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ATI Updates Linux Drivers
GraWil writes "Famed graphics card maker and documented Linux supporter ATI has refreshed its proprietary Linux drivers (3.11.1) for the Radeon and FireGL series cards. Unfortunately, many of the previous comments still apply and it seems that ATI is not yet committed to supporting Linux well. The procedure for installing is now documented in a separate how-to but it seems that quite a few are stuck in an endless cycle of compiling kernels with/without DRI/AGPGART/RADEON/DBE (insert random module here). For those with strong enough feelings, ATI is seeking feedback on these drivers."
The article starts off: documented Linux supporter ATI. And then goes on to say: ATI is not yet committed to supporting Linux well.
So which is it?
When you get to hell -- tell 'em Itchy sent ya!
Maybe ATi just plain don't know how to make decent X/Linux drivers? A graphics card manufacturer like ATi would not traditionally hire people with relevent experience, and I doubt they can justify the expense of hiring a specialist to do nothing but create Linux drivers.
Of course, Open Source could help them here, but we all know the arguments for and against that.
I've been hoping that some of these companies would do similar to what Google did (before this TopCoder) thing and issue a bounty of sorts to get these done. Perhaps the winner/winning group could get the right to develop the *n?x driver and possibly have it made into a paid over time position of sorts. As long as they pay less than they would in house + paperwork it seems both parties would make out pretty well.
( o ) one could say I'm rather baked
The nVidia installer is GPLd, they could use that rather than writing a huge howto. I guess ATI using software from nVidia would be a bit uncomfortable for them though ...
ATI, Remeber Diamond wouldn't release drivers specs for Linux either....
I never had to compile my windows kernel to get video working.
Just saying...
ATI makes some nice cards, but only for Windows users. Their Linux drivers are infamous for a reason.
If you are using Linux and want properly designed drivers, you really have no choice except to use an nVidia card.
If enough people leave the right kind of feedback, those drivers will be made open source.
There are just a few followers in management who think we need to follow NVidia's business model. They are wrong.
I use the ones provided with XFree86 and/or from DRI. Runs like a charm. I don't bother with those binaries at all.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Any performance figures on the two?
I am not the only one who is either thinking about or has already switched to Nvidia just because of the drivers.
I have been waiting for a year for proper drivers for Linux but as they still have not materialized the next card will be Nvidia, no question about that.
I wouldnt touch an ati card with a 10 foot pole, the only thing less scarry then the linux drivers are their windows drivers, and they are not that much better.
I got an idea: How about some 64-bit drivers. I'm sick and tired of my AMD64 3400+ having a GL refresh rate of a dead dog, or having to run it in 32-bit mode
(Which I refuse to do. I got 64-bits, I'm using them damnit. If I wanted to run a 32-bit OS, I'd run windows)
I'll believe that when my crappy Radeon supports 3D and my TV tuner at the same time.
If ATI's drivers don't cut it for you, this project has been helping out for a long time.
Tech News, Reviews and Tutorials
It is more a difference in system architecture than it is a matter of one system being better than the other.
http://nvidia.com
:(
:P
Been around since before 3dfx, and sadly 3dfx were the last 'good' open source 3D video drivers
I like Mesa for a software renderer (great job Brian et. al), but fact is DRI sucks. Doesn't matter if it's open or not - if it works it works, and frankly DRI can't cut paper with scissors.
I can't be bothered buying their cards. I have used ATI boards since 1987. I have owned the EGA Wonder 800, VGA Wonder, Mach8 accelerator (a Win 3.1 accelerator!), Rage chipset boards, Radeons from 7000-9000. Since I ran into a Linux brick wall with them (no specs, no binary drivers) my last two purchases have been Nvidia. I recommend the same for you if you use Linux.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
These drivers aren't new, they are out almost a month now and they suck just as much as every ATi driver before... I don't want a HOWTO to install a friggin' driver, I want to type ./install, restart the Xserver and have great framerates.
If the user interface is nice enough, does it really matter what exact steps are taken to install the driver? Even today, you hardly realize that a recompilation is going on with nvidia drivers, as they provide a nice little progress bar. To the user, the progress bar could represent copying files, compiling them from source, or whatever, he doesn't really care.
>I never had to compile my windows kernel to get video working.
Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've never had a Linux system become completely unable to boot because of a bad video driver.
On Windows? It has happened often.
Maybe you need to look again for something Windows is "better" at.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
I'm not sure the problem is with ATI.
I see no reason why the drivers cannot be binary just like on Windows. There needs to be a pragmatic approach to this, one which lets binary drivers exist with an interface that doesn't change all the time.
GPL is perfect for GNU tools and the Linux kernel, but has no place for drivers. If always enforced for drivers, then manufacturers just will never support a Linux kernel.
For example, if glibc was change from LGPL to GPL, then Linux would die overnight for commerce, and commerce is what is driving Linux into the enterprise.
"who think 'we' need to follow ...?"
are you purporting to be an ati employee?
Well, of course. The one "leg up" on Linux that Windows has and will continue to have for the forseeable future is that it's excessively convenient. It's already there. It probably came on your computer. You generally don't need to make any extra effort to use it. You seldom need to make any significant extra effort to use the made-for-Windoze devices, either. And you won't scare anybody away with fear of the strange and unfamiliar if you use Windows.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
before people started comparing the ATI drivers on windows vs linux..
here's my take:
I've got a laptop and a desktop, but with ATI cards in them. Setting up the video card properly on my laptop (windows) was a huge pain. It's a "mobile" card so finding the exact driver was... well.. painful. Go to HP (laptop manufact.) go to ATI, try this.. try that. Nothing worked right (often the installer would say I didn't HAVE an ATI card).
Then I went to install the ATI driver for linux (gentoo). Same problem. This driver, that driver.. big pain in the arse.
In hindsight, I would have gotten an nvidia card. I got my PVR (which also runs gentoo) and stuck my old geforce2 card in there. Not a single problem from day one getting the card to work in X... svideo out and everything worked almost flawlessly the first time (any problems I found out later were my own).
so, my take... but nvidia. they might not have the super duper fastest card all the time, but it's close enough that the saved time on driver headaches makes it well worth it.
> are you purporting to be an ati employee?
;)
Welcome to slashdot.
"... from an ATI engineer" did you not understand?
The 3.9 driver is much higher quality than the 3.11.1 drivers... I have had a ton of user complaints regarding black textures related to ARB_fragment_programs... Disabling the ARB_fragment_programs caused the driver to run the system out of RAM and die. Having the users revert to 3.9 solved all of those issues. It has caused that drivers advanced functions to get blacklisted in at least one commercial game.
no shit sherlock. Read his topic
Slow Down Cowboy!
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It's been 19 seconds since you hit 'reply'.
Piss me off. Got a Dell 2001FP to work with a second machine I set up. Figured for what I needed I didn't need to get a 9600 so I went for a 9200 only to find out that for some reason the DVI output is hosed. After some googling found no one else can seem to make it work either. Not a hardware problem as it works fine in windows. Never again for ATI.....
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
I have bought nvidia cards for the past 3 years because of their superior Linux support. And I am a prolific purchaser. This has amounted to at least seven cards, all nvidia. If ATI created and maintained stable open source video drivers with the Linux kernel, then I would very quickly switch my allegiance. I have always been uncomfortable with the closed source nature of nvidia's Linux drivers. But having a working card is the top priority, and so I've compromised thus far. I'd gladly switch to open source drivers if I could still play, i.e., UT2004 with them.
And even then the process is prone to inexplicable failures.
