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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."
According to the message posted, the utility used to reflash the BIOS runs in DOS, not Windows, and will work in FreeDOS
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 drivers for linux are really good but So are Matrox's. Matrox write some bitchen drivers like Nvidia but unlike Nvidia they GPL the whole thing. Getting all the windows functionality in linux for both my GF4 and G400 cards is perfectly easy. I advise buying from those two companies for linux. Matrox cards though old are very nice because they are cheap and they have good linux duel head support.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
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.
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.
RTA -F(polite)
He didn't have windows/dos/fat partitions at all. he downloaded freedos and used a ramdrive to flash his videocard's bios. thats all that was wrong. the ATI driver checks to make sure the videocard is an ATI card. It should just check for an ATI chipset. Sounds like a problem ATI will pacth in the next release.
the new nvidia drivers (40.72)for winXP are total crap, 9/10 times it will lock the system up when starting games, at least on my system,(pent4 2Ghz, Ti 4200) I'v had to install much older 30.82 drivers to play games
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.
If you go into a computer store and ask for an OEM ATI chances are you'll get a white box made by some unknown company that just took the ATIs chips and slapped them on the board , even though technicly OEM meens its made by ATI. this isn't a bad thig as 99% of the time "OEM" stuff works just as well as retail. this is more of a case of bad ATI drivers doing poor bios checking
There are two 'types' of ATI cards (at least for the 97xx series) - cards made by ATI itself which are stickered as 'made by ATI', and cards made by other manufacturers which may be using the exact ATI reference card design or the manufacturer's permutation thereof, and with enhanced features and which are stickered as 'powered by ATI'.
"Get off the cross - we need the wood" - Tori Amos
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/
Presuming you already have Linux installed, you should look in the various /usr/doc/whatever
directories belonging to the XFree86 stuff (there
will probably be a whole load of different packages
required for X, I don't know about Redhat/Mandrake
as I use Debian) and look for a file like README.DRI,
which might be gzipped (it is for me). The file also
tells you how to make sure that X will try to use
OpenGL (not difficult, may already be done for you!)
Alternatively, the actual DRI webpages are more up to date, and more thorough about which versions of cards they support - look for the "status" page for a start!
Configuring stuff, heh, I forget! If you have X set up to use your card, and tell it to use OpenGL, it will know whether your card can do it or not, and will try to load the appropriate kernel module. In my case, using a G400 card, it doesn't manage this, as it wants to have the agpgart module installed before the mga module, but doesn't realise to do this, so when my machine's booted, I normally modprobe the agpgart module myself, and then the mga module, and then the OpenGL works fine. Really, I should set up the modules.conf files to do this automatically, but I can't be bothered.
Bear in mind, that the mga module is only right for using G400/G200 cards, and the other cards would want other kernel modules! Also, those other kernel modules might not have those same requirements. In short, your mileage may vary.
But to return to the point in hand: If you don't want to be downloading binary-only drivers, then nVidia based cards are NOT what you want; they have no opensource 3d drivers at all that I know of. Some of the ATi cards are supported out of the box (I don't know how well!!) and some are only supported by ATi's driver so far, the one in the article.
Be careful! New moon tonight.
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.
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.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
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
I aint arguing but the X-Box would make a pretty good arguement that MS has some real strong ties to NVIDIA.
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!
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Actually I've run into the same problem under Win2k. Unreal Tournament hangs for a second or so about every 10 minutes but then returns to normal. Serious Sam 2 freezes after about 3 minutes and takes the whole system down with it. I think its a driver issue for several reasons. First under Win2k/XP its awfully darn hard for a program running in user space to take down the system, although a crappy driver can do it fairly easily. And I never had any problems until I started using the detonator 40s.
We're going to make information free Mr. Anderson, whether you like it, or not.
Booting Windows is a fix.
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
Washington bullets will simply be known as the "Bulle
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
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/
I don't know how much Matrox helped with getting the Linux/XFree86/GDI drivers written. I'm fairly sure it was mostly thanks to hackers who reverse engineered the Windows drivers.
My other first post is car post.
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.
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
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
A mindset more graphics cards companies should adopt.
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.
Apple uses ATI chips in its Power and other Books. With various level of a success in Linux/PPC and Xfree86, though - most of people complain about DRI. But it's out of the box - nothing was downloaded from ATI, although ATI people say they help Xfree86 hackers with the code and consulting.
Less is more !
What are some of the other reasons?
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.
Nonsense. You must be using Debian, or some other distro from the stoneage. When installing Mandrake (and presumably RedHat and SuSE) you are presented with a list of X-servers compatible to your card (the card is autodetected) and simply allowed to pick which option you want.
For me, with my Matrox G550 these options included XFree-3.3.6 with or without hardware 3D-acceleration, and XFree-4.2.1 again with or without 3D-acceleration. (why anyone would explicitly select "without" I don't know)
This has been the state of affairs atleast since Mandrake 8.0 released a year and a half ago.
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?
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.
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
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 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
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.
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.
That's because Matrox doesn't care what OS you use with their cards, they only care if you use their hardware.
No, that's because Matrox doesn't have any decent knowledge locked up in their code. If they did, they'd have just given away a good part of their company to the competition and their officers should be sued by the stockholders.
And no, GPL protects *code*. It doesn't protect ideas, and that's what the competition is looking for with a fine tooth comb.
Now, having said that, it's the right thing to do if your expertise is in hardware, not in drivers.
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.
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?
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.
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?
Now read that source code....I think you'll find there's a source wrapper that links to prebuilt binary modules...
Advanced users are users too!