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Problems With OEM ATI Cards And ATI's Linux Driver
Doug Bostrom writes "Over at FlightGear.org, Andy Ross describes how ATI's new Linux drivers only seem to work with "official" ATI cards (made by ATI), why that does not make sense, and a possible fix that unfortunately would mean booting Windows, if only for a few minutes."
They never have crappy drivers!
Which card will work hardware accelerated out of the box on latest Mandrake or Redhat?
According to the message posted, the utility used to reflash the BIOS runs in DOS, not Windows, and will work in FreeDOS
Are you saying that OEM ATI cards are not made by ATI?
Now, I did click on the "fix" link, but the website was not responding, so the only thing I'm going off of is that line. The author says that windows needs to be booted, and so I'm assuming that this windows is going to be on the same system, right? If so, this could present a problem since though many linux users also have windows installed on their computer, it's a good guess that many do not. So, what do these people do then, hmm?
*dual boot, referring to two or more operating systems (as many people have many more than just two)
that drivers for ATI cards does work for ATI cards.
They are by default not guaranteed to be able to work for anything else.
There are a few possible explanations for this rather odd driver situation...
I know this is rumor-mongering, but I can't help but notice that the *Windows* drivers dont' perform such a check, and neither do the Linux Retail drivers...
Consider this: Microsoft or some other party requests unofficially that ATi *not* support Linux in its OEM hardware, just for the sake of not having OEM desktop vidcard support for Linux...this could explain things like the OEM/Retail check that occurs in Linux, but not Windows. Interesting stuff..I want to see what ATI's reaction on this is.
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
This is probably a very good argument for non-binary, truly open-source drivers...
/* affect != effect */ void affect(int *thing,int effect) { *thing += effect; }
I've been hearing about bad ATI drivers since the days of the 80386. I've had some severe problems with ATI drivers myself, and needed to call ATI tech support. My impression is that the company should not allow receptionists to write drivers when they are not answering phones.
My answer: For business use, buy Matrox.
nVidia's drivers are wonderful, there's so many to choose from! In this modern age of infinite personalization and the choice to the nth degree, I love knowing that that somewhere on the interweb, there's a 12meg unified driver set made JUST FOR ME.
...had wonky drivers. Especially on their more recent cards (radeon forward). I'm guessing they get their cards so cheap by not paying their driver team.
For instance, on my mulitmonitor system I used to have the Radeon VE (Win2k). I installed Wolfenstein and Jedi Knight. Wolfenstein would crash all the time, but Jedi Knight was okay. So I upgraded drivers. Then Jedi Knight didn't work, and Wolfenstein did. Bah.
Not to mention going from TV out to Monitor out and back again was a terrifying ordeal because their saveable settings "themes" don't work. Or at least didn't work up until the time I took out my *last* ATI card.
mmmmmm Parhelia....
vk.
I think it was just a programer doing a standard check (helo vidocard. who are you?) and a QA department with every and only ATI cards.
I was under the (mistaken?) impression that the ATI drivers were released as open source? If so, wouldn't it make sense to produce a 3rd party patch against them to remove the check rather than get into flashing the bios on the card itself?
Not so, not so, not so. ATI has a reason for ensuring that their drivers function properly only with authorized hardware. ATI's marketing strategy centers around the company being recognized for making the top-quality graphics cards on the market. This definition includes all components from circuit boards to microchips. ATI's primary market is those consumers who need or want top-of-the-line video cards for personal or professional reasons. The ATI brand's image of exclusivity and quality plays a viutal role in the company's marketing strategy.
Having taken this into account, consider the Linux user community's reputation for using "hacked" or "modded" hardware for all sorts of reasons from saving money to illegally circumventing copyright restrictions. It follows that it is totally in ATI's interest to release drivers that work with their hardware exculsively. To do otherwise would be to associate the ATI brand with all matter of hacked, downscale, and jerry-rigged hardware, a move which would ultimately prove a detriment to ATI's profits.
theire
Holy shit... they're, their, and there have all cross-bred!
So what is to stop Linux users from modifying the drivers to bypass the official hardware checks? Shouldn't be any harder than defeating those old manual checks (i.e. type in word 12 in paragraph 3 on page 141).
will wine save me from booting that twisted os?
I have an Excalibur (ATI 9000 Pro based card), and have to run through a series of installs
to stop the video card locking up my Win2K system. The original drivers seem to be buggy.
When it is working fine (like now), it is a damned fine graphics card, its just such a
bitch to get going.
http://jesus.everdense.com/
Could somebody please post a link to the first Soviet post in this discussion. Thank you.
A oem radeon 7500 would not work at all with the driver downloaded from the ati site, but there was a "special" driver included with the card. It was a "overstock oem special" at compusa. I went back in, and ponied up the extra 20 or so bucks for the retail model, and the problems dissapeared.
Actually ATI does buissness with whoever is winning the video card race, they want the bleeding-edge technology, and most mac people who are into gameing, modeling, etc know whats good and what's better. When the GF3/4 came out that's what was in Macs, now its an ATI 9700
Sure, buy a crap card (LE means it didn't pass the "non LE" test, it's underclocked).
/.
