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.

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: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.

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.