Slashdot Mirror
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)."
maybe I wont need to use the Gatos drivers anymore... this would be very nice!
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?
Spoiled Linux punks.
Back in my day we had a galvanized metal box with a circuit board dangling in it. We had an old VT100 terminal hooked up, and we were happy!. In fact we were so poor we couldn't afford all the serial lines so we had to get by with just both data lines and the ground, but we were happy! None of that Fancy-Pants hardware control stuff that became popular among the Brylcreme'd University people at the time.
Did I mention that to get to this VT100 I had to walk 40 miles uphill kneedeep in snow? Both ways?
bah..
[/curmudgeon]
Trolling is a art,
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.
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.
sigs are a waste of space
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
life+universe+everything=42
UT 2003!
Linux Games!!
Tux Games!
Neverwinter Nights!
In your face you greasy little "Linux doesn't have any games" troll!
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!
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.
From the release notes:
NOTE: The OpenGL driver can use AMD 3DNow! enhanced opcodes as well
and - due to design - does not need a kernel patch for AMD 3DNow!.
Now that's the kind of thing I like to see.
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.
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 like how their license agreement on the download page is in a text area in a form. I erased all of the text and wrote "ATI will give me one BILLION dollars," and submitted it. And they accepted it! Thanks to UCITA, that's valid, too. (I think. OTOH, who the hell can figure out UCITA?)
Ooh, I submitted it again and now they owe me a monkey. Pay up, ATI!
-Waldo Jaquith
The press release gives more information. These are unified drivers for ATI cards on Linux--COOL.
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.
This is excellent news. Now all i need is to find the book on "Installing ATI Drivers under linux."
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
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
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
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?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Butterscotch is superior to vanilla when analyzed at a compound level.
In fact, butterscotch is superior in all aspects. Butterscotch tastes better, due to its ingredients it is healthier. Recent studies show that butterscotch *looks* better too. The only thing that vanilla is better than butterscotch at is hit/miss ratio of the trash can. And that is because butterscotch actually gets eaten; recent surveys indicate that butterscotch pudding is preferred 100% to 0% over vanilla pudding.
Butterscotch also contains a larger feature set than vanilla. When distilled, butterscotch makes a great, long-lasting chew-candy. When frozen, it makes a fantastic jawbreaker, when heated, it results in a glorious milkshake.
In conclusion, your must see what is obvious: Butterscotch is Better Because it Begins with a B, and because they don't make Apple pudding. If you weren't so closed minded to new ideas, you would have seen this a long time ago. I hope that this simple explanation corrects your longstanding error in judgement.
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
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!
have you been defaced today?
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.
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.
I just had a 1-hour confrontation with those drivers. There are several things:
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.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
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.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy