ATI's Radeon Linux drivers no longer supported?

SuperBug writes "After viewing the previous story on Slashdot about the Radeon 9800 vs GF FX 5900, I checked out ATI's web-site which seems to have been re-designed relatively recently. It seems strikingly similar to nVidia's site regarding the driver selections. I thought "great, ths should be much better to find my drivers now. At least a little simpler." To my surprise. I found this message for Linux Graphics Drivers "Not Supported". Thinking this had to be a mistake, I took a look at the "Discontinued Products" list under the customer care link and lo and behold. Just about every recent card is there. I just wanna know, what gives?"

Comments

possible answers?

[sweeney37]

Looks like they answer a lot of Linux questions in the FAQ.

Mike

Re:possible answers?

[wowbagger]

Funny, in the FAQ they say they supply binary drivers for accelerated 3D.

They no longer have them on the web site.

The FAQ is old, and has not been updated.

Re:possible answers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well the FAQ still states

Full-featured and optimized XFree86 drivers are available on the ATI website for the following product families ONLY:

• RADEON 9700
• RADEON 9000
• RADEON 8500
• FireGL Workstation products

The FireGL drivers are still listed if you go through the drivers page

Now having said all of this, ATI never supported the Linux drivers anyway. They provide documentation and tell you where to find drivers for Linux, but the drivers themselves are actually external to ATI. ATI generally provide patches to E.g. XFree86 but they do not maintain the drivers themselves. So whats new?

Re:possible answers?

[subsolar2]

ATI has only ever "Officially" supported Linux Drivers for their FireGL series of products. These drivers "unoffically" support the 8500 and beyond consumer grade products.

Nothing new here ... please move along.

Re:possible answers?

[pVoid]

Even further: ATI has never officially supported many NT/XP/2k drivers either...

I had bought a TV tuner card about 2 years ago, (it was brand new at that point)... the drivers went from beta to discontinued. The beta drivers were a hunk of shit. It took me hours to install them: there was no installer provided, just the drivers with .inf files, there were 6 distinct drivers for one physical card, and unless you found the exact sequence to install them in, they would BSOD the computer *during installation*. (I had to go through quite a few permutations). UN-F*CKING-ACCEPTABLE!

That is why I swore to myself that I would never buy an ATI card again (and I won't).

Re:possible answers?

[Endareth]

One thing found from digging through the ATI web site, while it is obviously in need of an update (note several references to the Linux drivers being available in the drivers section), there is mention of DRI Radeon drivers available at the Direct Rendering Open Source Project, with Linux Intel x86 drivers dated 2003-06-30.

Re:possible answers?

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

I went through the same thing, probably with the same card. ATI is permanently on my WNC (Will Not Consider) list both at home and at work.

Re:possible answers?

[Grandpa Jive]

I know what you mean. I avoid ATI's products specifically because they have a reputation of having really crappy drivers for *any* os.

I bought [and use] an ATI TV Wonder VE. The way this thing gets installed is kludgy at best, and under XP I get some crazy lines going all over the place randomly. They have some beta drivers for it, but using them made this card worthless as it never worked. pretty much had to reinstall after that.

and under linux theres no way to actually capture audio when you do a video capture under linux.. its a known issue. I got this for cheap which is the only reason why I got this.. but really. If I paid full price I would have taken this back and wrote ATI a letter.

Re:possible answers?

[iamnotaclown]

When the 3D effects company I work for finally made the switch from SGI Octane2s to PCs, we decided to go with the ATI FireGL 8800. ATI support assured us that Linux support was excellent. At the time, their Linux support actually WAS actually better than nVidia's.

After a year of frustration involving daily machine hangs, GL glitches and many cursing animators, we switched to nVidia Quadro cards (not sure which one). Since then, we've had almost zero crashes. There are still GL glitches in both Maya and Houdini, but the drivers are of MUCH higher quality.

Even when ATI "officially" supported Linux, that support was in name only. So they're finally dropping even that? Big fuckin' deal.

Re:possible answers?

[Ishin]

I also have an ATi TV wonder VE (in addition to a radeon 9700pro, but that's neither here nor there, as I agree on their driver support being crap) and use these open source drivers. They work great under windows 2000 on my dual athlon machine. They also worked fine in windows98se in my past experience.

hopefully this will solve your problems.

Re:possible answers?

[AstroDrabb]

The DRI supports ATI cards with 2D and some 3D. On my laptop I have an Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500] that works well with DRI. I was playing the Linux version of RTCW last night. However there are a few "proprietary" features that the DRI does not support because ATI does not release the specs. The NVidia cards on the other hand, have a common driver core. So any feature under the ms-windows driver will be present under the Linux driver. While I prefer open source, I don't mind if a manufactuer releases closed source drivers such as NVidia if they are of good quality. The NVidia drivers are just great IMO and I will only purchase from them in the future.

Re:possible answers?

[chef_raekwon]

the humour here is that every post above this level has a story about crappy ATI drivers/products...my story is no different, except that I had problems with an Xpert@play card about 5 or 6 years ago -- and they did the same thing to me then. I have yet to buy another card from ATI, and probably never will. It appears, from your posts, that some things never change.

Good Luck to those who need it.

To the rest, I say - go buy Nvidia, and save yourself the hassle.

Re:possible answers?

[letxa2000]

Maybe in a few years, the ONLY support will be for Windows. Remember, it's a Dog-Eat-Dog World where only the Fittest will survive, And Linux, BSD, Mac OX X, and any other Non MS OS is Dead or Dying.

That's how it has been for years, mostly. But if you haven't noticed more and more people, companies, and governments are using Linux lately. There is no indication this trend will stop. Hardware companies might be able to ignore Linux for another year or two, but beyond that they do so at their peril.

Don't worry--more, not fewer, companies will be supporting Linux in the future.

Re:possible answers?

[letxa2000]

Nice conspiracy mumbo-jumbo and "sky is falling" prediction, but you give too much credit to the monopolist and not enough to the free market which is already moving to Linux in increasing numbers.

Hardware will be supported in Linux by OSS programmers until there are enough people using Linux that hardware companies would be insane to ignore the percentage of the market they are ignoring by not supporting it.

I think you have too much technology experience and not enough real-world economic and business experience. Companies go along with Microsoft because it makes business sense to do so. When 10, 20, or 30% of the market is using Linux it no longer makes sense to blindly accept everything Microsoft dictates.

Don't worry, the sky is not falling.

Re:possible answers?

[nurd68]

Look at what we see: broken nVidia drivers, broken ATI drivers.

Let us suppose, just for a minute, that ALL DRIVERS SUCK.

They are all broken, in some way or another. All companies push stuff that isn't ready out the door, especially "stuff that can be fixed in software".

I look at it this way - I would rather have an honestly broken, open-source driver with a public buglist, than a closed "oh, it's ready to ship" driver that you can get no help on at all.

At least then I can work on it in my spare time, to try and get it to play nicely.

I just bought a Radeon 9800. Why? Because I think that when you take away nVidia's driver cheats, ATI has the superior hardware. Can I use it right now? Nope. But, I have a spare box with an AGP slot, source code for the R200's, and some free time. Maybe I can get it up and running and help out a bit. The kernel stuff should already work fine, considering that the ATI drivers don't require a kernel patch to work.

So, in short - all software sucks; open OS's just give me the ability to make it suck less, and that's why I prefer them.

Re:possible answers?

[Lumpy]

They also will not provide unified linux drivers, as it just is not worth it.

and every single one of us needs to write them a letter explaining why we will for the forseeable future only buy Nvidia and only reccomend nvidia to friends and relatives.

Nvidia supplies us binary drivers, but at LEAST they supply us drivers! I will buy only nvidia and reccomend to everyone to only buy nvidia cards. I have influenced at least 10 video card purchases in the past 2 months just by my reccomendations to co-workers.

If ATI would like to increase their sales, they had damn well get us IT people on their side... we influence far more people than they realize... and that can make or break a company.

Maybe....

[Graemee]

The guy who wrote them got hit by a bus and they didn't find the source code.

Re:Maybe....

