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

hmmm

[mschoolbus]

maybe I wont need to use the Gatos drivers anymore... this would be very nice!

Re:hmmm

[Wumpus]

Why? What's wrong with the Gatos drivers?

I haven't used them, but I'm considering buying an ATI card, and I'd rather use open source drivers, having had a very bad experience with nVidia's binary drivers.

Re:hmmm

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

having had a very bad experience with nVidia's binary drivers.

Binary or not, I've never had a problem with them in the year and a half or so I've been using them. They are wonderful. I play a few games (I'm not much of a gamer, but I do have to get my Killing Spree fix in from time to time). I play Q3A and RTCW (mostly - UT2003 won't run on my card). I get better frame rates, and just general performace, under Linux than I ever did with Win*, and I only have a 8Meg TNT2... (I'm going to be getting a GF3 or 4 from Santa this year, the downside is he told me to charge it to MY card. Damn fat guy... Throw me a bone once in a while, won't ya?)

What's wrong with nVidia's drivers? Nothing, as far as I can tell.

Re:hmmm

[dildatron]

My experience has been similar to yours. I have had RtCW crash maybe twice, but I think it was punkbuster related. Either way, it didn't bring the machine down, just the game crashed.

I have been fairly pleased with nVidia's drivers, and I appreciate that they support linux with my GeForce 4ti. It rocks.

Re:hmmm

[Wumpus]

Well, I'm glad they work for you, but I'm seeing occasional system lockups that weren't there in the year or so I was running the XFree86 drivers. The only suggestion on nVidia's site was to turn off AGP support, which I did, to no avail.

I'm a competent C programmer, and I've done driver work before. I can find my way around source code, and I've tracked down problems in open source code I was using before. Not being able to debug this is driving me nuts.

So, this is what's wrong with nVidia's drivers. When they break, you can't fix them.

Wonderful for Competition

[theBraindonor]

This is absolutely wonderful for Linux 3D graphics. Depending on how well these drivers perform, gamers and graphics developers alike will have an alternative to NVidia.

The ATI drivers don't even need to outperform NVidia's. An ATI graphics card is almost always cheaper than the corresponding NVidia card. Some of us don't like spending any more of our own money on a computer than we have to.

RPM package format only

[denisb]

Quote the ATI driver page :

ATI FireGL provides the drivers in only one standard packaging
format. It's the widespread RPM packaging standard which is well
Known in the Linux community. Respective files are named "*.rpm"
and are just called RPMs. Its assumed that this is the method
that serves the needs our customer's best.

RPM is nice and such, but please do like Nvidia, and provide a non RPM option ! I can get around this by using RPM and extracting the stuff, then making an ebuild or something, but hey, it is much easier if RPM is complemented by a tgz ..

Re:PPC?

[Elendil]

2 words: source code...

Re:PPC?

[wilburdg]

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.

Why support binary drivers?

[azz]

There were rumours flying around a while ago that open-source Radeon 8500 drivers would be appearing. I'm therefore sad to see that ATi have decided that closed source drivers are the way forward. I don't see any reason to promote this on Slashdot, or to consider this in any way beneficial for the open source community; remember, closed-source Linux drivers are not support, they're marketing. Thanks, ATi, I'll be buying my graphics hardware elsewhere in the future.

Re: International Liability

[waldoj]

ATI is a Canadian company, are they liable under UCITA?

Dmitry Sklyarov is a Russian guy. Is he liable under the DMCA?

-Waldo Jaquith

Re:Whoop-ti-do

[timmyf2371]

IMHO, I don't see anything wrong with these drivers being "secret-ware". ATI have released these drivers, and, IIRC, they've also released the specs of their boards so third-parties can also develop device drivers.

There's nothing wrong with mixing free and closed software. If these drivers enable me to play the likes of UT 2003, then so much the better.

Here on /. I see many posts about driver support for Linux-based Operating Systems lacking - here's one of the market leaders producing drivers for Linux. IMO, we should be congratulating ATI.

