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)."

Comments

Re:PPC?

[*xpenguin*]

Nevermind, the page says:

# This version supports only Linux/x86 versions based on libc 6.2.

NVidia drivers not so hot...

[X]

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.

Re:NVidia drivers not so hot...

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

He just dosnt understand that the machine isnt really dead, just the head.
99% of the time you can still blindly restart X and recover fine. The Magic SysRq key helps a lot for recovering from X problems.
As for just crashing X, thats why I run my games on a seperate X server, something you can't do in windows. I keep :0 for gaim, moz, Eterm.. and :1 for rtcw/winex/q3/q2/qw

Re:PPC?

[dinivin]

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

Hah squared!

[mao che minh]

UT 2003!
Linux Games!!
Tux Games!
Neverwinter Nights!
In your face you greasy little "Linux doesn't have any games" troll!

Re:Here's hoping

[dinivin]

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

Re:RPM package format only

[crimsun]

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.

On the other hand...

[Chad Page]

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.

press release

[tornater]

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

Re:All-In-Wonder support, anyone?

[karlandtanya]

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.

Nvidia supports flat panels just fine...

[hirschma]

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

Re:Uh...

[3vi1]

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.

Unified drivers?!

[m0i]

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!

Re:RPM package format only

[7-Vodka]

Theres also a program called rpm2targz:

emerge search rpm:
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 .rpm file to a .tar.gz archive

The Driver SUCKS!

[GeekDork]

I just had a 1-hour confrontation with those drivers. There are several things:

• XVideo is dud.
• Video overlay creates artifacts all over the screen like it did since the first fricken FGL drivers.
• The drivers cannot be compiled with gcc 2.95 without modification and don't work properly (oh wonder) when compiled with gcc 3.0 on a 2.95 system.
• The drivers depend on DRI 3.0.x, recent DRI CVS is 4.1.0. No fun.

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.