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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)."
Let's hope they got it right.
Reviews of the stablility and performance of these drivers will probably be a major factor in my decision on whether or not to buy a 9700. I've been hesitating because of all the bad things I hear about their drivers. I use NVidia now and I've never had a problem with the drivers, so I'm a little worried about switching.
Aw crap, ninjas!
Goodbye forever, windows, you won't be missed.
If I ever see a BSOD again, it will be too soon.
Does anyone know if this will work on PPC with Gentoo or Debian such as those Powerbooks that come with the mobility radeon 9000?
It is all well and good that they are putting out drivers that works "across the board" for their product line, but I have seen, time and again, where a "universal" device driver is not so universal after all. If it was written on a machine sporting an 8500, where does it degrade with the 9700 and so on? If they are not the same card, they won't be 100% compatible.
Another possibility is that the drivers are written to work generically with the chipset. This would have the distinction of having unremarkable drivers that do not push any card to its full potential.
My deep and sincere apologies to ATI if they are successful in making a universal driver for their stuff that actually takes full advantage of each device. I would bet that such a driver would be a real winner.
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
There have been alternatives from Matrox and PowerVR for some time now, but that may not be viable for all users. PowerVR especially is tight-lipped about weather or not they have plans to release a new product any time soon. The Kyro 2 cards are almost 2 years old now, and I am looking for an upgrade. The Radeon 9700 could now be a good choice for me.
nVidia has used a universal driver for years. Doesn't matter if you have a GeForce2 MX or a GeForce 4600, you download the same driver for the OS.
I wonder - is the "installation" package unified, or is the actual driver that gets installed unified?
IE the installation program detects what driver needs to be installed, and then pulls the relevant files out of the installation file and installs them (how many times can one use the word install or it's derivatives in one sentance before you are forced to take a technical writing class?).
I think will have to wait for the benchmarks to come out to figure out the answer.
Does anybody know if this driver supports the video input/output features of my All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500DV? I'd love to have xawtv running on my screen, or to watch mplayer on the TV.
Or do I have to run the GATOS driver for that?
I went to the download page and discovered that the
." This allows me to build the NVIDIA drivers for any distro I'm using OR any tweeked kernel I'm using.
rpms were ONLY in i386 packages, no re-linkable source distro.
In the past I've always downloaded the NVIDIA src RPMS and just done a "rpm --rebuild . .
Restricting the users to the distro's stock kernel kinda sucks.
But it doesn't suck nearly as bad as having NO support whatsoever.
Thanks ATI, you just made the decision for my next notebook considerably more difficult.