Then flash it with an ATI firmware. FYI the GPU & RAM clock speed are... in the firmware.
That means his card is "overclocked" an probably instable as well, else they wouldn't sell it a LE.
Then, test some drivers, and make a flame report about it, and then get it posted on
So, instead of encouraring the company to make competitive drivers (binary, not binary, who cares: we want drivers THIS YEAR) lets do the contrary and flame them.
"unfortunately would mean booting Windows"
This quote examplifies exactly what is wrong with you Linux geeks. How are you going to convince people to adopt Linux by spending all your time bashing Windows? It would be anagalous to Juno spending all its time to bash AOL, and look where it has gotten them!
Huhu
Yeah, with an OpenGL that lacks half the extensions to exploit the features of those cards. Lovely.
Those 'new' (ie ATI 7500+, NVidia 4MX+) cards are just expensive radiators in macs. Oh sure, you pay twice the price for them due to the stupid ADC connectors and/or a custom firmware, and you get half the features for it.
And, yeah, I have macs, and I have those graphic cards. I even flashed an ATI 8500 for my G4, however, if you have an ADC display, you are screwed.
"Having taken this into account, consider the Linux user community's reputation for using "hacked" or "modded" hardware for all sorts of reasons from saving money to illegally circumventing copyright restrictions. It follows that it is totally in ATI's interest to release drivers that work with their hardware exculsively. To do otherwise would be to associate the ATI brand with all matter of hacked, downscale, and jerry-rigged hardware, a move which would ultimately prove a detriment to ATI's profits. "
As opposed to the reputation their brand already has for bad drivers (the present situation doesn't help) which could affect their profits.
In for a pound, out with a pig.
That said.
I have been in the computer game for a long time and have been threw every component and its manufacturer under the sun.
ATI gets a bad rap because it sold a buncha crappy cards with crappy drivers a while back. But they hired the Apple PR team to pimp them and a lotta people bought these cards and got screwed. The ads were better than the actual performance.
NVIDIA came along with a couple of nice 16 meg cards that worked well with Open GL and Direct X, and were fairly cheap.
ATI retaliates and does the Original Radeon. Pretty much junk except for the 3d performance. But ATI had been a traditionally OEM supplier anyway. Not a lot of experience for the high end commercial product. Remember the day of 3d cards? You would see STB and VooDoo, and that was about it.
The Geforce is a great product, sold a helluva lot, did the job become popular. But ATI revamped and started with the 8500, cleaned its driver act up and their cards kick ass.
I have an 8500 64 meg I grabbed from NewEGg and am perfectly happy with it, all 3d games in windows and it works well in Linux. My other box has a geforce 3 and it works well two. Though for web stuff, 2d, the ATI hands it its ass.
Problem with most people is they buy the bargain basement, OEM, close out, and it doesn't work to expectations. Well, GEE, musta been a reason for the closeout sale for all that white box shit. Oh yeah, paid 74 bucks 2 months ago for the 8500, tv out and all.
AS for those drivers from ATI, there are for ATI cards. In the day there were many problems with NVIDIAs reference drivers not working with third party manufacturers.
I understand we are all cheap computer people, and we conserve where we can. Between pricewatch and EBAY. But I learned a long time ago. Spend that extra 20 dollars for the retail CPU, get the 3 year warranty. Get that name brand motherboard. Cause it never fails, you buy something cheap and it burns out and you gotta buy again.
I think ATI and NVIDIA are par with each other and I am glad. Good competition. I understand the loyalty to NVIDIA, they were the reigning champions. ATI is kicking ass too. IT is better for all of us. And as for you guys who bought that 64 meg 20 dollar Radeon 7000(cause it said 64 meg) sorry dudes, shoulda ponied up some more cash/
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
There is a difference between "Built by ATI" and "Powered by ATI". The problem you're seeing with OEM and non-ATI manufactured cards (aka "Powered by ATI") is in the BIOS -- the driver expects an official ATI BIOS (which would be a on "Built by ATI" card) and doesn't see it, so it won't work. The "Powered by" cards use reference drivers which aren't tweaked to any particular iteration of the card. "Built by" drivers won't install on non-ATI cards.
Solutions: Flash the BIOS as some have been suggesting, or buy an official card. Or just yell at ATI enough until they release a reference driver.
-----------
POiT!
The ATI driver for Win95 for the 1995 mach64-based ATI card "PN 109-34000-00" is buggy. For a long time, I thought that Netscape was crappy, leaving 'ghosts' when scrolling the window, and crashing, so I switched to IE. Later on, Excel started to hang up and exhibited the same scrolling 'ghosts' that Netscape had, and crashing. After that I turned off the hardware acceleration in the ATI driver, and all these problems went away.
I am suprised no one has created a patch to fix this yet. It sounds like it is nothing more than checking the PCI ID to see if it is "correct". The solution is to just NOP out the check, or if necessary JMP past it. It is no different than those annoying doc checks on older games where you had to type in a random word from the manual, and probably much easier to bypass.
Booting Windows is a fix.
yES.
Almost reminds me of the "Quake III" optimized drivers.
