said that 5 years ago because of their lousy drivers and support).

Did That.
Used a Shuttle SS51G with ATI 8500dv for video output to widescreen SONY using ATI HDTV component that doesn't work.
ATI's solution?
We have no solution..Tough beans.
NEVER AGAIN ATI.
Oh! but cool remote input.

Did That.
Used a Shuttle SS51G with ATI 8500dv for video output to widescreen SONY using ATI HDTV component that doesn't work.
ATI's solution?
We have no solution..Tough beans.
NEVER AGAIN ATI.
Oh! but cool remote input.

It might be usefull to link to chips actually used in the laptops mentioned.

Info here. It's a really nice chip, but I wonder how it matches up against the Nvidia's GeForce2 Go and 4 Go ... That aside, I want one. :)

I have the same thing from just adding a $150 ALL-IN-WONDER® RADEON 7500

All the same functionality with the remote control on my current system.

ATI, pinnacle, and others bundle software to "Search and schedule programs for viewing or recording by title, category (i.e. golf, comedies, etc.), actor/performer or date"- in short, they're not barebones recorders either - yet require no monthly fee. You wouldn't be criticizing TV tuner cards without having used one, would you?

...and it's not really markedly different from UT2

Perhaps you didn't notice that UT2k3 is really Unreal Tournament 2?


Oh and maybe they'll support more drivers than Nvidia :(

It is not Unreal Tournament 2003's job to support drivers. It's the vendor's job to add the Savage texture compression support to their drivers. ATI, for one, is doing this for some of their cards.

ATi is patching their newer radeon drivers, and will support S3TC some time in the future!

XFree86 does support your Radeon 7500 and 8500, anything more recent you're on your own ! ATI doesn't offer any better drivers, just "support" by the way of links (www.linux.org ... yeah riight, like that's gonna solve my problem).

... that there seems to be a great deal of trouble with the AGP 8X interface as documented here and acknowledged here? This does not appear to be an isolated case, as many people with many different mainboards are reporting this. If one looks only at performance without the chance of actually getting the thing working, the review is incomplete, if not downright misleading.

IF you can't be bothered with the clicks, look here

Depending on which box you're planning on, you may want to wait for a graphics hardware rev from Apple. The new ATI 9700 isn't yet available for Mac, but will probably be coming out soon. Given the performance step these cards offer over the current generation, you may want to hold off (either to buy the new card, or buy the discounted older model.) NVidia will also be shipping a next-generation card (Nv30) sometime Q4/Q1.

OS X is great - especially coming from the dark ages of old Mac OS. My wife has an iMac, and a friend of mine has an iBook - both are pretty nice systems.

My only gripe with Apple is that Mac's CPU and chipset is still behind the times. I've heard rumours of OS X running on Intel hardware - now, wouldn't that be a kick in the head?

ATI does not release *nix drivers for their products.

ATI does release accelerated 3D XFree86 DRI drivers for some of their products. Specifically for the Radeon 8500 and FireGL product lines.

URLS:
Radeon 8500 Driver
Linux Driver Policy (mentions their own drivers in a table half way down the page)

My theory:

If the...

• ...Radeon 8500 driver is just a rebranded FireGL driver.
• ...future FireGL cards are based on similar chipsets to their high end consumer level cards.

ATI might regularly release drivers for their high end consumer cards from now on since it would be seem to be little work for them.

The drivers would probably be optimised for correctness instead of speed.

ATI does not release *nix drivers for their products.

ATI does release accelerated 3D XFree86 DRI drivers for some of their products. Specifically for the Radeon 8500 and FireGL product lines.

URLS:
Radeon 8500 Driver
Linux Driver Policy (mentions their own drivers in a table half way down the page)

My theory:

If the...

• ...Radeon 8500 driver is just a rebranded FireGL driver.
• ...future FireGL cards are based on similar chipsets to their high end consumer level cards.