I'm beginning to think the only way we'll see easy driver installation on Linux is if people fork the stable kernel series - while Linus and the gang make all the changes they like to the unstable series, a separate team is preserving ABI compatibility whilst backporting non breaking changes. This task wouldn't necessarily be a huge amount of work - the kernel is pretty mature these days, most of the user-visible work is on hardware support anyway. If users don't get kernel updates every other week, it's not such a big deal.
For those who are not inclined to hack around with config files and such, we have to make a decision on ATI or linux. I uninstalled my linux partition due to the problems I would have to go through to get my video working. And these weren't solutions, they would have been attempted fixes (using a different ATI card driver without knowing the exact results). I plan on going back to Linux one day but I'm not sure if I'll be buying an ATI card anymore. Nvidia will be my next linux supported video card. Unfortunately, ATI doesn't lose that big a share of the market to care about my choice.
ogg
Black cat, searing pain, flames...? I must be in Heaven! - Homer Simpson
There's too much proprietary licensed code in these drivers for them ever to be open sourced. ATI and nVidia don't have ownership of alot of the code. At least nVidia did the decent thing and GPL'd their "glue" code which they do have control over (maybe ATI have too, but I'm not familiar with their drivers).
To be frank, I'm just glad that these companies are supporting Linux at all, although I don't think we'll see a major change in the status quo until Linux CAD workstations become more popular, in which case very high quality drivers will be mandated.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
Well if we're just going to throw around anecdotal eveidence as if it were fact, I did a Redhat installation the other day which successfully booted into a wonderfully fucked up display which made it near impossible to quit from their stupid Firstboot application. This was on Virtual PC 5.2, which emulated a Trio32. Once I'd managed to fight my way to a shell and configured X manually (Still using the Trio driver) it worked fine. The Redhat installer just fucked it all up.
If enough people leave the right kind of feedback, those drivers will be made open source.
Well, my employer, a federal government department, won't be buying roughly 100 FireGL cards this year (looks like we are going with nVidia Quadras) because of the lack of solid top-quality stable 2D multi-head (3-4 heads) open-source drivers. Yes, I mean 2D.
We'll being using the nVidia with binaries drivers which we would gladly drop in favour of ATI if their drivers were better, open source and part of XFree86 or xorg. Note: I don't care (much) about 3D, I need very high quality (bandwidth) 2D drivers.
That was my one burn in my venture into Linux. I installed FC1 and it didn't pick up my video card (ATI 9600 Pro), I looked at the choices for video settings and lo and behold there's my card in the options! One change and a reboot and NOTHING! It hangs the system, I can't boot and a hard shutdown puts the system in permenent pout. I've had to re-install three times now. The tech boards all tell me of this ATI problem but then why do I have a Windoze-like choice if the damn driver isn't even there?
I knew that sometimes /. isn't exactly quick on the uptake, but these drivers first appears AUGUST FIFTH, very nearly a month ago. It really doesn't take much to get a front page posting anymore.
Hey, did you guys here about this crazy Utah company suing International Business Machines???
You are comparing Windows to Linux when you should be comparing Windows to X or Windows to DOS.
Maybe I'm just unlucky but I have had X not boot because of configuration problems. Maybe I'm just lucky but I have never had DOS not boot.
That doesn't matter. No one wants their (not very good) driver code anyway. What is needed is the proper technical specifications. The GPL code can be clean-roomed from that.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
It's more like lack of staff, I believe. They've got something like roughly 4% as many developers doing Linux development as they do Windows developers- and these are developers dedicated to Linux driver development.
And they HAVE recently hired relevent experience- Michel Danzer just hired on out there and he's one of the DRI team's better developers. I don't know if the problems are due to them not doing something like NVidia (which is that their driver core is largely the same codebase for Linux and Windows...) or if it's that combined with the shortage of capable people working on them.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Seriously, I've been on the ATI beta testing team (although not anymore) and submitted feedback for every driver release to date.
I cannot get 3D working (2D works fine) with my 9800 pro - although exactly the same setup works fine on my old 8500 for 3D.
ATI have not responded to my emails, to my feedback, to any forum posts (although that isn't unexpected) - and this just plain sucks.
Please, if you want a 3D card in Linux, check people have the same hardware and it works if you're after an ATI card. Although only a small group of people have this issue, it is real and does exist.
Gentoo discussion
Rage 3D discussion
Quick Summary Enabling DRI causes X eat all my CPU and not start unless I have a working framebuffer.
With a working framebuffer I get screen corruption, menus and windows are not drawn properly and running any OpenGL application causes X to hang and eat all my CPU.
In both cases I can ssh into my box and kill X or the OpenGL app and I can use the box again.
The only common demoninator seems to be Asus motherboards with certain ATI cards - but the same hardware works fine for Windows XP!
Did you even read his/her subject line?
Try hitting F8 on boot up of windows. Safe Mode bypasses the card's video drivers into a generic failsafe 256 color 640x480 driver. Or maybe you just made that example up.
Nvidia drivers support XvMC extensions. This allows me to watch HDTV video clips even with a relatively weak CPU. Last time I checked ATI's drivers did not support XvMC under Linux. Briefly looking through the release notes, it doesn't look like this has changed. NVIDIA is still the card to get for people wishing to play high def video content smoothly under Linux.
I think the best feedback you can provide is a note indicating that as a result of the fact that the ATI card you would have liked to use did not work out of the box in a Linux instalation, you have returned it and used the money on an nVidia card instead. Further you are advising your peers that they will get a much better result by using nVidea cards if they choose to run Linux.
You may want to note that you would be happy to help them test their cards and drivers under Linux, but if you are going to do that you expect to be paid for the work.
-Rusty
You never know...
same reasons I'll never buy ATI. Hell, the drivers suck even on Windows.
Nvidia has their own share of problems, but at least their drivers are released every few months. A lot of reading is required to set them up right and there are bugs (X hw cursor problems with the 5x00 series) but they're annoyances and not debilitating.
NVIDIA gets my purchases time and time again because there are no other affordable dual DVI cards out there that run decently on Linux
sadly, this is one department Linux reallllly lacks in.
and next thing you know, someone will ask:
"an ATi engineer? ATi makes engines now?"
um, why are you arguing that the driver is too proprietary when an actual (well purported...) employee is saying it is just an issue with management? In fact, I have not see any ATI employee argue that there are proprietary routines in the driver that prevent it from being open sourced. The only people that I have seen that make that argument is nvidia. And nvidia does it because they fix their badly designed hardware in the driver, the so called secret driver optimizations. If it's broken, fix the hardware!
Since I ran into a Linux brick wall with them (no specs, no binary drivers) my last two purchases have been Nvidia. I recommend the same for you if you use Linux.
I wouldn't. The thing is that proprietary drivers and no documentation are against the principles of F/OSS. If I had to recommend a graphics card, it would be ATI radeon 8500 which works well with Free drivers (accelerated OpenGL etc.)
If you encourage hardware companies to keep their documentation secret you will have a future where you have to use non-free drivers for all your hardware. That is a disaster from the perspective of both Open Source and Free Software movements. I would like you all to understand that the software freedom has a value and functionality is not the only meter of the goodness of software.
Check out this rant about ATI's broken promises for 64-bit and Linux...
I updated my old ATI 7500 All in Wonder to a 9600 AIW, thinking that "ATI tries to support the community - they are releasing some specs to the DRI developers, if not for the newest boards."
/. ATI into realising that they need to support us BETTER - after all, telling people "Sorry, our drivers don't work with DirectX 9.0, you have to downgrade to DirectX 8.0" would not fly, so why should we be told to downgrade from XFree80 4.4 or Xorg to XFree86 4.3?
/. story will be, as the bard put it, ".. a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".
First, the proprietary drivers do not work with Xorg - only XFree.
Second, they will lock up solid if you are running 4K kernel stacks - you need to have 8K stacks. Ven then, while their glxgears program runs, I cannot run UT2003 - as soon as I try to launch the game the monitor shuts down and the system locks.