For those who don't remember. ATI released drivers that gave high frame per second scores in Quake III. QIII being a common bench mark this made their cards appear to run very fast. It turns out that the driver looked for the Quake3.exe file and reduced the video quality to up the frame rate. If you changed the name of the file to something like Quack3.exe and ran it. The video quality improved while the frame rate dropped.
It's not that ATI has bad hardware, just horrible drivers and poor judgement.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
I have a "powered by ATI" card that I bought on the cheap, and I remember reading at rage3d.com that one particular release of the windows drivers for XP did a similar check for "OEM vs Retail". This was back in the day when the retail drivers and OEM drivers were different. Funnily enough though, my OEM card had a retail bios so I didn't experience this problem.
This problem in the older driver sets was removed (aain I cna't confirm) when ATI went to the unified driver "Catalyst series"
Maybe this set of drivers has been ported from the old code base? Now according to the press release the Linux build is a "unified driver". So I expect it is ported from the newer code base...
If you go to the ati site and click on the "powered by ATI" drivers, there is no option for a linux driver. It only appears under the "Built by ATI" drivers section. This would suggest to me that it is very deliberate. All of us can assume why... but none of us know for sure.
My gut feeling is they can't be sure how the OEM cards are set up (eg mem speed etc) and therefore can't guarantee the driver will work. ATI don't have the resources to field calls from every man and his dog world wide for 100 variants of the same card. Then again like I said this is only speculation. We should probably find out the reason before everyone shoots off at the hip and accuse ATI of all sorts of things.
Back to windows for a second. The solution to work around the windows install was a simple modify of an inf file....
Mybe it is just as simple for the linux xfree drivers, but I don't want to start pulling rpm's apart and looking at whats inside.
lounge around on the blue couch
Q11: Will ATI Retail drivers work with my Partner Product?
A11: Yes. ATI Retail drivers are designed for products "Built by ATI" however these drivers will also work on "Powered by ATI" partner products. These drivers are available at the following link http://www.ati.com/support/driver.html
according to this they should work!!!!!
lounge around on the blue couch
[Flightgear-devel] ATI vs. Linux
Andy Ross flightgear-devel@flightgear.org
Wed, 27 Nov 2002 15:23:14 -0800
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Probably most of you noticed last week that ATI has released a unified
linux driver package for all of their 8x00/9x00 cards. I've been
wanting to try one of these for a long time, but have been a little
scared of the DRI drivers which are still maturing. This was a good
excuse to buy a cheap ($70) Radeon 8500LE and try it.
The short report is that it works and seems to run FlightGear very
well, but I wouldn't recommend buying one purely for their Linux
drivers. Stay with NVidia for now. Continue reading for the story of
compatibility hell.
Background: ATI's business model differs from NVidia in that they
manufacture and market their own circuit boards, not just the graphics
chips. Mostly. They actually *do* sell the chips to OEMs, who market
third party Radeon-compatible boards. In their marketing parlance,
their own boards are "Built by ATI", while third parties sell "Powered
by ATI" hardware. Most of the low end mail order cards are of this
type; ATI's hardware seems to be sold mostly off of store shelves. In
practice, this doesn't make much difference. While some OEMs might
skimp on parts or use cheap memory, most don't, and the hardware is
100% software compatible. ATI's windows drivers have always worked
equally well for OEM hardware and "Built by ATI" cards.
Except their Linux drivers. For reasons unknown, the recently
released drivers do an explicit check to see that they are running on
"built by" hardware, and exit if they find a "powered by" card. Guess
which one I bought? Not that I could tell -- I ordered a "ATI Radeon
8500LE 64MB" card from a mail order vendor. There is no information
in the distribution channel to indicate what you are getting. Nor is
there any documentation on ATI's site that the linux drivers only work
on "pure" hardware. So I'm SOL. ATI clearly says on their website
that Radeon 8500's are supported, but in reality most Radeon 8500
cards are *not* supported. Someone lied to me.
But nothing is ever unfixable. Remember that the hardware really is
software compatible (the DRI drivers and Windows drivers don't care
what they are running on). It turns out that the "OEMness" of the
card is stored in the PCI subsystem ID, and that value is defined in
the card's BIOS code. And the BIOS can be flashed.
So I'm off to the realm of the hardware modder and overclocker. It
turns out that utilities are available to put a retail BIOS into an
OEM card, which will defeat the stupid version check. I found one at
http://www.xcl-clan.com/ -- woo hoo. Except that it's a DOS program.
Remember that I'm a Linux guy. I have no DOS, nor FAT partition, nor
even a floppy drive in this machine. So after a few hours finding and
burning a FreeDOS CD and figuring out how to get a ramdisk working,
I'm golden. The card has new BIOS, and it works, and the steam coming
out of my ears hadn't yet caused any major burns. Yay. Apparently
some people enjoy this stuff...
In summary: unless you are 100% sure that your card is a "built by"
variant (which basically means that you have to have purchased it in a
dark red ATI box at a retail store), are happy with gray market stuff
like BIOS reflashing, or absolutely *must* have one of the
super-high-end super-expensive 9700 cards (for which no alternatives
exist), stay away from Radeon cards for Linux. The technical decision
to cut off perfectly working hardware is pure idiocy, and the
marketing scheme that makes it impossible for a consumer to tell the
difference between supported and unsupported products is downright
dishonest.
