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.

Here's hoping

[lazyl]

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.

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: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.

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.

Bah..

[grub]

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]

Re:Bah..

[RDW]

Dana Carvey? LUXURY! When I were a lad we had to make do with watching Monty Python on a 3 inch oscilloscope while we paid IBM 6 shillings an hour to let us debug their punch cards for 26 hours a day with a blunt knitting needle underwater in total darkness! And when you tell young people that today, they don't believe you...

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.

Re:PPC?

[*xpenguin*]

Nevermind, the page says:

# This version supports only Linux/x86 versions based on libc 6.2.

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: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.

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: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.

3DNow! support too

[Brian Stretch]

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.

Nice License Agreement

[waldoj]

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

press release

[tornater]

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

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.

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.

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: Butterscotch

[CyberKnet]

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.

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!

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!!!"

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.