Third, for reasons unknown I've lost all Xv support - so video playback sucks and I can no longer access my PCHDTV card.
Fourth, GATOS and the proprietary drivers don't mix - so you cannot use the tuner section at all.
I've asked one of the ATI developers who hangs out on the DRI mailing list to push for ATI deploying a Bugzilla-like tracking system, and to support the tuner in the proprietary drivers (since all they need to do is make the tuners an Xv subsystem).
So, let us all
Of course, past experience suggests that this
www.eFax.com are spammers
I can't believe that this is how I have to install a driver. I'll swap to nvidia for my next card, even though I am happy with the windows performance of my current radeon 9800 series :|
I *want* to swap to linux. But dear lord, it isn't being made easy. I can't be bothered with all this.
Looking at the title of his comment, that is the implication.
*sigh* back to work...
ATI is sloooow on supporting Linux.
ATI is sloooow on releasing Linux driver updates.
We have about 70 odd Matrox P650 cards, and we use the generic XFree86 "vesa" driver because the latest Matrox drivers still suck so bad, crash, lock-up, destroy the virtual console (Ctrl-Alt-F1). ATI isn't quite that bad at least.
No, it just means ATI is REALLY bad at making drivers on other platforms.
Still no support for the Radeon 7500.
Gatos and DRI both provide functionality. It's not really necessary, though, the stock kmod radeon and stock Xf86 radeon drivers work.
Except for that pesky s-video port. The kernel has no trouble putting the console screen on the TV but only the VESA driver is successful for Xf86. The VESA driver isn't fast enough to watch DVDs.
Pick and choose, I've tried all the combos:
kmod: 2.4.18-2.6.7, Gatos, DRI
drivers: Xf86 4.1.0-Xf4.3.0, Gatos, DRI
Put the kmod on the x-axis and the drivers on the y-axis and make a matrix. I've tried them all. Only the VESA driver will correctly get the sync values for the s-video port with a Radeon 7500. I've tried the math to convert VESA screenmodes to modelines with no luck.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
This is the usual "Windows market share is better at something".
The reason stuff "just works" in Windows is because every hardware developer out there has limited resources and gets the biggest payoff from making sure it works well in Windows.
To be fair, it's something that happened a lot on Windows NT, but less often on Windows 2000.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
an ATI engineer? ATi makes engines now?
No, an engineer can do various things, including design video hardware, manage power grids and drive locomotives.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
I'd be annoyed if the installer was an X Window System application. It being text mode is a good choice! Why set up X to use some shitty driver just to install a new driver and have to shut down and restart the X server again?
A GUI version of the installer would operate in exactly the same way, it'd just have pretty clicky buttons instead of a collection of character cells with a different background color representing a button.
Of course, it's likely I'm feeding the trolls, but Gatos!=goatse
Never confuse volume with power.
But nVidia's business model is to release as much of their driver code as they are legally permitted to (at least, that's what they say). Most likely, there's some patent licensing agreement involved which would mean that, even if nVidia were to release the source to their drivers, it wouldn't be legal for anyone else to do anything useful with it anyway. So nVidia would be doing the right thing by not inserting code of questionable legality into the kernel tree.
In any case, binary-only drivers aren't really nVidia's business model; they don't actually make any money on them, and they spend development effort on them. Their business model is selling hardware which uses proprietary techniques they've licensed from others. Either ATI is doing this or it isn't, but that's been decided long ago for all of the hardware that's been released.
In general you are right but NOT if you develop a 3D engine like I do. I absolutely need the drivers to be as good as they can be (and on cards better then a Radeon 8500). And I'm sorry to say but on linux the ATI closed drivers are still the best (most features) but are very bad compared to nVidia drivers for linux.
Free software is good and I'm all for it but there are cases where features DO matter.
Greetings,
Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
Works for me
Yeah, I've never had to recompile Mac kernels either....
It's actually pretty easy to get 3D working if you have an ATI Card. 1) Sell your ATI card on eBay 2) Pick up a nVidia 3) Boom! Your done. Easy! I don't see why so many people are having problems...
And i never could compiler my own kernel to make it best fit for my computer either.
Your dist should provide the headers and build system to compiler the module without any problems.
kindly regards daniel
What a waste. Yeah, I can compile my own kernel (I did it for years) but I gave up doing it myself and left it for my distro's kernel team to handle because I don't need the hassle. There's no way in hell that I'm going to go back to custom-compiling a kernel with no DRI just to get 3D acceleration when my old ATI 128 worked great with the old DRI drivers.
ATI! Get a clue! Release your specs again or cooperate with the X and DRI teams to make sure your drivers work properly with stock distro kernels. Your chips aren't that good that they shouldn't work according to the standards.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I am rather surprised. Matrox is no more in the race to raw performance, but there are none for their openess. For example, it remind me of DirectFB development site (www.directFB.org), stating that "it [Matrox] is the best supported card because Matrox did a nice job with providing hardware documentation to developers. All drawing and blitting flags and functions are supported, it is rated 90% because it lacks 24bit support." (cf http://www.directfb.org/modules.xml)
But I think that P650 is the latest model, right? I don't know about this one..
RIP Slashdot. I used to love you. dead account - but slashdot wont let me delete it.
I'd be happy to leave feedback, but the ATI card I have (AIW Radeon) isn't among those the driver supports. I don't expect you to go back and redo a driver for the 2Mbyte PCI mach64 ATI card I have sitting around in a box, but would it be too much to ask for full support for the AIW Radeon?
I wish ATI would put a bounty on providing the specs and creating the drivers (a la the weather channel) for each new generation of card. At this stage they could still do it and get significant money for the R3xx and R4xx chips! People buy X servers, people spend 500+ on video cards, people will contribute X0 to get their cards supported. I'm sure the manufacturers who make Radeon cards alone would chip in a not insignificant amount, add to that pc/laptop/settop manufacturers who use radeons, the large companies with 1000s of Radeons, the odd specialist with lots of radeons (or who will buy them, weather channel, Disney, id). The list goes on, it's all a question of how much do ati want?
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Don't stress, your card will work, it just won't have accelerated 3D until someone figures out how to get it done without ATI's help.
It's really no big deal, you'll have a nice 2D accelerated experience, which is where you'll be spending the vast majority of your time anyway.
How often are you actually using 3D in Linux? Be honest.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
I keep getting a JavaScript "Please select a product" message when I click submit even though I've selected a product. Anyone else bumping into this?
Some people don't know the difference about "Troll" and "Flamebait"!!
Or is there some Ati fanboys in the place?!
RIP Slashdot. I used to love you. dead account - but slashdot wont let me delete it.
i sold my ati card months ago and replaced it with a nice nvidia. ati's linux support has always been spotty. drivers are out months later, bug ridden and don't support various features. they might as well not have any support at all. not to say nvidia is a lot better, they have a long way to go, but they are better than ati's support.
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Look at what this guy says ! Mod it up, and if it's already capped, well .. send the right kind of feedback. That means non-inflammatory, polite, to-the-point, etc.
How would you know that? Do you have access to the code? Or do you just repeat the common thinkings?
RIP Slashdot. I used to love you. dead account - but slashdot wont let me delete it.
Nvidia seems to be able to handle the situation quite well, so your argument just doesn't hold up.
Btw., how on earth can someone mod this obvious bs insightful?
Moreover, you are barking up the wrong tree here - what forces you to update your kernel ? Unless there is a big security hole (rare) or it doesn't work for you right, you do not have to run the bleeding edge. If it isn't broken, do not fix it.
I remember a while back an article in ./ about a taiwanese company with a chipset and a card as a competitor in this fray against the ATI & NVidia. Does anyone have a link to their site.