ATI might regularly release drivers for their high end consumer cards from now on since it would be seem to be little work for them.

The drivers would probably be optimised for correctness instead of speed.

1) Get satellite and a Bell ExpressVu PVR. I've had mine for almost a year now, and am very happy with it's performance. I've barely touched my VCR since then!

2) Get a PC with a video capture/playback card (like ATI's All-In-Wonder Radeon), and some open source software and roll-yer-own PVR. You can get TV listings for Canada with the XMLTV project. The Linux VCR HOWTO will probably be helpful.

Nvidia's drivers come from the exact same code base as their Windows drivers. This makes them just as fast and stable as their Windows counterparts. They aren't GPL, but the sure are damn good.

Isn't that a bit misleading? I thought the FireGL drivers were developed by someone else and, as far as I can tell, they don't seem to mention that. It just makes them look like they're developing the drivers. Do the original FireGL drivers have the same license attached to them?

Where are the cute tricks involving prehensile tails? Where are the happy waltzes to some itinerant organ grinder's music? WHERE'S MY MONKEY?!

ATI released Radeon 8500 drivers yesterday. =)

From ati's website:

John Carmack

"The R300 is an ideal rendering target for the DOOM engine, it can do both our highly complex pixel shaders for light surface interactions and can very rapidly render all the stencil shadow volumes which deal with all our dynamic masking of way light operations"

"3D accelerators are all about performance, quality and flexibility and the R300 breaks new ground over anything thats come before it in all three areas."

ATI doesn't have a history of releasing the most reliable drivers, but that doesn't mean their cards are no good for XFree86 systems.

Unlike nVidia, ATI has chosen to support open source development for their cards rather than produce their own closed-source drivers. Consequently, nVidia has a set of good drivers for both Windows and Linux, but no one but them knows anything about their implementation or their hardware specs; ATI, on the other hand, produces no XFree86 drivers of their own, but they've given some support to open source efforts, and now we have a set of open source drivers that work pretty well, although they're still in development.

ATI did a good thing by providing developer resources to the whole community, because now we have an open-source software implementation that will last forever and important hardware information that anybody can implement a driver for. The difference between nVidia's and ATI's policies are analogous to offering a man a fish, as opposed to teaching him how.

ATI doesn't have a history of releasing the most reliable drivers, but that doesn't mean their cards are no good for XFree86 systems.

Unlike nVidia, ATI has chosen to support open source development for their cards rather than produce their own closed-source drivers. Consequently, nVidia has a set of good drivers for both Windows and Linux, but no one but them knows anything about their implementation or their hardware specs; ATI, on the other hand, produces no XFree86 drivers of their own, but they've given some support to open source efforts, and now we have a set of open source drivers that work pretty well, although they're still in development.

ATI did a good thing by providing developer resources to the whole community, because now we have an open-source software implementation that will last forever and important hardware information that anybody can implement a driver for. The difference between nVidia's and ATI's policies are analogous to offering a man a fish, as opposed to teaching him how.

So do some 'real' research before you start knocking company's that do support open source.

Real research? I think it's blatantly obvious I did none. I quoted no sources. I referenced no "proof". My severly unresearched statement simply stated: ATI supports open source (http://www.ati.com/developer/linux.html). Show me where Nvidia has helped with the creation of open source drivers. Maybe they do, but I currently understand they don't.

Nice links BTW. Informative?

Is the ATI TV Wonder USB. Anyone have any experience with or feelings about this one? I don't watch enough TV regularly to justtify actually owning a TV, but it's not a medium to which I want to lose access.

*muttermutterdon'twanttomissstartrekmuttermutter *

So given that the ATI USB TV tuner is the same price as Hauppage's but seems to be better feature-wise, does anyone have any grounds on which I shouldn't get it?

Cheers,

ATI put out a duel head Radeon VE using what they call Hydravision Linux support is basically none existant for the hydravision though.

