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ATI Releases New Linux Drivers
dinivin writes "Today, ATI has released all new 2D/3D drivers for Linux/XFree86. The drivers will work on any "Built by ATI" Radeon 8500 or higher card (up to the 9700). Unlike the previous drivers from ATI, these support both the XVideo extension and S3TC (making UT2003 playable with these drivers)."
Nevermind, the page says:
# This version supports only Linux/x86 versions based on libc 6.2.
Am I the only one who's had problems with some games crashing until this last batch of NVidia drivers came out. For that matter, the last batch didn't include an update for my GeForce2Go (stuck in OEM land), and it *still* crashes a lot.
sigs are a waste of space
if you look in the readme that you can get to from the link, you would see only x86 (P3 and higher) is required.
http://dri.sourceforge.net
There are open source drivers for the 8*** series cards, and I do believe they work on PPC... Not quite as feature complete, but decent drivers nonetheless.
Dinivin
ATI needs to get their act together. There are entire forum sections dedicated to trying to get your ATI drivers to work.
Congrats on the easiest 10 karma ever (+5 for asking the question, +5 for answering it)
I alternate between posting +5 and -1 Comments. Karma: +53 -47 = 6
UT 2003!
Linux Games!!
Tux Games!
Neverwinter Nights!
In your face you greasy little "Linux doesn't have any games" troll!
The drivers from ATI are not the drivers funded by the Weather Channel. There are open source drivers from the DRI project which were funded by the Weather Channel.
Dinivin
The original drivers were for the professional FireGL 8800-type cards only. Then people figured out they could be made to work on the regular 8500 as well, and instead of putting the smack down decided to officially support it as well. Now these new drivers have xvideo and s3tc support so that desktop and gaming users will enjoy them a lot more, and work on 8500-9700 ATI cards. Keep up the good work, and don't forget DRI people too :)
Please see this file. It recommends using Alien [Debian users are specifically mentioned], which can easily generate a tgz as well.
Also of note is that Debian Sid's libc6 isn't supported. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.) Again, please refer to the above readme.
For Radeon cards (up to the 9000 ATM) there are free software DRI drivers as well. They cannot perform as well as these and the Windows drivers because of restrictions on what can be released as source, but they work well on BSD, which the ATI driver's don't do and NVidia didn't do until very recently.
The FreeBSD porter did a good job with the dri-devel tree - it goes through the tedious process of building and installing a new XFree86 DRI setup for you. I was running my 8500 under FreeBSD the same night I installed it, to my pleasant suprise.
The press release gives more information. These are unified drivers for ATI cards on Linux--COOL.
ATI is investigating the possibility of supporting TV Out under Linux for products which include this feature.
The GATOS Projectmentions limited use of this feature in some of their configurations.
Linux ATI TV Out Support Programis a work in progress by Lennart Poetteringto control the TV Out feature of certain ATI graphics products under Linux. It has currently been tested on Rage Mobility P/M devices only, but should also work for RADEON and RAGE 128 according to the author.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I'm typing this on a Gentoo box with two DVI LCD monitors attached to my Ti4600 card. Running one large desktop across both monitors WITH 3D acceleration across both monitors.
I might add that you can't do that with the ATI drivers, nor is there any flavor of ATI card that drives two DVI monitors (not that there's a huge selection of such cards with Nvidia chips, but Gainward does make one).
Nvidia is really the best choice for performance graphics on Linux.
FYI.
jonathan
The actual driver is unified. You can pull a TNT-based card out of your machine and replace it with a GF4 board and never have to update the drivers.
Well, I own an All-in-Wonder Radeon. It's not _that_ old (300USD a couple years ago), and it's unsupported by their unified driver! And I don't even talk about the multimedia features, TV in-out, which are mostly broken in Gatos tools/drivers and non existent in their own driver.
I'm back on Win2k for the time being, partly because of this. And I wonder if my next purchase will be ATI, based on my current experience. Sad, because the hardware is rock-solid!
have you been defaced today?
Yes, you'd think that there would be either compatibility or performance issues across different hardware, but I've run the new Catalyst unified driver with both a 7500 and an 8500 and performance on both was drastically increased. I'd have to say that the new drivers actually push them much further towards their potential than the old seperate ones did. Ah well; I say kudos if they can do it on the linux platform as well, and certainly nothing (by consumers) is lost in the effort if they can't. Anyone got any benchmarks yet?
To turn on TV out I have to make sure I boot the machine with the television connected to the videocard then issue
at a shell to get TV out. To get LCD again, I issue
emerge search rpm: .rpm file to a .tar.gz archive
app-arch/rpm2targz
Latest version available: 8.0
Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
Size of downloaded files: 3 kB
Homepage: http://www.slackware.com/config/packages.php
Description: Convert a
Liberty.
Because there are some of us that actually use Linux for the sake of USING it, not for some vague idea about freedom. Not that I don't support open source and free software, but if I have to choose between closed-source 3d acceleration and NO acceleration.... the choice isn't a choice.
Never heard of alien?
Converts from RPM to debs, or tar.gz's, etc. apt-get it if your debian, urpmi it if you want it on Mandrake for any reason (converting those goddamn debs!), I guess if your slackware you already know how to find it...
Otherwise you're right, but GF"4" MX has hardware T&L -- it just doesn't have a vertex shader (programmable hardware T&L). But agreed, GF3 would be the much better choice!
Nvidia too a lot of heat for the naming scheme, as feature-wise the GF4 MX is same generation as GF2.
I just had a 1-hour confrontation with those drivers. There are several things:
Well, after installing a fresh X 4.2.1 from debian unstable, fixing about thirty parser errors in a source file and wreaking general havoc, I was at least able to start X. 3D seems to work, but I was not inclined to do much testing beyond fgl_glxgears and glxinfo after realizing that I was unable to use a text console without snapping back to the X console every second.
All this slowly leads to a heartfelt "fuck ATI" feeling and I'll have plenty time to ponder this while I restore my X config that mysteriously lost all 3D acceleration and Xvideo capabilities after switching back to the DRI driver.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Since it was nvidia that bought 3dfx, maybe you should go complain to them. Not that it will do you much good.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Basically, all parser errors occur on lines that use the __KE_DEBUG (or something similar) macro in fglxr_public.c. The macros are defined as __KE_DEBUG(fmt,args...) and it seems gcc <2.96 can't handle that when called with just one parameter. All I did was rewriting each call to that macro to have at least NULL as second parameter.
There are also errors that are caused by the patched drmP.h. I got around those by disabling the patch contained in make.sh.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.