What's the difference between an 8500 and the 9100? My understanding was that the 9100 was a rebadged 8500, but apparently there is some sort of differences between the two. Which one is better?
Which is possibly "constructive criticism" but certainly isn't "flame the hell out of them"...
Tell them their feeback site doesn't work properly: ADODB.Command error '800a0d5d' Application uses a value of the wrong type for the current operation. /linuxDfeedback/datasource.asp, line 57
You mean like Red Hat has been doing for at least 5 years? (I am not implying Red Hat is the only major distro to do this, I simply don't have the experience with any others to know either way)
Go load up on the matrox 4in1 G200s. Complete, open software support for the best 2d display hardware commonly available
I don't get it, what does Artificial Turd Industries have to do with geek news?
I had bought a 9600XT after reading several reviews that gave it outstanding marks for "fps/$." Some OpenGL apps were fine (and plenty fast), but others (notably Wine) crashed my box. Turns out the drivers were oopsing when running an SMP kernel on SMP hardware.
After reporting the (reproducable) kernel oops, I waited 7 months for the next driver release in the hopes it would be fixed. No such luck. I ditched my 9600XT and bought a GeForce 5700U - it just works.
What's sorta ironic is that the 5700U (a massive card, with a huge fan, several passive heatsyncs that requires it's own power input) is in the same "performance ballpark" on most tests (and significantly underperforms on some, like pixel shading, IIRC) as the 9600XT (a small card, with a small fan, and no passive heatsyncs).
It's a great contrast between design elegance and brute force. If ATI could write working drivers...
for Linux. Of course if I knew what graphics cards Linux actually did support without a lot of dancing around, I could actually go out and buy a newer card. So ATI's lack of support actually doesn't hurt them since I'm not buying their competitor's cards either.
...the first graphics card vendor to release stable, open drivers for their top product lines is going to sell a shit load of cards to all of us that are annoyed by the current state of drivers ;)
I would resent buying another card this soon (I shelled out a few hundred quid on a GF3Ti500 a while back), but I'd spend a few hundred more for a card that was fast and worked flawlessly and I suspect many others would too. Hell I've even been considering giving up UT2004 and going back to an old Matrox card that is fully supported.
Having said that, I am grateful that nVidia have any support at all and being able to run native 64bit drivers on my amd64 rig is excellent and the nVidia installer generally does a pretty good job, but it would be so so much better if support was as much a part of the OS as for all my other hardware.
So, graphics card companies, take a chance!
Chris "Ng" Jones
cmsj@tenshu.net
www.tenshu.net
Did you submit the article 2 weeks ago? If so, then yeah, the Editors are sleeping. But if not, I don't see how you can complain.
Could you please specify where the right place is to leave feedback? Particularly for those of us that have been burned in the past and now won't buy ATI products until or unless they release specifications or open source? Since we don't have any current products, the driver feedback page is not going to work. We represent additional customers and revenue.
These comments are about the older Gxxx series, the current Parhelia Pxx series is extremely bad supported under Linux!
I refuse to taint my kernel by using an NVidia card. On the other hand my ATI AIW 7500 still lacks functionality. The GATOS project is great but crippled and held back by lack of specs. I'm not expecting ATI to come out and GPL code for their drivers. All I ask is that the data sheets for the hardware be made available so drivers can be made. As things currently stand I will not buy any new ATI products. I'm not a gamer and what I have works. I'd like to buy a new card but what good would it be to have a card that isn't supported. If a friend wanted to play games on his box I'd have to recommend NVidia despite my dislike for kernel tainting.
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
I have never had a case in which a video driver prevented windows from booting at least to safe mode. I have had some problems with video drivers in Windows 3.11 that crashed win.exe but I was able to edit them out of the ini file. NT3.51 really never gave me any trouble of any kind. However, every other version of NT I've used has at some point or another given me the ol' INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE for no apparent reason - Guess it just forgot it had a driver loaded.
On versions of windows that support booting to text mode - hint, this is all of them except maybe NT3.51 and NT4, and I think you can get them to do it too with some tweaking - it's pretty much impossible to have them fail to boot at least that far because of a video driver. Of course, you can't actually fix a problem from there.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
For Fedora Core users, the Nvidia graphics driver is already packaged, and soon ATI's driver will be too. Installation is one command:
/Peter Backlund
yum install nvidia-glx (or fglrx)
That's it. No configuration, no compilation, nothing. You don't even have to reboot. Even easier than Windows. The drivers are provided by the Livna.org repository (http://rpm.livna.org).
Progress on the ATI driver can be monitored here:
http://bugzilla.livna.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211
As of right now, the published version of the Nvidia driver is 1.0.6106, with 6111 coming out shortly.
Some of the improvments made by the livna re-packaging can be read about here:
http://rpm.livna.org/livna-switcher.html
The same applies to the ATI driver.
Note: an ATI employee (M Tippett) has been heavily involved in the packaging process, which shows real committment from ATI's side. Nvidia has not even bothered to answer a request to put a link on their driver download page to rpm.livna.org.
Hello, my name is Robert Lerner, and I pronounce Lernux as "99% cpu"
At least that's my theory.
I've got a Radeon 9800SE All-In-Wonder, which has the new(ish) Rage Theatre 200 chip. This isn't supported by GATOS. I should, of course, have checked this before buying the machine, but there you go. The reason it isn't supported is because it's really complicated and all though ATI have released some specs (under NDA), the GATOS developer(s) haven't gotten round to doing the huge amount of work involved in writing a driver.
I say developer(s), because I think the effort to support the Rage Theatre 200 actually consists of one bloke, called Vlad or something. I think he might be a student of some kind. This may be completely wrong, and I don't want to cause any offence, but that's the impression I've got - one single developer working on the Rage Theatre 200 driver, intermittently, as a hobby. There's been a "don't expect anything for at least 6 months" notice on the website for nearly a year.
The value of open source software is that if something is used by many people and has a long lifetime, the community can build that piece of software into something valuable for everyone, with minimal cost and maximum gain for the participants. This, at least to me, seems to be the key feature of open source.
ATI seem to have gotten the wrong end of the stick and decided that the value of the open source community is that a multi-million dollar corporation can print out a copy of it's specs, along with an NDA of some description, and as if by magic, some student, perhaps called Vlad, will appear out of thin air and do all it's work for it.
Some points for ATI:
Rant over. I make no claims as to the accuracy of the above. In fact I hereby certify that the above is guaranteed to be inaccurate in some way. Please correct me. The emotion is real, though. I'm just fed up with having to reboot into Windows to watch TV.
"The Milliard Gargantubrain? A mere abacus - mention it not."
How bout 12000+ signatures of annoyed linux users. http://www.petitiononline.com/atipet/petition.html
Also this issue and petition has been submitted to /. for 2 weeks now.
By OSS'ing the drivers completely, they could get away with a lot LESS development of their code.
Add to that the market is open now for other architectures with AGP/PCI being able to use the hardware for no effort and surely you have a winner?!
The 8500 is better. The 9100 uses newer components but runs them at slower speed to reduce yield issues, power consumption, etc.
The 9000 beats the 9200.
Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've never had a Linux system become completely unable to boot because of a bad video driver.
Apparently you've never run it on a system which has the mobile S3Virge chipset. It'll completely hardlock the system every time - even when probing for the device using YaST.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
On Windows? It has happened often.
You must be an idiot or something as I haven't had this happen once.
Yes! That is so retro!