It's not that the drivers themselves are poor quality, or that I think
ATI is actually trying to abuse its customers. But this driver
release is just not good. Between them, the ATI marketing,
engineering and manufacturing people have turned a fairly standard
software release into a bloody, frothing mess. Give them another
release to fix the release stupidities (or at least document their
hardware limitations) and hopefully things will get better.
And the competition isn't even close, anyway. Except at the very high
end, the NVidia hardware and drivers are just as fast, just as cheap,
and (most importantly) just work.
I'm going to give the DRI stuff a whirl tonight. It lacks a lot of
the fancier hardware features (programmable shaders), but FlightGear
doesn't use them anyway. After last night's experience, I'd honestly
give up 10-20% in performance to not have to use the ATI dreck.
Andy
--
Andrew J. Ross NextBus Information Systems
Senior Software Engineer Emeryville, CA
andy@nextbus.com http://www.nextbus.com
"Men go crazy in conflagrations. They only get better one by one."
- Sting (misquoted)
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I flashed my Matrox G400 from Windows XP Professional.
My brother got a Gateway computer that was suppose to have an AGP Rage Pro II. For weeks it didn't work with X windows. One day he picked the old Mach64 X server by mistake and low and behold it worked. The OEM was selling what was essentially a Mach64 (it had more ram than a stock Mach64) and calling it a Rage Pro II (yes, I know the cards where probably simular, but there are sufficent differences to matter. Especially for 3-D games). You can imagine the problems this would cause. If your Wiz bang Radeon 9000 is really a first gen Rage 128 with 64 megs of DDR slapped on, but still reports itself as being a, so t Radeon The driver takes the card at it's word and nothing works.
As a side note, the "SoundBlaster Live!" that was suppose to be included has an Ensonique Audio PCI chipset instead of the EMU10K chips it was suppose to have. OEMs suck.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
This is why I use Mac OS X.
:)
I pop the card in and it Just Works (tm).
I had a GeForce 2MX board in there, and just replaced it with a GeForce 4 Ti4600. Just installed the board and it works. It also has dual-head support so I run both my 22" Cinema Display (ACD) and 18" Sun LCD (DVI) off of it.
I wanted a third display -- so I added an ATi Radeon 7000 in a PCI slot and poof! It also Just Worked (tm). I've got my Sun 21" CRT plugged into it.
My display now spans three monitors. One for running xterm's, one for running Mail.app, and one for everything else.
Why do I need 3 monitors for that? 'Cuz I can.
Anyway, no crappy drivers for me -- just built-in OS support for me. Those of you who b_tch and whine because you can't use your 1984 EGA Video Seven board under OSX just have no idea what plug n' play _really_ means!
--Me
I've been in touch with tech support at the OEM for my Radeon 9000 Pro, Power Color. They are not happy with the situation and the pressure is on for ATI to get a fix out ASAP. Latest email estimated sometime next week for drivers that work on all of the OEM cards.
I also get the impression that this was not a conspiracy. The drivers use the INT10 support in the card's video BIOS. The OEM video BIOS's vary slightly from card to card depending on what features they implemented (2 DAC vs 1, etc). The driver needs to be adjusted for each of the various BIOS. That's why flashing the ATI BIOS works. ATI just made it work on their cards first and will be filling in support for OEM cards ASAP.
Is that guy who wrote that piece a retard or maybe thinks that he has some clue? .h file... the same goes for USB... It's just plain stupid that there's no way of neatly coordinating efforts to collect once for all those IDs... but thenwho needs so much bloat?
Every darned OEM has its own PCI ID. The correct way of recognising cards is checking this PCI ID against a database of and if matching then it's being used. This is how it's been for years and this is why Linux has new PCI IDs added every now and then into one of the kernel's
happy turkey day!
It's great that ATI released a binary driver (it would have been better if they had released a Free driver or at least something portable and fixable). Why do I say this? It adds to Linux credibility! If more hardware manufacturers start to support their hardware under Linux thats good. However I feel stung personally. I can't try their drivers but they don't build laptops so I couldn't have gotten a "built by ATI" solution. I have a Radeon M9 (RV250) so I should be able to get some support from the DVI CVS but it would be much nicer if I could get a supported driver (and not the no Xv $179 Xi one) and compare the DRI one. I asked ATI what the situation was, for any pointers, told them I would try to use their driver anyway and told them that I had supported a commercial Linux distro. I asked them if they would supply Dell with a "source" for the drivers as they would with the Windows version so Dell could supply a driver for their configuration (and ATI support could pass me off to Dell). Their reply? A stock letter telling me to go to the manufacturer of my product. My next move? A call to ATI customer services tomorrow, until I at least get an email address to a human and a human reply that answers my questions!
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Everytime I've seen an anouncement about these drivers the anouncement has specifically said that the drivers are for cards made by ATI.
Derek Greene
Funny this thread should pop up... I just pulled out my trusty Matrox Millennium PCI video card to while doing the post turkey day PC support work that happens on every major holiday.
Anyhow, the Matrox stuff was rock solid for business apps. Had a mystique, then millennium, added a rainbow runner, then a G400 Marvel and a RT2000 at work. Yup, an early adopter... the trusting kind...
