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.

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.

press release

[tornater]

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

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!

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.