ATI are so interested in getting feedback, that they
1. Ignore them.
2. Fail to fix the issues brought up by them.
Further in response to people saying ATI probably can release the code due to licensing issues, who cares. The specs for the chipsets themselves would be enough for people to write their OWN code for them.
why would a company that can barely get their drivers to work reliably on a Windows machine try to make their drivers work reliably on a OS that has so much less of the market share? They can't make money off the drivers anyway (except if you consider lost business because they suck as "making money").
Name one other company that would dedicate valuable resources (in this economy, every resource is valuable) to getting their drivers to work on a system that about 2% of their consumers care about?
screw my karma, man :))
> which i'd note is a *text* mode installer, not exactly 21st century is it?
Expecting people to run X without X driver man? There is a thing called VESA driver, but nobody bothers setting it up unless there's no other way.
> a 40mb download if you have the sources
wget patch-[something].bz2
man patch
But anyways I strongly agree with the rest of your comments (the failures on driver installation/usage are ridiculous in these days)
--- Naive inside, foolish outside...:)
Granted I'm a more experienced linux user, but I recently installed the ATI drivers on a machine and had very few problems. At the worst they're binary-only but not much worse than NVidia in that aspect. I'm using debian so I converted the RPM to a DEB (pet peeve there with the RPMs), dpkg --install'ed it, and in the end it actually handled more automagically than I would have needed/expected
I have for awhile been an NVidia fan, but not a fanboy as I expect some of the commenters here are. Certainly the machine I installed (not my own) with a Radeon 9200 performed beautifully in OpenGL/3d apps, even compared to my own NVidia-based ones.
My only annoyance is the older ATI cards, no official support and I haven't figured out what to use (binary, source, DRI or Utal-GLX drivers?) for them.
Yes, I would appreciate more open-source support from card manufacturers (and come on guys, NVidia ain't perfect here either). But I CAN appreciate some of the issues around releasing a full open-source driver that hints at card functionality. OS is wonderful, but perhaps we need to be more flexible as far as binary drivers, coming to a midpoint (partial-open-source? Open-source SDK?) with manufacturers in order to really get things to move into supporting linux better.
That ATI's driver download support page actively lists Linux nowadays to me is a big plus in itself...
I am an ATi engineer and I have to say that te drivers are too proprietory to open source.
Management really wants to but us engineers are against it.
Here's what I just sent to ATI via their feedback form:
... just occured to me I misspelled distribution.
First off, your choices on the feedback are woefully inadequate. Given that many distrobutions of Linux are switching to xorg-x11 rather than xfree86 and you only cover xfree86, that's a problem. Same with hardware. Those of us with AMD64 CPUs aren't covered. But, then again, you have no drivers for us, either. Which is why I sold my radeon 9800 pro and bought an nvidia geforce 6800 gt. nvidia more or less fully supports linux. I doubt I will ever buy an ATI product again, at least not as long as ATI continues it's current linux driver policies.
hmmm
What, still no PCI Express or Athlon 64 support? NVidia is starting to look mighty good at the moment...
My video card started failing this week in my gnu/linux workstation so I went to the local computer store and bought a new one. While there were several ATI cards available, they were NOT an option in my mind, because ATI's drivers are too buggy to be worth my trouble.
I settled on a FX5200 becuase it was fanless and would be fast enough for what I needed.
The closed source nVidia drivers compiled and installed without a hitch, but I'm not a novice when it comes to compiling a new kernel. The installation would have been impossible for many people I know.
Religion is poison to rationality, and we lose sight of that at our own peril. -- Lurker2288
Please note that I purchased NVidia hardware (and discarded the OEM ATI equipment) because ATI do not support Windows 2003 either: http://www.ati.com/support/infobase/4227.html
I installed ATI drivers on Fedora Core 2 last week, and while it required a bit of patching here and there that wasn't documented anywhere on the ATI site, a quick google search for "Fedora Core 2" and "ATI" pretty much did the trick. It was astonishly simple, at least in comparison to the hoops I used to have to jump through (I've kept the same distro on the same Linux box since 2001 without updating it at all, just because it was working and there was no reason to mess with it). This is all to say that it seems the problem the author has with the drivers is that they're proprietary, and thus makes some end users have to do some wacky patching depending on how esoteric their distro is. It seems if you're using a popular enough distribution, it's relatively easy to find a forum post at Rage3D that documents the steps any bozo can take, using patch -p1 to the original ATI distribution, to get things working. In short, so long as you're reasonably close to the mainstream, there's a whole hell of a lot of user support out there. And if you're not, well... that's why you've installed a bleeding-edge distribution, right? Maybe it's just my memories of installing netatalk (one of the more horrendous file servers I've ever set up, by pure neccesity), but raising a fuss and making sardonic comments over ATI's lack of commitment seems rather ill-tempered when they seem to be releasing Linux drivers quite regularly. Would you rather they open-source the drivers once and stop supporting them and leave it to the community?
And people like you are one of the reasons why linux will never be mainstream
"oh, don't make it GUI configurable, thats stupid"
Moron
This is news?!
OMG nVidia also updated their Windows drivers too! Let's have an article every time any mfr updates their drivers!
This driver is a month old.
Slashdot - Old News Is Good News.
But I can tell you that this driver is still based on the old codebase. So no improvements, except very minor bugfixes (no corruption, when shifting to console and back)
Awareness of suckage can be the first step to innovation. Maybe you should take the time to write a detailed list of suckpoints, possibly with proposed fixes.
We are conceptually stuck in the Unix era because nothing better has been proposed.
I have an Nvidia card and have never had to recompile my linux kernel to get it working
PHP is the solution of choice for relaying mysql errors to web users.
Unfortunately my new desktop came with an ATI PCI Express card so I can't get 3D acceleration on it (2D works if I lie to the driver about what the card is.) I'm not planning on holding my breath waiting for ATI to get a driver out the door "Eventually," and I'm certainly not going to make the mistake of buying their hardware again.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The 9200 is the best. The 8500, 9000, 9100, and 9200 all use the same core, r200. The 8500 and the 9000 are susposed to be the same clock speeds.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
I'm wondering if ATI's lousy linux support runs across their entire product line, including their workstation cards.
Their consumer products, even on the high-end, are marketed for gamers, which is overwhelmingly Windows based.
But their workstation cards are running on platforms that often require Linux. One would think that they would require good linux drivers for workstation cards, and that this expertise could be carried over to the consumer card line.
So are they losing workstation market share because of buggy drivers? And if they have good workstation Linux drivers, why not transfer that code over to the consumer division?
evanchik.net
Thank you for inspiration - once we publish specification, these Linux zealots will make job for us an we can fire you - I know it's you, John, we have only one Linux driver developper.
/. too...)
Yours loving Boss (yeah, I read
If you do that, why would ATI bother? You'd just make it look like they already lost the market and should focus on Windows where they're doing well.
The correct feedback is this: When you find a bug in their driver, send in a bug report. When you find a missing feature, send in a feature request. Don't send in a feature request that reads, like, "open source your drivers, dumbasses!" as that will be ignored.
It's not hard. It's the same process you do with every other piece of software in the world. If ATI gets 30,000 bug reports, to fix them they'll either need to hire more Linux staff (thereby making the driver quality better) or open-source the drivers.
Comment of the year
For the most part, you are correct. However, check here to read about people that have the same issues with nvidia as most do with ati. Nvidia works great on 2 of 3 of my machines, but on the third, it doesn't work at all, and nvidia won't respond to bug reports, nor say, "Yes, there is a problem with some chipsets, we are working on it." Yeah, I'll still buy an nvidia card next time around, just because it will *probably* work better.
Do like 14.5 k others, and try here:
http://www.petitiononline.com/atipet/
(No, I have nothing to do with the creation of that petition.)