[TopShelf]

That damn bus is dangerous - always seems to wipe out the one guy who can resolve a sticky situation. How come it never hits the PHB's?

Re:Maybe....

[hesiod]

> How come it never hits the PHB's

'cuz they're never in the office, or they have good enough parking spaces to hop in their SUVs before going anywhere near a bus.

Re:Maybe....

[slide-rule]

That damn bus is dangerous - always seems to wipe out the one guy who can resolve a sticky situation. How come it never hits the PHB's?

Who exactly do you think drives the bus? ;-)

This article is all wrong

[phoxix]

Get your binary only ATI drivers right here:

http://www.schneider-digital.de/html/download_ati. html

ATI's Alexander Stohr still works on these drivers (and is a lurker of the dri-devel mailing list.)

Lastly, why don't slashdot editors do some sort of background checking. What are they being paid for?

Sunny Dubey

Re:This article is all wrong

[phoxix]

Just like to add, those drivers work on the 8500 series to 9800 series. Even if they are labled for higher end cards.

Sunny Dubey

Isn't this suppored by DRI?

[termos]

Check here for more information. I am not sure though.

Discontinued products

[CaseyB]

"Discontinued products" simply means they aren't manufacturing them any more, i.e. anything that isn't in the current "Products" section.

ATI Linux Drivers

[Surak]

ATI XFree Drivers have always been written by third parties. ATI does not support them and never has. They merely provide specs to open source developers who in turn write drivers. nVidia, OTOH, actually writes drivers, but keeps the source closed.

So you have to decide the between the lesser of two evils, I guess.

Richard Huddy from ATI answered that question

[Rapsey]

http://www.slo-tech.com/clanki/03032/03032en.shtml

NVidia vs. ATI

[Matrix272]

I've been a fan of NVidia for a long time... since the Riva TNT2 came out back in the day. One of the major things that contributed to their success (in my opinion) is their driver support. For Windows, there's only 1 download for all of their graphics cards. Granted, it's about 30mb, but it works. With Linux, they've always been forthcoming with drivers, even when the kernel supports the cards (in the most basic way).

With the release of the Radeon 9800 and above, ATI is (arguably) finally catching up to NVidia in terms of quality graphics cards... it almost seemed a matter of time until something broke, and I guess the Linux drivers were the first thing. I just hope they keep their All-in-Wonder cards coming. If I ever save up enough money to buy another video card (holy crap, $400 for a modern one these days?), I'll definitely get one of those (I have a GeForce 4 Ti4600 right now).

I still like NVidia, I just hope their next card is better (and quieter) than the GeForce FX.

Re:NVidia vs. ATI

[josh crawley]

Speaking as someone who just installed Knoppix and the Nvidia drivers you're full of it.

Just grab the GLX and Kernel [4363 is latest] tar.gz's. Unpack them, export IGNORE_CC_MISMATCH=true. go into the Kernel directory, make, go into the GLX directory, make, go into /etc/X11, edit XF86CONFIG-4 [e.g. remove dri, etc.. replace nv with nvidia], add nvidia to your /etc/modules

now either reboot or isnmod nvidia and launch startx. Boom NVIDIA drivers.

WOW THAT'S SO SIMPLE I CAN'T UNDERSTAND WHY ANYONE USES MICROSOFT

Re:Is that an official distribution?

[phoxix]

Alexander Stohr is an employee of ATI. And the drivers on the link are official, are an offical source of distribution.

Sunny Dubey

Re:Is that an official distribution?

[blixel]

but for many people, "drivers that some guy built" just don't cut it

I guess you don't use Linux at all then eh?

Didn't ATI just win Xbox 2.0 contract?

[cacheMan]

Interesting...

A change for the worse, but not all doomed.

[alriddoch]

A search round the driver page reveals that Linux drivers are still available for the FireGL series of pro cards, and as the latest Radeon cards are based on FireGL technology, Radeon 8500 or later are supported by the driver. If you download the latest driver rpm for "FireGL X1, FireGL X1 128MB, FireGL Z1, FireGL 8800, FireGL 8700" then the package description lists "ATI Radeon 8500, 9700, Mobility M9 and the FireGL 8700/8800, E1, Z1/X1" as supported cards. Hopefully ATI will continue to produce updated versions of this driver, with new extensions, support for new versions of glibc and new versions of XFree86. It would be much better if they could list this driver in the standard section so that users would know it was available and supported Radeon cards.

