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."

Comments

Re:Isn't it right

[Morgahastu]

They are not drivers for the ATI Card itself, they are drivers for the ATI CHIPSET.

ATI makes cards with its own Chipset but they also let other companies (such as Sapphire) makes their own boards with ATI GPU's, and they are supposed to use the same drivers.

Incase anyone is wondering, Sapphires cards are way cheaper and sometimes (in the 8500's case) they outperform ati's own cards.

Why not patch the drivers instead?

[Linux Freak]

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?

Clueless

[buserror]

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.

Re:Sad

[Kris_J]

If you look at this comment as coming from someone who might not have a Windows partition/licence, then it's simply an honest expression of a disappointment in a technical restriction they can't overcome either costlessly or legally.

All /. editors must have NVIDIA Stock

[puto]

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

Re:All /. editors must have NVIDIA Stock

[m1a1]

But ATI revamped and started with the 8500, cleaned its driver act up and their cards kick ass.

This is misleading. Yes, ATI's drivers and cards got much better with the 8500, but it was still a far cry from GeForce 4. Nvidia's drivers are simply superior to ATI's. If you don't believe me look at how well the Geforce 4 performs against the 9700. It is a testament to its drivers and architecture that it hangs as close as it does (if you look at the hardware of both). Now ATI is in the lead with th 9700. Is it faster than what nvidia has? Yeah. Are it's drivers better? Hello no. Not to bash ATI. They have done a great job getting back frame game, but they still lack in an important area!

Re:Sad

[fymidos]

Most of the times it is not really bashing windows. You would begin to understand if you could only, let's say, read your documents in pure-dos-6.22 mode.
It's even worse for us linux guys. My home computer has an uptime of 23 days right now, i NEVER close my mozilla window, i NEVER close my consoles, i never stop XMMS (mp3 player). I have 4 desktops full of windows. I get up, work, go for a walk, work, go to work sometimes, back, work...
If i suddenly have to reboot to read a crappy word file that openoffice can't import correctly... my reaction is naturally "unfortunatelly" !
I'm used to to have a desktop that is just there. ALL the time. It's not much to redo everything but it's not something i want to do.
To sum up, for me it would be "unfortunate" if i had to boot a different linux distro as well.
And i did say MOST of the times. Sometimes, it's just bashing microsoft of course :)

Re:Explanations...

[imr]

It seems there is a little more there than pr, but i'm no specialist in hardware. Here what i read in a french news site speaking of the same subject:

From: Roman Stepanov
Subject: [Dri-devel] Re: New ATI FireGL drivers announced
To: Alexander Stohr
Cc: dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2002 15:02:31 +0300

Hi, Alexander!
[ snip ]

At first I attempted to set up SuSE's xfglrx package to get 3D acceleration
for my Gigabyte AP64D board (actually it is a R200 QL with 64 Mb DDR RAM).
After generating XF86Config and typing startx in command prompt X server
failed to start. I found in system logs that 2D driver refused to
work with third party boards. It's nearly impossible to buy "build by ATI"
board in Moscow, so I was forced to apply my assembly skills to modify board
vendor id in 2D driver (fglrx_drv.o). After replacing ATI's id (0x1002) with
Gigabyte (0x1458) I was able to start XFree but I saw my text consoles
(vga=791) broken. Next thing I've tried is to start Tux Racer game. After 2
minutes of pretty smooth gameplay it hung and my box locked up completely.
I decided it's enough to uninstall this package and I started to look around
for any alternative driver. I've downloaded official ATI driver version
2.4.0 and tried to install it. After install script built kernel drm modules
installation stopped because depmod complained about unresolved symbols in
module fglrx.o That was my last attempt to use official ATI drivers :(

Now I have installed driver from dri trunk, it works pretty well, but I have
very slow gameplay with Loki's Rune. Maybe today I will try to install
official ATI driver again, this time version 2.4.3. I hope it finally going
to work.

******** FIN du premier mail ********
Reponse:
From: Alexander Stohr
Subject: RE: [Dri-devel] Re: New ATI FireGL drivers announced
To: Roman Stepanov
Cc: dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2002 13:43:31 +0100

[snip]
for completeness its: R200/RV250/R300/some-Mobility
[snip les quotes qui parle du drivers qui se lance pas]
That's Intentional. On the list you can find several references to
problems with the multiple OEM BIOS variants even with the DRI drivers.
Since this must be considered as third party software and hardware,
you should consider calling the respective vendor for support.
(Having a broken BIOS checksum is the least problem in that area...)
[snip quotes qui parlent du changement du code hexa]
This might be a BIOS problem. Current drivers are using the
XFre86 Int10 module for doing mode switches. Thanks for another
reason for not letting that drivers run on third party boards.
[snip]

Stability of a specifc grafics board is mainly due to its
clock rate, its RAM bus interface clock an signal quality
plus misc power supply parameters (mainboard abilities to
drive that board, PCB design to ensure the voltage does not
drop critical in any operation thermal and electrical condtion).

I know that ATI is ensuring this for the "Built by ATI" boards
with much effort, but i have no idea how intense those third
party vendors do that. The second unknown thing is your hosting
PC system. You should verify it with a secondary operating system.

[snip]
> Now I have installed driver from dri trunk, it works pretty
> well, but I have very slow gameplay with Loki's Rune.

Thats the best and only drivers that should use for your adapter.

> Maybe today I will try to install official ATI driver again,
> this time version 2.4.3. I hope it finally going to work.

What you were doing is "unsupported" and "not recommended".
This is meaning that it is on your own risk if you do it.
Maybe there are legal reasons why you shouldn't be allowed
to do that, but i dont know this myselves.

-Alex.

Re:It makes perfect sense

[ywwg]

so why do their windows drivers work with "powered by" hardware?

Re:It makes perfect sense

[rugger]

WTF are you smoking. Whatever it is, you should stop posting to slashdot while under the influence.

The boards the drivers don't work with are boards built by 3rd party board manufacturers, using chips that ATI sold to them. (ie not reverse engineered, not stolen, not illegal or immoral in any way) These boards, while not made by ATI themselves, are as legal and sanctioned as the ones made by ATI. They are not jerry-ridded, hacked or downscaled in any way. In fact, ATI lets these manufacturers use the logo "powered by ATI". If any manufacturer was making cards that ATI was not happy with, ATI would simply refuse to sell the Radeon chipsets to them.

This driver incomaptibility is a silly restriction, probably due to a rushed release schedual or poor foresight from the driver writers. It could be simply because the driver has not been tested with "powered by ATI" hardware yet. I expect that this will be fixed.

Re:Luckily...

[CoolVibe]

That's because Matrox doesn't care what OS you use with their cards, they only care if you use their hardware.

A mindset more graphics cards companies should adopt.

don't buy cards with closed source drivers

[g4dget]

This is one of the many reasons you shouldn't buy cards with closed source drivers:

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.

What are some of the other reasons?

• Closed source drivers inhibit innovation. 3D graphics cards are really powerful computers--if the software to drive them were open, people could modify it to do other interesting things, not just one particular model of 3D graphics.
• Closed source drivers won't work with non-mainstream open source operating systems. I want people to be able to experiment with new GUIs and new kernels, not just keep building on top of a handful "mainstream" systems.
• Binary-only drivers tend to stop working sooner or later. You end up having to upgrade a perfectly working piece of hardware just because it isn't supported with the latest Linux/X11 versions.
• If you keep buying cards with binary-only drivers, you remove the incentive for people to ship cards with open source drivers.

Bitten by that

[fstanchina]

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.

Why not use Linux instead of DOS?

[Anonymous Bullard]

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.