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

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...

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.

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

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.

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

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!

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.

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.