I'd like to make some comments from the point of the research I've done so far on this subject, in relation to some of the things you've said.

First, on hard drive failure:
Hard drives fail. This seems obvious to me, I was a network admin in college and I saw a lot of hard drives fail. Pity the poor fool who tries to transport them.. click click, click click.
My Tip: Burn. CD burners are cheap, reliable, and the media is super cheap. Yeah, an entire movie won't fit on on CD. But you won't be playing from the CD, the idea is merely to have a copy on permanent media in case of HD failure - then put it back on the new HD when you get it. So, make sure you have your media box hooked to your LAN and copy those files to your CD burning machine. No burner? Buy one. - Note: My Pine drive shipped with Nero full version, thus I recommend buying one, because otherwise I would have bought it seperately anyway.

Noise:
Computers are noisy. This is probably the biggest hurdle to overcome in a entertainment center pc.
My Tip: abandon convention. To combat noise, I'm looking at using a specialized watercooled case. I realize this case doesn't fit the traditional entertainment device size/configuration - but I've abandoned that notion and just committed myself to buying the quietest setup I can find and figuring out a way set up my entertainment center around it so that it doesn't look out of place. I have to admit, at first, a "dumb terminal" type setup seems like a good idea, but most of the stuff has to run from the client, not the server. You basically aren't buying yourself any help because your powerful video card and processor have to be on the client anyway, and those cause heat - so even a dumb terminal is going to be noisy.

TIVO Functionality:
A must-have. Clearly an entertainment PC is only going to be more than a fancy looking DVD player if you include video capture and playback.
My Tip: ATI All-in-Wonder. The ATI All-in-Wonder is still the best video capture card on the market. Note that it comes with a remote. NVidia has one now, but reviews are not as glowing. Program guides for both are free.

Output:
TV resolutions aren't very good. My research suggests that even new, fancypants TVs resolution isn't good enough to use for a computer.
My Idea (not advice): projector. Currently I'm considering buying a high resolution computer projector for about the same cost as a very nice TV (a.k.a $2,000-$3,000). I've seen one of these at one of the places I've worked, and I was impressed. It showed both a 1024x768 computer screen and DVD playback very well. (Comon, I *HAD* to play a DVD on it!) The only issue here is obviously light - projection does not work well in a room with a lot of light. Even though otherwise this is an ideal solution (huge screen, relatively low cost, high res) - I'm not sure I can live with the tradeoff. I imagine for normal TV viewing I will still go with the regular TV I already own. My super-sneaky idea for a "close" monitor - build a flap to come up closer to the projector. I doubt the text would be readable, though. I'm still mulling over the possibilities.

Thanks for the tip. But I think I found something better. ATI is now selling the remote from their All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500 as a separate product, imaginatively dubbed the Remote Wonder. So far, it's only for Windows (not a big deal for me, at least), and I think I'll have to tinker to get some of the ATI-specific keys to respond in other apps, based on a hasty search of the browsable tech specs. But RF, more keys, and two-button mouse capability for the same price as the Keyspan seals the deal. I think I have a critical part of my Living Room PC project solved. Now I just need all the other parts. :-)

ATI's linux driver page

The drivers for the FireGL also work on the Radeon 8500, which has the same 2D and 3D core.

Dinivin

With ATI's recent transition to the catalystunified driver model with frequent updates I would say that has already happened. Hell the rv250 and r300 have already been spotted in the last update, so they can't be that far off.

first off, the nature of most of the replies here seems to indicate that slashdot isn't a great place to ask home theater questions. try the home theater forum on the av science forum. basically, what you are going to want is a vga card with the ability to output arbitrary scan rates and resolutions. try the ATI radeon line using software to adjust your scan rates like powerstrip. finally, as one other poster mentioned, you're going to want a vga to component video transcoder, like this or this. with the appropriate video card and the vga transcoder, you'll be able to run native HDTV resolution into pretty much any consumer grade HDTV set.