The Marvel is what really what blew my faith in Matrox. Spent $300 when that was a serious amount of cash for a PC video card, found out there were no win2k or nt capture drivers... Dropped a box back to win98se and waited for the glorious 'over 2g' files and a bit more stability. Years pass, they release a new version of the card (the G450 without hardware acceleration) before a win2k driver was released. Finally, they delivered something. They turned the win2k version into nothing more than a TV tuner card! No capture.
Insult to injury, Matrox offered to give me $50 off a G450 if I bought it direct - not even enough to let them compete with other vendors selling the retail box with the 'rebate'.
The RT2000 was ok once it worked, the RT2500 much more forgiving.... but the trust is gone for me. (not including my trusty millennium card, that is...)
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
I've flashed a Abit board using their windows based web utility.
I've flashed a Ricoh DVD/CDRW using their Windows flashing utility.
It may be ATI's policy that the OEMs are responsible for modifying (if needed), testing, and distributing the drivers for their cards. The presence of an ATI video chip does not mean that the board is compatible with an ATI video board. Many OEMs make minor or major tweaks to the reference designs that their cards are based on. They may even design their card from scratch. It is the OEM's responsibility to provide drivers for the cards that they sell. Unfortunately, many OEMs are unwilling or unable to properly support their products, that costs money, which could help pay for the CEO's new airplane.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Actually a good percentage of 'powered by' ATI 3rd party boards are built on the same assembly lines as 'built by' ATI boards, using the exact same PCBs & parts. Just the printed label & stickers are different, or the PCB colour.
Mind you some OEMs do manufacture their own 'built by' ATI boards on their own lines using their own designs.
Actually a good percentage of 'powered by' ATI 3rd party boards are built on the same assembly lines as 'built by' ATI boards, using the exact same PCBs & parts. Just the printed label & stickers are different, & maybe the PCB colour too.
Mind you some OEMs do manufacture their own 'built by' ATI boards on their own lines using their own designs
That argument makes zero sense.
1. Nobody, Linux hacker or otherwise, builds cards in their basement with modern surface mounted chips, it would cost dozens of times more than the card itself does.
2, They still have to buy the chips from ATI (if they have some other chips that ATI's drivers are useful for then ATI is in much worse trouble that from from your fantasy Linux hardware builder.)
3. The fix for the other cards was simple enough to be totally trivial for anybody capable of building the card from scratch.
You have to do better than this nonsense to try to insult Linux users. Go back to school.
What are some of the other reasons?
"Finally, you seem not to realise that it isn't always up to the card/chipset manufacturers to open their driver source. NVidia, for example, is under NDA with several third parties over technology used in their cards and drivers. That means that they can't open the source to their drivers. "
How do you know this? Who's your independent source? If you say Nvidia, then that's a bit self-serving of them to say that. Doesn't change the end-results though. But untill the open-source community gets into the hardware biz. we will always be at the mercy of some company, be it Nvidia or ATI or Matrox even. Sucks to be stuck with a freedom half-way between windows and what we aspire to.
That's funny, yesterday I've been bitten by this f**ing thing and now I see it on Slashdot.
I saw the hype about new driver and since I needed a new graphics card I thought it would be nice to show appreciation. I was a little disappointed that it took several hours to debianize their crappy RPM packages, but I guess that's the price of using the best distribution. And then when I'm done I get this stupid message about my non-cheap, non-no-name 8500 card being unsupported. I was about to kill someone. If the computer case wasn't closed already, I would probably have ripped the card off and thrown it out of the window.
Instead of all the jumping-through-hoops to build a bootable DOS floppy etc., why aren't the hardware manufacturers starting to build Linux-based tools?
The GPL'd FreeDOS project deserves kudos for providing legacy support alright, but Linux also provides additional reliability (no lockups during BIOS flashing...), choices between CLI or various GUIs, continued cutting-edge development of the environment with support for USB, FireWire or whatever media peripherals might be available and even support for hardware platforms other than x86 (e.g. Mac peripherals have BIOSes as well), to mention some advantages off the top of my head.
Since hardware manufacturers can't continue relying on DOS much longer now that MS is pulling the plug, the obvious choice for boot-time tools is really the freely-distributable Linux. It would be a tragedy for everyone but Microsoft if Windows became the successor of DOS as the *required* hardware maintenance platform.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
Seems like ATI has manoeuvred themselves in a difficult position by selling both chips to OEMs while manufacturing their own cards at the same time.
Clearly ATI has an interest in selling their own cards with the very best drivers available. This may imply withholding support to other manufacturers.
But ATI also has an interest in selling chips to OEMs, and has to make sure that "ATI inside" does reinforce the company's good imago. But these OEMs range from Hercules to some noname Taiwan 4-person manufacturing firm with holes in the roof and without the resources to develop their own drivers.
Should ATI refuse to provide decent drivers to this small OEM, effectively reducing their sales of chips to (perhaps) the benefit of their retail product? Or should they provide suboptimal OEM drivers, running the danger that consumers start associating "ATI-inside" with crappy cards (not knowing it's the drivers that are cripple)?