Help savingAmigaOS and a free PowerPC market
Take off the "on other platforms" part and I'll agree with you.
i have an even better idea. how about some atifan code monkeys repackage the ati distributed drivers with a new smarter installer that can cross install the drivers on the popular distros and if absolutely necessary leave instructions for the user on how to continue the installation. the package should be fisher price and graphical. the best is where everything is automated based on a few configuration options.
once this picks up, ATI will probably buy into it. they would have more to lose by ignoring it than adopting and embracing atifan code monkeys.
then maybe one legendary monkey will reverse engineer the ati drivers and produce open source drivers which work better than their binary equivalents. ati will have to buy into it at this point. or they will hire the code monkeys and the community will achieve its goal anyways. happy hunting.
Just do an installation. About 5 years ago I started using linux. About 3 years ago I bought a system with NVidia card. It was going to replace a Windows server. Well we decided to make it a linux server instead, it was hell. From then on every video card on every computer desktop and server that we purchased was an ATI video card. Why? Because ATI video cards just worked with linux and every computer which is purchased may run linux at some point (Currently we recycle old desktops to linux file servers, network monitors, gateways, training computers). Install RH, install Suse don't worry about the video card it will just work, because all the computers we purchased had ATI cards. Two months ago I purchased a Dell laptop despite having an Nvidia card. I was assured that it wouldn't be that difficult to get the driver working. After about 2 hours I had it configured and working. I then upgraded my kernel. I had to reset up my drivers. Yeah, this time it only took a few minutes, but what a pain to have to go through those steps and remember what it took to get the video working again. So I went on wishing my laptop had an ATI card. Then a couple of weeks ago one of the techs was going to get a new computer. So we decided that we would make it dual boot and that way we could use it for training and showing linux desktops. I also found out from one of my tech's that one of the VP's is a closet Unreal Tournament fan. Okay so let's slide in a 9800 card and show him how well linux can run it. Well guess what, our simple installation turned into a kernel recompile, configuration setting, documentation web hunt to get it to work. So now when we purchase computers I no longer require that they have ATI video cards. We'll worry about it whenever we switch it over to linux and if we find a reasonably priced card that works easily with linux, then that is what we will buy. We are currently looking at selling a monitoring tool for chemical reactor systems. The OS platform will be linux, the video card?????? But it currently looks like it will be the Nvidia 6800 even though it is proprietary driver I've heard it is easy to install.
Everybody knows that ATI is better at directx acceleration... that's what they are optimised for... and that's why their cards suck at linux.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
On a HP nc6000 laptop (Radeon Mobility 9600, run at half the possible clock speed, 250 instead of 500)
.debs
With the 3.7 driver I got over 200 fps with fgl_glxgears, and around 1,300 fps with glxgears.
With the 3.11.1 I get 180 and 850 respectively. I would like to report that on the ATI feedback page given in the blurb, but they want my full name and email, and in very small print at the bottom of the page they say: "All problem reports, test results and other feedback shall be the property of ATI and may be used by ATI for any purpose. [...] By using the feedback form you grant ATI the right to contact you for more information or to send future email."
I don't think so. I instead reported to they guy who makes the
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
The dev tools are an issue. However, it is VERY handy to be able to get applications distributed as source. It's like Java but fast.
As far as the driver compile goes: You don't neeed the whole kernel for that, just the headers.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
No that's not true. They all use 200 level chips but not the same ones. the 9000 for instance uses rv280 which is consider the fastest of the lot but had some compability problems with dual head support.
The 8500 and 9100 use the same core, the R200, but come in with various core clock and memory clock speeds. The 9000 uses the Rv250, a heavily modified R200 with a clockspeed increase and half the texture units per a pipeline. ATI rebadged the 8500 as the 9100 because the 8500 was faster than the 9000. The 9200 uses the Rv280. The Rv280 is a Rv250 modified to support AGP8x instead of AGP4x. source. Of course, none of this tells us anything about the various cards actual performance, which is why I asked the question.
umm but he is correct.. These drivers let your video card work in X, why set it up for the nv driver when you can do it from the command line?
and seriously though linux is mainstream
keanmarine.com
http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33739 457
8500DV I bought off ebay to make a freevo box from. Apparently the fglrx driver has a breakpoint so any opengl app fails. On top of that neither the tv in or tv out work. This card is useless to me.
superman runs linux
I have an all in wonder and I wanna watch TV dammit!
How about a version of the ATI-MMC for Linux? hmmm?
Yes I know that the gatos project has a setup available but I have tried using it a few times and I either 1) could not convince it to work or 2) If it worked and I got a TV image I could not change the channel. And the image was crappy. And there was no sound.
So how about it ATI?
I know you are just talking out of anger but OPEN SOURCE HARDWARE? Are you in the E&CE profession? Do you have any idea about how complicated and expensive it is to ramp out a modern graphics chip? Very few companies let alone individuals have the experties and resources. And they should provide their expensively designed chips for free because ... ?
For that matter, since there are so many people howling for open source graphics driver, how many people on Slashdot do you think can develope high quality graphics driver? Free things are great, but you get what you paid for.
Mate of mine did an internship at nvidia a few years ago, those drivers will never get gpl'd... why? you ask, simple. 80% of the code belongs to SGI. Quit whining. Open source drivers probably couldn't match nvidia's existing performance anyway.
Come and see the violence inherent in the system!
I found out the other day that safe mode doesn't stop all drivers from loading, just the ones that Windows 'thinks' are unsafe. I ended up using knoppix to recover the drive (the only other option being to reformat). This wasn't a video device though.
INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE is usually an IDE issue (although the only known workaround is a reinstall that I know of....).
Main reason I bought an ATI is because they are a Canadian company based in the same City as I am - and its impossible to get a 6800 Ultra up here. But if they don't improve their Linux drivers I know my next purchase won't be an ATI card...
I'm an ATI engineer too, and the proprietary code is stolen from a secret alien race that's been running Earth since the 1930's. We're trying to build a powerful resistance force, fighting the beings who've given us just enough technology to enslave us all.
Also, management is just a collection of bio-engineered drones.
You probably have but don't know it. You just saw a progress bar. Microsoft thinks your mind would explode if it told you really what is happening at every step. They could be checking your software registrations and scanning for mp3 files right now for all you know.
The missing featuer is that the card does not work at all without proprietary drivers. If they want our business, fix that first so that the user can even start using their computer.
If my screen goes blank, and I can't switch to text mode, I don't care if the propietary drivers are perfect, I can't install them.
You never know...
I have a Radeon 9800 Pro in this machine, going utterly un-used. I've seen some kind of fucking voodoo that I had to pull to get the thing to work with Fedora Core 2, but didn't have the time to do all the tricks.
Honestly, I don't care for Nvidia. I don't like how they have to have their coders look through each game and change the drivers to intercept the game-code and change it to something that works better. Moving down to 16 bit precision wherever it seems "best" to them. It wasn't all that noticable with the Ti4200's, but with the Geforce5's and above, it's the entire method.
I'm getting to the point where I'm going to start swearing off of Ati in total. The Radeon 9800 Pro and the Geforce 5900XT cost around the same (in my part of Town), but the 9800 Pro pulls hela more performance on most of the games I've played with it. I've recommended the Radeon 9800 Pro's to everyone who could fit one in their computer.
I still think the Ati's make better cards for what you get out of them, but I think Nvidia plays the supporting game much better. To top everything off, the entire Radeon line is incompatible with the AMD 8151 "AGP Bridge" chipset.
So I'm converting back to Nvidia, strictly out of Necessity.
DRI, AGPGART, yada, mostly can be compiled into modules. You don't have to recompile the kernel if you had it set up in this way... just unload the module. The most common distros ship the kernel in this way too.