Tim

Re: International Liability

[Elwood P Dowd]

It doesn't matter where you're from when you commit a crime in the US. If your crime occured in the US, you'll get deported, or picked up when you step off your airplane.

The reason that Dmitri shouldn't have been touched is that he didn't violate the DMCA. Someone else in his company did. Whomever distributed his product is the "criminal." Creating the product occured 100% on Russian soil, and was not a violation of the DMCA. Shipping it/wiring it to the USA was a violation. But Dmitri didn't do that. Since this is criminal law we're talking about, you can only go after the individuals that commit the crime, not some random member of their company.

Unless I'm totally misunderstanding the situation. Maybe Elcomsoft is a two person company, and Dmitri really did send the product to the US. Maybe the "crime" was his presentation, and not distributing their product.

Either way, it's the law that's fucked up, not the fact that it was applied to a foreigner. Being from another country doesn't give you diplomatic immunity. And it shouldn't. The US isn't bad in that regard. If you mail a bomb to Italy, and you live in Greece, you'll get deported, or arrested the next time you travel to Italy. Right?

Re:NVidia drivers not so hot...

[cheezedawg]

Funny- people install bad drivers on a Linux machine that crash the computer, and all they say is "Oh well, I hope these drivers improve."

People install bad drivers that crash a computer running Microsoft, and people scream "Look how unstable this Microsoft OS is!!!"

Re:Whoop-ti-do

[Anonymous Coward]

So it is illegal to use alien to convert your RPM.

Which part of modify do YOU not understand? Unpacking the software with a different tool doesn't modify it in any way. The files are all still there and they haven't been modified. If they had they wouldn't work.

Re:Here's hoping

[avdp]

That's right... Nvidia is a hardware company and that's how they make their money.

So what was your arguments about programmers going hungry if Nvidia's drivers were open sourced?

I think most reasonable open source advocates don't expect Oracle to release the source code to their database. However, there is little (valid) justification for hardware companies (such as Nvidia) not to open source their drivers.

A distros lack of LSB compliance isn't ATI's fault

[Nailer]

RPM is the standard Linux package file format. If your distro aims to be Linux Standards Base compliant, it must have a mechanism of installing such files.

Preferably a full RPM implementation, but systems like alien or even (I guess) rpm2cpio are acceptable.

Re:Here's hoping

[be-fan]

An OpenGL driver is a full OpenGL implementation. A lot of the optimizations that NVIDIA does in the high-levels of their drivers could easily be used by a competitor. Since crappy drivers is the main thing holding ATI back, it would be very stupid of NVIDIA to help them out in that catagory.

RPM Inclusion in LSB Linux's Biggest Clusterfuck

[FreeUser]

RPM is the standard Linux package file format. If your distro aims to be Linux Standards Base compliant, it must have a mechanism of installing such files.

No. RPM is not the standard Linux package file format. The standard Linux package file format is the tarball, either gzipped (.tar.gz) or bzip2ed (.tar.bz2), or uncompressed (.tar).

RPM is a part of the LSB standard, which is just one of several Linux standards that are NOT universally accepted, nor should it be. RPM was placed in the LSB because of Red Hat politicking and in an IMHO very illegetimate effort to give them an edge over other distributions. Indeed, RPM's inclusion in the LSB is the main reason why the LSB should, IMHO, either be rectified to exclude it, ignored altogether, or (ideally) adhered to in other respects, with the RPM provision sumarilly ignored.

The pointlessness of including RPM in the LSB standard is underscored by the incompatability between Suse RPMs, Red Hat RPMs, and Mandrake RPMs (to name just three), and by the success of many products which have been packaged in proper, distribution-agnostic form (nvidia drivers being one such example, but by no means the only one).

Yes, superior distributions such as Debian and Gentoo can extract the necessary data from the cumbersome RPM format, but forcing them to jump through that particular Red Hat hoop is neither justified, nor desirable.