ATI should make up their mind, and either supply best possible support for both types of cards, or drop OEM sales altogether.
here on the DRI web site is a little explianation about ATI naming
specificaly:
The difference between the 8500, 8500 LE, and the 8800 is clockspeed. The 8500 LE is made by third party manufacturers.
I have always used ATI cards, but at the moment I only have a ATI Radeon, so I can't try ATI's new drivers. I will probably upgrade for ut2003 and DeusEx 2. But any way I have a lot of confidence in the DRI people.
So...what's this? Graphics card manufacturer releases binary-only drivers for Linux and they are Bad? ATI releases drivers for their video card and they are bad? It seems that both of these are pretty much the normal course of events.
It's interesting that these drivers seemingly work great with real ATI boards, suggesting to me that they are just Evil and explicitly exclude support for OEM boards, even if they are fully ABI-compatible.
All I have to say is that, for both problems, there is a simple solution. Use the source, Luke!
---
It is said that the lonely eagle flies to the mountain peaks while the lowly ant crawls the ground, but cannot the soul of the ant soar as high as the eagle?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Does anybody know if these drivers support TV out.
If someone has experience with the drivers *please* post them!
Here's a thread where people asked the same question on running 'powered by' cards and it contains a link that we found which seems to solve the problem. (Requires hex editing a file and the 'powered by' restriction is gone)
h re adid=33648944&perpage=20&pagenumber=4
http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?s=&t
There is actually a work around to get powered by cards working with the Linux driver WITHOUT needing to flash your cards BIOS or using Windows. It involves a tiny bit of hex editing and details can be found here (4th post down on link)
I've got a OEM 9000 PRO from ATi and it refused to work initially:
/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers/fglrx_drv.o
(--) fglrx(0): Chipset: "Radeon RV250 If" (Chipset = 0x4966)
(--) fglrx(0): (PciSubVendor = 0x148c, PciSubDevice = 0x2039)
(--) fglrx(0): board vendor info: third party grafics adapter - NOT original ATI
(--) fglrx(0): Linear framebuffer (phys) at 0xd8000000
(--) fglrx(0): MMIO registers at 0xe9000000
(--) fglrx(0): ChipRevID = 0x00
(--) fglrx(0): VideoRAM: 131072 kByte (64-bit DDR SDRAM)
(EE) fglrx(0): board/chipset is not supported by this driver (third party board)
I quickly came to the conclusion that the ATi drivers don't like non-ATi cards. I did a bit of searching and I found a solution - I did not find this myself!
Install and configure the drivers as per normal. Also, I suggest you download "hexedit" from freshmeat.net as you'll need it. You'll then need to hexedit this file:
To let it accept non-ATi boards, hexedit the file at offset 0x626e and alter "74 44" to "90 90" and save changes and away you go. Since making this change only, my 9000 PRO now works fine under RH 8.
This means no Vesa drivers! It means no more 60Hz screen refreshes! It means for GL acceleration. Run "glxinfo" for some information on the status of OpenGL and maybe "glx_gears" to actually test it. It should run very quickly.
Enjoy!
I would also like to note that my card does work and it's not 'made by' ATI. It's a HIS 'powered by' Radeon 9700 and has been working flawlessly with the new drivers from day one.
There also is a patch that you can apply to the drivers that will make them work with other cards without having to flash around with the BIOS. (See my other posting on this page for the link)
We've managed to get an ENMIC 8500 Pro to work with that as well. (see mutombo's posts in this thread)
I have a 64MB DDR VIVO Radeon. I bought it because nVidia's drivers would lock my system after a few hours of surfing the net (I checked with my brother's Geforce 2 the other day and found that they still haven't fixed this yet). ... to full of themselves to realise they have customers...
ATI's support of Linux users is half-arsed at best.
Their own binary-only drivers only work on newer boards (8x00 and 9x00) so I can't use them. They're not interested in covering the DRI drivers to use S3 Texture Compression (which is patented) so I can't play UT-2003 (hence my brother's Geforce). The have requested that people not work on the TV-out features of the Radeons because it is patented, so I am stuck with VESA framebuffer tv-out or a very buggy hack of a thing for X that hasn't been developed for a year.
They aren't giving out information to the DRI team on how to use the more advanced features of the Radeons so the DRI drivers will fall further behind soon their closed source drivers (in feature set anyway).
I don't think I'll be buying another ATI card. I'll go back to nVidia and hope they stabalise their drivers. But at least the features are there and they 'just work'. ATI are starting to remind be of 3dfx
Is it being ported to Linux?
You know something the rest of us don't? Please post a link to that information.
From: http://www.linuxfocus.org/English/January2002/arti cle222.shtml#222lfindex3
Currently most Linux graphic card drivers (X servers) do not support hardware-accelerated GLX/OpenGL for remote applications. They do support hardware acceleration for local applications. The effect is that remotely started OpenGL applications are hardly starting at all and are really slow. An exception are the closed source NVidia drivers. They have a direct rendering interface which supports indirect rendering for remote applications.
I use a central server to run my applications and then use X to display them remotely. Is the above excerpt out of date or do any other board manufacturers plan to incorporate the ability to run OpenGL apps from a server?
Brian.