I am using this driver currently with my Radeon 9000 Pro, and have had excellent results.

ATI drivers still suck.

[supabeast!]

I've given up on ATI because of their crappy drivers. Sure the drivers are no longer the huge bottleneck that they once were, but it's all still a big mess on Windows, and they are real bastards about just being upfront and posting decent Linux drivers for download. Since buying my Radeon 9700 Pro I have had numerous problems trying to run games on it under Windows XP and Mandrake Linux, and at this point, I'd rather just lose some performance and go back to running Nvidia cards with detonators.

Discontinued products

[Anonymous Coward]

The "Discontinued Products" page has nothing to do with Linux drivers. "Discontinued Products" simply means everything except for the current line-up (Radeon 9800, 9600, and 9100); these are no longer being manufactured, but they are still supported.

The removal of the binary-only Linux drivers (not to be confused with the "radeon" XFree driver) is news to me, though.

Re:vendor asshats

[mofochickamo]

It sucks when a vendor won't consider supporting their products in OSes that don't have massive market share...

Welcome to my world.

Steve Jobs.

You've got things out of order

[fobbman]

Before you post stories to Slashdot and stirring up the masses, why don't you try to contact ATI customer support either through email ? That seems to be much easier, and much more productive, than taking up front page space.

This is an ongoing problem...

[wiresquire]

The lack of support by vendors makes it real difficult for people to really have confidence in Linux, and makes them keep that partition with that other OS on it.

Just over the past month, I've got a digital camera that isn't supported. Actually, I think I nearly fried it trying to get it to work, but that's another story. Then I went looking for a 6 in 1 adapter for it. As I was browsing through the store and on the net, I was thinking to myself "If just *one* of these dang things said it supported Linux, I'd buy it!".

There's a market for vendors for people who don't want to compile major parts of an operating system like the kernel, X etc.

Hey vendors, this is a growing market! Come on in, the water's fine!

Re:This is an ongoing problem...

[SomeOtherGuy]

I have always found hardware that is supported fine in Linux for each category. The problem being, that by the time Linux supports it -- the product is no longer available at the stores, because it has been replaced with a new model. This is a vicious cycle. The memory reader is a perfect example. When I bought a USB CF reader I did much research and found that the SDDR-61? worked perfectlly on Linux -- and about 40 others did not work at all. I was lucky to find one in the close out bin at my local best buy. I used it for 2 years and was perfectlly happy. Then one day I bent the pins on it and decided I needed a new one. Again I did my research on what current CF readers were supported under Linux. Guess what, the same as the first time I had checked 2 years previous. You can walk into any store and find at least 20-30 different card readers....but guess what, try finding one that was manufactured 3 years ago....Damn. Same goes with webcams, digital cameras, video cards (to some degree), etc. This is frustrating. At one time (about 3 years ago) I had carfeully purchased all my external paripreals to ensure that everyone worked on Linux. And now that some of these things are wearing out, I am finding it very difficult to replace them without going "dumpster diving" on ebay..... You would think with the increasing popularity of Linux that hardware support would be getting better -- not worse.

Microsoft

[stephenry]

Isn't ATi lined up to produce the graphics hardware for the X-box? Maybe, Microsoft gave them an incentive to support Windows, and Windows only?

Re:DRI vs ATI ?

[lavalyn]

FireGL drivers support the OpenGL extension that allow UT2K3 to run. Probably why ATI released the drivers too - every last Linux gamer needed an nVidia card to play it before.

Re:Radeon is supported by XFree86 team

[eviltypeguy]

Not anything beyond the Radeon 8500 is supported. ATi won't provide the technical specifications citing industry trade secrets and a bunch of other crap. Oh, they also don't think that Open Source programmers are capable of writing a real driver for programmable hardware like the 9600 / 9700 / 9800.

They also refuse to provide the information to XiG, so you don't even have the choice of buying a commercial driver.

