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

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: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: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.