To get powered by ati cards to work you need hack file /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers/fglrx_drv.o
let it accept non-ATI board, hexedit offset 0x626e: 74 44 --> 90 90
got this from Rage3d
http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?s=&thre adid=33648944&pagenumber=4
They are not drivers for the ATI Card itself, they are drivers for the ATI CHIPSET
Really - I don't read it that way at all. Looking at the notes about LINUX and XFree86 support It just refers to product families.
Now granted that ATI tends to sell a "RADEON 8500" and so there is confusion between the chipset and the product. But nowhere can I see and assertion that the drivers in question are either for or not for ATI Chipsets.
Now if they were released (to the public, reference drivers are almost always released to OEMs under NDAs) as reference drivers then that is a different thing. Reference drivers are for the chipset, if the OEM has correctly implemented the hardware, they will work, these drivers are used for reference, hence the name. The downside is that these may not use all the optional features of the chipset. Remember that one chipset can support a number of functions, and some of these are dependant on the OEM fitting the right support chips, the right speed memmory, the right connectors. If they differentiate in price the may choose not to do this.
If it doesn't say reference driver, then its not. Its made some assumptions about the hardware above and beyond the chipset. Depending on how close this is to the original reference drivers it might work, it might be flakey, it might just lock up.
So if you want performance you will need to look for a driver for the specific hardware, if you want stability then you should try and obtain reference drivers - thats why NVidia stuff is reasonably stable.
Remember the OEM manufactures the card for its own reasons - if it doesn't say 'supported by ' when you buy it you have no right to expect it to. Many cars are powered by Ford engines, I would not expect Ford to be able to fix the crash damage on my non-Ford car, but I would expect them to be able to service the engine. If you buy a Sapphire card for your Linux system, then make sure Sapphire provide the driver you need.
At what level does company X have an obligation to support its product sold through the OEM channel - after all you choose it, your supplier sold it, the distributer shipped it - all of these people all 'added value' to the supply chain. Many video card memory chips are made by Samsung, but clearly they will not be expected to provide a driver.
Yes the ATI logo is used - but it says 'Powered by ATI' - it does not say 'Compatible with ATI' although that is the assumption many consumers will make. Perhaps the fault there is shared.
Now be clear I'm not defending ATI here - this discussion is applicable to any hardware drivers. ATI is at fault here for the whole confusion about what this driver does and doesn't do, and what its logos do and don't mean. NVidia are much clearer, and feel it better to provide wider ranging support.
But it is important to understand that just becase hardware X uses chipset Y, then its not reasonable to expect a driver for Y to work with X - there is more differences between hardware than the name on the front of the box.
Rule number 1 for Mac buyers/users:
:)
DO NOT under any circumstances buy "extras"(like RAM, bigger HD, monitors, peripherals) from Apple.
Every Mac user knows this. It's just those poor, poor switchers that get cleaned out. I remember being on once... I bought an $800 17" CRT. I bought 32MB of RAM for $300. I bought an ixMicro 8MB video card(that I never used) for $500. I bought a DVD-ROM drive without decoder for $300. I've been there, I've done that.
Basic rule of thumb, buy the fastest system(bus speed-wise) with the fastest processor(since upgrades are usually about 2 years away) the best video card(flashing after-market cards is a surefire way to lock yourself out of something cool later) and the least RAM, HD and other "commodity" parts you can buy. Pick them up later.
Never buy a monitor from Apple. They've offered about 3 models of monitors with non-proprietary plugs in their entire history, and those were in the interim time between the d-sub 15 and the ADC. Meanwhile, all Apple video cards have a perfectly usable DVI connector and a DVI-to-VGA adapter in the box.
Consider yourself empowered. Don't let them screw you. The Mac is a great machine, but you HAVE to know how things work first. You can't just make a TV commercial and expect not to get ripped off from then on.
Just tried RH8, MDK 9.
RH7.2 and MDK8, SUSE 7> all previously autodetected and correctly configured Voodoo3s...
Both autodetect and configure Voodoo3 and Radeon 7500 (what I have handy) during install, and hardware accel is enabled by default, it can be deselected during install.
Installing Knoppix 3.1(Debian unstable, basically) configures it properly, but accel does not work on the Radeon.(Haven't jacked with it further, cool distro otherwise, on my short list)
I got a boxed ati radeon 8500, and the drivers don't work anyway for me. The DRI module won't load into the kernel, nor will it recompile.
The xfree86 firegl side drivers leave the console looking like it went through a potato masher.
It's really sad that I bought an ATI card specifically because I knew ATI had open source drivers for their Radeon cards. Well, I waited over a year for drivers for the 8500 that don't work...
Wow, what loyalty to the linux community.
Closed source drivers maybe just PR, but at least nVidia has a reason why their closed source (The SGI contract or whatever). AFAIK (and corect me if I'm wrong) ATI has no real reason for closed source drivers.
Is that although there is no real driver for me, the card still costs the same.
If they don't support Linux (x4 major distributions), then why isn't it cheaper than Windows (x4 Major versions)? If I call up and get "sorry, we don't support users on that OS", then why is some of what I paid for paying for Windows support?
Not that I'm twitter and bisted.. oh no!