As a rebuttal, though, if you had done it with modules, then you wouldn't even have to reboot Linux. I've never installed graphics drivers in Windows without having to reboot at least once.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
Really easy:
Of course, there's the part about needing a kernel that doesn't have DRI compiled in, but does have AGPGART.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
ATI finally release new more functional drivers and all of a sudden people are bitching about their shoddy work. Look, Linux is not homogeneous, it is not straightforward to deliver drivers that will plug into XFree86 and just work on *every* distro with *every* little tweak your average Linux enthusiast has decided to play with.
ATI driver guys are plenty competent at Linux/Unix drivers, they have engineers from just about every graphics company you care to mention including SGI, heck some of their engineers helped developed the DRI on Linux so this is absolutely *not* about the technical competence of their engineers. The complaints of installation are probably a tiny minority but there's enough of them to make this an issue. Many of those problems may be poorly configured systems or running the wrong x server version or a mixture of both.
Beating ATI up for finally giving Linux some attention is not the right approach here.
I think the most suitable solution would be for the installer to be both GUI and text, which wouldn't be too difficult to program via frontend/backend paradigm; many installers have already done this (I think loki based installers can do it). Having both means that user friendly distros with X out of the box can have their pretty GUI installer, and do-it-yourselfers can run the CLI before they've set up their X. The CLI also provides a fallback if something goes wrong (and we all know it will).
It is true that you would almost never have a CLI fallback for a windows installer, and the reason for that is because X isn't mature enough yet; it needs some sort of failsafe backup that can almost always be run (just like windows) if the vendor's drivers aren't working. For a truely user friendly distro, X wouldn't crash out to command line, it would reliably load up the generic drivers for further visual configuration.
Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. -Anonymous
My Nvidia 6800 just came in yesterday. \o/
if a company required me to setup my X server and window manager BEFORE i installed my graphics card drivers, they would be stupid. kind of like your point in this excerpt.
now excuse me while i go start seti@home in my 18th century ssh session.
- I'd prefer not to.
But skillfull....
Seems appropriate here to add a "me too" comment. I've bought two NVidia cards for exactly this reason. If any other reputable vendor (ATI, Matrox, whoever) were to publish truly open source drivers for a modern chipset, I'd be buying their cards until they stopped.
In the business graphics workstation world, ATI cannot sell cards to Linux users as their drivers suck - OpenGL applications crash all the time. NVidia cards and drivers "just work". I will not recommend/buy another ATI product until they produce a stable driver.
The market for linux OpenGL workstations has to be pretty significant. ATI is loosing a lot of business because of their lack of quality Linux drivers.
I agree with this 100%
I have an nVidia card myself, but I've always found the drivers for it that are included with X to be far superior to those provided by nVidia. Perhaps instead of complaining about ATI not providing a decent driver, people should use, contribute to and support open-source drivers for their video cards and other such products.
Linux users should be supporting open-source projects anyway, this is one way to do it and get some benefit on the side.
Q.
But nVidia doesn't have open source drivers, either.
Holy shiy, you mean there are STILL new systems being build around this 10-yearold grahics decelerator?
I hated the Virge-series....
Um... the generic display drivers that ship on the 2K3 disk work fine. You don't need 3D on a server.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
Is there any particular reason you're using Linux then? If all you care about is performance, stick with Windows, because the proprietary ATI Windows drivers are much better than the proprietary ATI Linux drivers...
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Isn't the Apple OS X driver similar enough to the XFree86 driver that a common codebase should be possible ? I assume that the OS X driver is bug free ...
I like Linux. I can't use it unless I am a disciple of the OSS religion?
Q.
As a customer, I want to support companies providing a fully opensource driver for their graphic cards. Binary only drivers for linux should be avoided and we customers should support with our dollars or euros hardware providers giving opensource drivers.
If you know about graphic cards with a supported, fully opensource (ie GPL or OSI accepted) driver, please tell.
The DRI itself doesn't suck. It's the DRI drivers that generally aren't as good as the closed-source ones.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Are you saying you would still use Linux if it were completely proprietary and closed?
I'm not saying you need to be a religious zealot, I'm just saying that there are very practical reasons to want Open Source Software. I myself switched to ATI from NVidia because NVidia refused for six months to fix a bug in their proprietary FreeBSD driver. Six months without a working video card is highly impractical! Even though the Open Source ATI driver isn't perfect, at least I don't have to worry about which exact kernel options I'm using, whether I have XFree86 or X.org, worrying if my next buildworld is going to break the driver, etc.
An Open Source driver can be included as a base component of an Open Source operating system. This isn't about being a disciple wearing sackcloth and ashes and trudging along behind RMS, this is about being pragmatic.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
You don't need to care about software freedom.
Of course, if you don't, sooner or later you'll
find yourself unable to upgrade.
NVidia users were recently stuck, unable to run
the latest kernel with 4 kB stacks. Those of us
with open drivers had no such problems. It's
fixed now, but the waiting sucked.
If the proprietary drivers break, tough luck.
You'll have to hope the vendor still exists and
still cares about your hardware.
bringing the number of 3D games that run under Linux from three to four!
The reason it's a text mode installer is because you have to kill X before you install. Keep in mind that half the installation is "insmod nvidia", which probably shouldn't be done when X is running, and you're going to have to restart X anyway.
ATI Technologies Inc.
/. thread.
Brian Chadderton
PR Manager
(905) 882-2600 Ext. 8350
Fax (905) 882-2620
Email: bchadder@atitech.com
I sent a link to the petition as well as a link to this
I apologize if this has already been posted, but have any of you seen (or signed) this petition? http://www.petitiononline.com/atipet/petition.html
Wait a sec, isn't anyone using ATI's proprietary driver also tainting the kernel?
Look, the only difference is that ATI opened up with information about some of their *old* hardware, but their recent modern cards have 3D drivers that are just as proprietary as NVIDIA's drivers.
NVIDIA says they can't release the code for any of their 3D drivers for any of their cards (old or new) because they don't own all the code thats in the driver. Given that this sounds plausible to me, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt until there is evidence that they are lying, if you want to automatically assume they're lying, fine, but without evidence, not many are going to take you seriously.
P.S.: I think a lot of people in this thread are seriously underestimating how complex those 3D drivers are. Those drivers aren't thin wrappers over a nice clean simple API. Since there aren't *any* standards whatsoever concerning 3D accelerating hardware, there effectively *is* no API, for all we know the software drivers may be doing just as much sophisticated processing as the hardware is, or perhaps because the technology continues to change so rapidly, a lot of the technology is still in software form and hasn't been moved yet to silicon on the card? You all do realize we are talking about *multi-megabyte* drivers don't you? So the references to a mythical, silver-bullet "spec sheet" I've seen, I suspect are an excellent example of grossly underestimating the situation.
First, my guess is that there isn't just one of these beasts (a spec sheet), but several *hundred*, and second, since these companies only have to document their hardware for their own programmers who may also be engineers, or at least have complete and dedicated access to the engineers that designed the hardware, why do you assume such a spec sheet(s) would be useful to someone without intimate knowledge of the hardware? And isn't that *exactly* what these companies do not want to publicize, the intimate details of their hardware?
The guy who make the decision for nVidia to keep the code closed stopped by campus last semester. A bunch of us *nix people were talking to him. The reasons he cited for closing the code had nothing to do with licensing issues and everything to do with "if its so easy for others to develop this stuff, why are other major companies having trouble with Linux support."
In other words, writing drivers isn't in nVidia's business model, but selling a product with drivers is in ATi's business model. ATi and others seem to be having trouble releasing good GL drivers for Windows, not to mention Linux. Therefore nVidia feels it is a competitive edge to keep their apparently superior programming techniques under wraps.
After a while, I regretfully started to believe him.