Darl MacBride comments :

[borgdows]

"They have pulled off Linux support at our request.
If they had continued to offer Linux support, we would have sued them for IP infringement about using Linux to develop drivers for the illegal Linux platform."

I don't know if this helps but...

[qtp]

The Xfree86 status page for ati shows accelerated support for the newer ati chips.

Maybe ati sent them the specs?

Re:Radeon is supported by XFree86 team

[mahdi13]

What the hell are you smoking? The XFree team reversed engineered it themselves, all ATi did was steal their work and fling poo at them

From the Interview last week...

Slo-Tech: When will ATI provide open source (Linux) developers with information about yours hardware so that they will be able to write drivers instead of reverse engineer them?

Richard Huddy: ATI gives Linux drivers quite a high priority - but there's just way too much intellectual property exposed in the low level chip interfaces so we don't put that into the public domain. I'm amazed that people can really reverse engineer drivers from our binaries - but I guess that shows just how keen the Linux community is to get the best out of their machines. Sorry I can't offer more on this!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

What a bunch of reactionary crap ...

[pantropik]

Normally I don't post in threads like this, which mostly consist of every user with a functional keyboard doing his best to shout down everyone else.

I've read through this thread and read "ATI is great and you're a moron" and "ATI sucks and YOU'RE a moron" ... I must say, it'd almost be amusing if the people saying this crap didn't come across as being so serious.

Let's review:

ATI's website has been revamped. Completely replacing a website this large in place is, one would expect, nontrivial. We can expect a few glitches here and there. It's not like some guy at GeoCities unveiling his new "Pamela's Yummy Tits" website. It's certainly NOT worthy of this level of discussion (term used VERY loosely) when the simple fact is, as you're about to see, it's all about ... NOTHING!

After reading all about the horrors facing innocent Linux-using high-end Radeon owners, I did the unthinkable: before posting ANYthing I visited the site for myself. I know, I know, the ancient Greek method of simply thinking about something and then expounding on it rather than actually sullying ones' self by investigating ... it's ugly. But I never claimed to be perfect. Next thing you know I'll actually start READING THE ARTICLES BEFORE COMMENTING ... god help me.

First I went here.

Then I clicked the big link called "DRIVERS". That brought me to here.

In the left pane I clicked "Graphic Driver". The pane to the right of that then presented an array of choices. I chose "Linux" and then from the pane just to the right of that I chose "RADEON 9700 PRO".

And what did I find after clicking the little red and quite intuitive "GO" button?

Driver Download and Installation
Before you start, please read these installation tips.

Download this driver bundle if you are having issues with your ATI product, including those mentioned in the "Fixed in this driver"
ATI Linux Driver Version 2.5.1:
Install the Driver Package for XFree 4.1.0 OR Install the Driver Package for XFree 4.2.0.
Xfree86 Version Driver Version
4.1.0 X4.1.0-2.5.1
4.2.0 X4.2.0-2.5.1

Posted: November 29, 2002
Released/Not Supported

Driver Release Notes (HTML)

This version supports only Linux/x86 versions based on libc 6.2.
To find out which library you have, download the script 'Check.sh' and run it.
This bundle contains the necessary files for any X86 version of Linux based on libc 6.2 (glibc 2.2)
Submit feedback on this driver to our ATI Linux Driver Feedback

Further Linux and XFree86 information on ATI products is available from the ATI website.

And there you go. Emergency over. After reading all the pure CRAP in this thread I must say it was a bit of a letdown.

And for those a bit braver, beta drivers for X 4.3 can be found HERE If you want to know what the deal is with these drivers (which are much newer than the ones on the main ATI site) just head over to HERE and you'll find lots of comments made by people who have (*gasp!*) actually USED the drivers instead of just making uninformed and mostly WRONG sweeping statements about them on Slashdot.

I apologize. I don't normally post things this mean-spirited but watching this thread unfold just kind of disgusted me. So many people ready to spout whatever bullshit pops into their minds, so FEW people who take a look at what's actually going on ... and you know what else?

Mod me down all you want. In this case I really, really very honestly don't care.