Partition Magic, among others, has been using DRDOS as its boot OS for years. M$DOS is not the only flavour out there, and who cares if M$ "supports" DOS or not? What possible difference could official "support" make to someone who uses DOS (M$ or others) for boot and maintenance utility disks? Besides, M$DOS has been essentially bug-free for many years, and there's not much that can go wrong with it.
Just because something is "unsupported" doesn't mean it magically stops working. It'll continue to work just as well as it ever did.
What would be a problem is if hardware manufacturers only provided Windows-flashable BIOSs.. but I don't think that will happen, if not because of the obvious technical issues, simply because of the hassle factor -- their own techs will scream bloody murder, along with the rest of the clone system world (40% of all PC sales in the U.S.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Hrm...
I've been trying for two years now to get my G400 to work _properly_ under linux.
By properly I mean that the following two things have to work.
a.) Video acceleration on the second head.
b.) Power management on the second head.
a.) It kinda sucks that if I use linux with mplayer on my matrox card, the Xserver dies so horrifically that I have to ssh in and do chvt from antoher box... (I can't use CTRL-ALT-F1 to change back to the console).
b.) It kinda sucks that I can't get my monitor to go to sleep. Instead, when the first monitor goes to sleep, the second display goes to a lovely bright cyan colour.
Needless to say, this isn't with the Xfree driver (which doesn't support the second head).
All my problems are with the Matrox binary driver which I can't fix because I don't have the source.
I'm not the only one.. just search on google for 'G400 APM linux' and you'll find dozens.
I wonder if Matrox will fix the driver before the card hits the dustbin... I already consider it to be obsolete.
Excellent! Worked for me with a Sapphire 8500LE! I still get a little weird artifacting around the mouse pointer, but nothing as bad as when i flashed my board to the ATI non-OEM BIOS!
thelocust[dot]org
The support for a second monitor seems to be a sales gimmick more than a serious initiative. It is certainly poorly supported by Matrox.
Mine is a Sapphire card as well, but obviously being a 9000 PRO it is quite different. I've not had any problems at all though since I started using the ATi drivers which is very good. They are very quick in 2D and 3D which is very pleasent. Although I've not tried anything serious in 3D yet, like Quake 3.
I'm running XFree86 4.2.0, the standard RH8 install so it may be worthing trying a newer version of XFree86 (4.2.1 is current) if you continue to get these problems with the mouse pointer. I certainly don't have them.
The main problem is that we are going to have to go through this everytime ATi release a driver. Hopefully they'll remove this check in the future!
Wait, shock horror, you mean you don't get source code with DRI drivers? Of course you don't and some of us have known this all along despite the FUD from it's proponents. Can we now dispense with the unfair criticism of NVIDIA for not having "open source) graphics drivers?
Are you sure smp would affect the drivers? Perhaps parts of the OpenGL layer can be threaded, but I would think that smp affects the game engine performance far more than anything else. Would a video driver actually have a "use smp" function callable by applications? Could a video driver prevent an application from using threads?
A) Not everything on a circuit board is an ATI chip. Besides the simple things (resistors, etc.), there are RAMs (which don't all have the same timing numbers), possibly external DVI transmitters, power regulators, etc.
B) OEM boards do their own board layout. Layout can make or break a board because of issues of inductance, capacitance, crosstalk, signal timings, and all sorts of things.
As a person who has worked at a technical level with OEM "powered-by" ATI cards, I can assure you that they are NOT the same thing.
Actually, RAM timing numbers are a big deal. If the OEM chooses to use RAMs different from what ATI uses (for instance, ones that have CAS 2), then only the BIOS on the OEM card will work. You CANNOT use the ATI BIOS, because it has the wrong programming for the RAM chips. Furthermore, if the OS driver attempts to reprogram the memory timing with something improper for the RAM chips on the board, it will not work.
I would buy my XT hardware used but I've just found that cast off high end is cast off for reasons other than being old.
Always Buy New: CPU, Motherboard, Hard disk, media (floppys, zips, Blank CDs... ok the CDs an obveous one).
Prefer new: Fans, advanced cards, ram.
Prefer used: Printers (New are good usually people toss old printers for speed and quality... I use Kinkos for quality I don't need speed)
Always buy used: Scanners
(People cast off scanners when Microsoft declares em obsolete and pulls driver support. Old scanners are already better than I need. However getting good Sane* drivers for new scanners is a pain.
*Sane is a standard Unix scanner support libary for a number of scanners.
I don't actually exist.
How do I install the ati linux drivers in slackware? They only provide rpm packages. I've read that alien and rpm2tgz are supposed to convert it to tgz but I can't get them to work.
Rattling around the back of my head is a disturbing image of something I ... Now I'm remembering, those giant piles of computer
saw at the airport
magazines right next to "People" and "Time" in the airport store. Does
it bother anyone else that half the world is being told all of our hard-won
secrets of computer technology? Remember how all the lawyers cried foul
when "How to Avoid Probate" was published? Are they taking no-fault
insurance lying down? No way! But at the current rate it won't be long
before there are stacks of the "Transactions on Information Theory" at the
A&P checkout counters. Who's going to be impressed with us electrical
engineers then? Are we, as the saying goes, giving away the store?
-- Robert W. Lucky, IEEE President
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