ATI fairly recently came out with an adapter to let their Radeon 8500 cards output to HDTV. Anandtech has a brief review of it.

and then there are things that really really shouldn't have a USB interface at all.

>8-bit ISA cards could still support SVGA modes

And they weren't limited to just 256 colour either.

There's no reason why you can't pump 16-bit or 24-bit data over an 8-bit bus. It just takes longer!

Here is a card that was once the envy of geeks everywhere...

RADEON(TM) 8500 MAC EDITION

ATI's VIDEO IMMERSION(TM) II technology ... In addition, there is component output support for HDTVs (High Definition Television) at 480i, 480p, 720p and 1080i.

However, it's not available yet. Promised for "2002". I'm still waiting...

Hmm...
I haven't used any FireGL cards in XFree86, but ATI provides drivers for it. I understand drivers for the FireGL line are another team's responsibility, and they're certainly not mentioned in the FAQ, but it still counts.

I don't know about quality, but it's probably pretty good.

You can get up to $150 off a All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500 128MB AGP through ATI's Trade-Up Program.

Basically if you order the card through them you get an instant $50 rebate... Then when you send in an old ATI card or even a different brand of graphic card, they will send you a $100 rebate.

• It's available to US & Cdn. end users only
• You get more if you supply them with old ATI cards, I believe (about $50 US/Cdn, depending on where you are).

ATI has a nice card out, just for capturing tv/video. Built in 125 channel tv-tuner, s-video in, and records direct to mpeg-2 format. This is a PCI card and captures quite nicely. Check it out here: ATI-TV Wonder or, the USB Version or the Cheaper/lighter version and even get a Remote Control for it. All from ATI.

ATI has a nice card out, just for capturing tv/video. Built in 125 channel tv-tuner, s-video in, and records direct to mpeg-2 format. This is a PCI card and captures quite nicely. Check it out here: ATI-TV Wonder or, the USB Version or the Cheaper/lighter version and even get a Remote Control for it. All from ATI.

ATI has a nice card out, just for capturing tv/video. Built in 125 channel tv-tuner, s-video in, and records direct to mpeg-2 format. This is a PCI card and captures quite nicely. Check it out here: ATI-TV Wonder or, the USB Version or the Cheaper/lighter version and even get a Remote Control for it. All from ATI.

ATI has a nice card out, just for capturing tv/video. Built in 125 channel tv-tuner, s-video in, and records direct to mpeg-2 format. This is a PCI card and captures quite nicely. Check it out here: ATI-TV Wonder or, the USB Version or the Cheaper/lighter version and even get a Remote Control for it. All from ATI.

That is 100% unacceptable and anyone with a brain will not use their hardware until they change their policies on giving us developers documentation.

Well, zealots can stick to "open" crappy, out-dated, and unmaintained stuff, and non-zealots can stick with working, timely, stable stuff. Usually, I let practicality choose instead of politics.

You know why 3D still generally sucks on the PC?

Interesting, I've never noticed that. Compared to what? Game consoles that are built solely for churning polygons, or the latest flick from Pixar?

Stupid greed.

Imagine that! A company wanting to protect the hard work it has put into their products! And on top of that, they want to turn a profit! How disgusting!

When its all said and done, I have to place my vote for nVidia, hands down. There are many reasons for this... howerver this is the most compelling...

nVidia Drivers page link

• Windows 95/98/Me Drivers
• Windows XP/2000 Drivers
• Windows XP 64-bit Drivers
• Windows NT Drivers
• Linux Drivers

ATI Drivers page link

• Windows XP
• Windows ME
• Windows 2000
• Windows NT

At home I run about 7 computers, a mix of linux winXp 2k and 98. The fact that my geforceX cards can and will run great in all of the above os's using proper driver support is all I need to buy from nVidia. Good customer support, and good OS support. That will bring in my dollars...