It depends on how the DMA framework, etc. is laid out. All things being equal, it's relatively simple to code for both OSes- but many driver teams in the past took shortcuts that require more dedicated work.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I am not a video driver development, so I'm almost assuredly being naive here - but I would have thought most of ATI/NVIDIA's intellectual property would be invested within their GPU. As far as device drivers are concerned, aren't these just black boxes - eg, send opcode x, operand y, get output z? What's to protect here? Isn't the details of the engine that need to be protected (corporate-wise), rather than the programming interface?
sloth jr
The newest cards supported well in DRI are from ATI. I have a Radeon 9200 I just bought, as it's the newest thing out with good open source support.
Nvidia is binary-only, and Matrox has lost their earlier excellent open-source support in the G200/G400/G450 era.
May we never see th
I gotta ask... whatever happened to Matrox? Did they fall off the edge of the earth? What about Voodoo and the others? What is wrong with this industry that we've only got two viable choices left in video display cards when it comes time to buy a new PC? Even in the Windows world, that's a horrifying thought, that the video market is so close to becoming yet another monopoly that we'll have to deal with.
I have a dozen times more choices in what to wipe my butt with after a dump. I guess you're better off being an asshole than being in the computer biz....
Games! I want hardware acceleration!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
My comment about NVidia drivers tainting the kernel was just me stating why I don't consider NVidia cards an option since many others posting here seem to speak of how great they are. True, the ATI driver situation is no better but when I bought my card it seemed they were more open with the community and those magical spec sheets were said to be coming soon.
Of course 3D drivers are complex. I'm not expecting magic. There are also many spec sheets. If you read the GATOS mailing list it becomes clear after a while they aren't playing it straight. Those developers who have signed the NDA agreements have gotten scant information after lengthy waits. In some instances the data provided was flat out wrong. Even non-3D stuff (like channel changing for AIW cards) had to be reverse engineered because the docs were no help. Everytime the specs have been released the GATOS team has made things work (even if it entails a lengthy wait due to time constraints). If, after this long, ATI feels the need to protect the intimate details of some of their hardware that is far from new they really have problems or should be lightyears ahead of NVidia. Also keep in mind the ones who get that intimate knowledge of the card are under NDA and can't go giving the secrets away. You can bet ATI would sue hard and fast if that were to happen.
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
But if nVidia's drivers work on my Linux box (meaning they give me accelerated 3d in X), and ATI's don't, then sorry, I have other things to worry about than making sure my PC is free from the hideous taint of non-free software.
And if ATI stole their code, they would either have to release it under the GPL too, complete with nvidia copyrights all over it which wouldn't do their business any good, or they could just steal it and incorporate it into their binary only drivers and risk being sued.
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The quality of the drivers and their being closed-sourced have at the very least nothing to do with each other. It's a red herring.
The only thing that makes "quality" drivers and open-source drivers mutually exclusive are the absolutely worthless NDAs.
Well perhaps they could open up the bits which *are* theirs, i'm sure the functions which interface directly with hardware are theirs atleast afterall who would they buy software to directly interface with their own hardware from?
As for the higher level functionality, that could be copied from existing opensource drivers for the most part anyway..
If they did like sun did with staroffice, release everything they had the rights to and let the community replace the missing bits...
Once most of the framework was in place, it wouldn't be hard to change the hardware interface for newer hardware but they would have the advantage of a driver they didnt have to license code from anyone for.
They could also release it under a license similar to qt, dual gpl/nvidia licensing
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Red Hat don't guarantee a stable interface, far from it. They regularly backport breaking changes from the unstable series.
You can use the open source nv driver to get 2D graphics, install the driver using a GUI then simply log out and back in again to get the updated driver. There doesn't need to be text mode involved at any point, though I'm not saying there should *only* be a graphical installer.
Actually, in Canada an engineer generally won't drive a train. I mean, if you want to go through all that university and work in the engineering field for years to be legally allowed to call yourself an engineer, why would you want to become a train driver?
It's been a long time.
Actually, management is filled with people who didn't have the skill or drive to find something they'd actually like to do for a living. Sure, we all hear about the multimillion dollar a year Darl McBrides and Bill Gates and so on, but the truth is, to enter management is to succumb to mediocrity. The average business program, almost by definition, makes the average engineering course look impossibly hard in comparison, and because of that, anyone who doesn't have any ambitions will almost automatically opt for a business course.
To be frank, it's that exact reason why it's a bad idea to get into that field, tempted by dollar signs. You can only have so many managers before the system simply shatters, but adding engineers and other productive people increases the amount of productivity a business can have.
It's been a long time.
The open-source drivers are 2D *only*. There is NO open source code ANYWHERE to control the NVIDIA cards' 3D hardware, it is and has always been proprietary (allegedly for the reasons they give).
I'm not talking about ATI. The point of my post was trying to understand why you think ATI is worthy of your consideration, while NVIDIA is deserving of nothing but contempt.
The truth here, IMO, is a little more ugly than a lot of us F/OS people would like to hear about. NVIDIA is the clear leader in 3D performance and their driver is more stable and easier to use (they use one unified driver for all their cards). The are the industry leader, which is why there is absolutely no sane reason for them (or anyone trying to compete with them) to open source the code that drives their 3D hardware.
I once wrote a response to this same issue, where I tried to explain why I think the 3D accelerated graphics market is still different (for now) then the other more mature markets for peripheral devices where standards have arisen. There are no standards whatsoever for 3D acceleration, every company is doing things their own proprietary way. I suspect that (the source code of) these 3D drivers would not only tell you a lot about how their internal hardware works, they might also have a lot more of the "intelligence" of the 3D architecture than many of us think. Until these card makers can move most of that intelligence into the silicon of the card, and provide a relatively simple software interface to it, don't anyone hold their breath waiting for these companies to open source what is quite literally their crown jewels.
Perhaps as the industry stabilizes this may happen, but right now 3D acceleration is in a rapid state of flux, the technology changes quickly, and it would simply be more expensive for this companies to put a lot of the intelligence into the silcon, rather than keeping it in software which can easily be updated. I'm guessing that a lot of the code of their drivers would, in a more stable market, be moved onto the silicon and a standardized interface developed.
The reasoning behind my preference for ATI is petty although I reserve plenty of scorn for them. In my view the drivers for NVidia have slowed development for open drivers by the community. As they say it works and if that's the case there isn't a huge need to write open drivers. ATI, through their contempt or bumbling (or both), pretty much assures that the community will come forth with open drivers in a more timely fashion. Now that I've seen just how timely that is I won't be buying any recent ATI card.
I understand your point about not releasing crown jewels but can you honestly tell me the tech in an All In wonder 7500 is ATI's crown jewels? Surely they can be more forthcoming with their older hardware. You're right though... 3D is still changing at a rapid clip but that's been happening ever since I built my first machine over 6 years ago. How soon do you think any standardized interface is developed? I don't think it would be a welcome change considering the drivers for new cards are often shoddy upon release and tweaked over time. It's a form of vapor to me. $SWELL_CARD is available now but will only work proper when $COMPANY_FIXES_BUGS.
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
You can even try to force the driver accept a card with a "ChipId" entry in your x11.conf.
The real advantage of the binary driver is support for many more GL extension. Just compare 'glxinfo' output.
If you don't know Jack, why not shut the f*ck up?
> The missing featuer is that the card does not
> work at all without proprietary drivers.
No, that's not true at all. ATI cards work fine in X, they just don't offer 3d acceleration without using the proper (hard to install and proprietary) driver.
Wrong.
Many moons ago (in the original TNT days) Nvidia released the source for a utah-glx style driver (Indirect only). The code was somewhat obfuscated (it looked like they ran it all through cpp), but it worked. People have off and on tried to port it forward to DRI, but there is little intrest thanks to Nvidia's binary drivers.