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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 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 ...
I use the ones provided with XFree86 and/or from DRI. Runs like a charm. I don't bother with those binaries at all.
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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.
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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.
try nvidia--they have 64 bit drivers both for windows and linux.
Seriously, many people here rag on nvidia for their binary-only stuff, but they DO provide drivers for a VERY broad range of OS's, unlike many other companies. They may not support open source, but the DO support their customers in a greater degree than many companies, even when those customers want to do some fairly weird stuff!
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
The best part is how if you click on the "documented" link, it takes you to a mailing list post from ATI announcing a press release or linux support page or something... I can't tell what it should have been since the link is dead. :-)
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.
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.
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 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???
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
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.
Check out this rant about ATI's broken promises for 64-bit and Linux...
Have you even tried the newer catalyst drivers, or are you just talking out of your ass? I moved from an nVidia GeForce 4 ti4600 to an ATI x800 Pro a few months ago. The drivers were NOWHERE near as bad as people led them to believe. And, if you don't have a brand new nVidia card, the newer detonators significantly slow down the performance of your older card.
I've yet to see any current evidence that ATI drivers are any worse than nVidia drivers. In the past? Without a doubt. But now? Not so.
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
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.
Well, it's hard to take anything from someone who doesn't know how to spell scary with more than a grain of salt, but that is beside the point.
Maybe if you actually DID touch ATI with a 10 ft pole, you would realize that there really isn't anything terrible about the ATI drivers. I have had my 9500 Pro for a year and a half and haven't had any problems at all. I even convinced other users who had the same misconception as you about ATI to get the card. They are now ATI users who bought the next gen cards. The drivers were messed up years ago, but people like you still propagate the myth that they still are. I'm sure there are still driver issues out there that I just haven't run into since I only play newer FPS games (cracked HL2 runs nicely, as does Far Cry and Call of Duty).
Now, I did try to use the card under Linux when I bought the card. I never got the ATI drivers to work AT ALL. It used standard X drivers fine for 2D, but I couldn't play any 3D games. They might be better now, but I haven't tried in over a year. Really, though, Linux right now just isn't the right tool to use for playing games... and I wasn't very disappointed, since I didn't use Linux for games.
You really shouldn't insult something when you have no idea what you are talking about. It's the same kind of attitude managers have when you try to convince them to use GPLed software.
IANAL, but I play one on
It's most certainly an ATI problem.
Instead of still supporting crap like XFree86 4.1 they need make sure their driver installs without incident on the most used Linux distributions at present time. That means that at least on Fedora Core, SuSE and Mandrake it should be as easy as running "sh ati-installer.run" (like the Nvidia installer). There's no second step to that procedure, just restarting X. Also how hard could it be to provide some AMD64 builds? Who cares if nobody uses them, the lack itself reflects poorly on the company when compared to Nvidia.
The fglrxconfig utility is a joke, asking you everything from your keymap to mouse model. It's a fundamentally flawed concept. They need to swallow their pride, study the Nvidia installer and replicate it exactly.
I have cards from both manufacturers, the most recent one being an ATI. However, if this situation doesn't change I know what my next card and my recommendation to others will be.
It's like deja vu all over again.
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)
ATI has been steadily releasing newer versions of their linux drivers over the past year (and I commend them for doing that). What has been frustrating is that the general experience has been that performance has degraded with many of the recent 3.xx releases, at least in comparison to the old 2.8 release which was already pretty fast and stable for my ATI card. I think part of the problem has been the push to support the most recent chipsets which has definitely complicated the driver releases.
btw, this http://www.rage3d.com/content/articles/atilinuxhow to/how-to hosted by Rage3D has been a god-send to those of us linux users suffering with ATI cards....
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.
In ATI's case, I don't think it's a matter of expertise. I didn't have any problems getting their drivers to work (even with a 2.6.x kernel), and the OpenGL acceleration is great (1700fps on glxgears with my 9600). It's pretty simple, at least if you use Debian (I dunno about other distriutions). There's a whole page on it here:
ATI Linux driver packages for DebianATI even encourages the circulation of those prebuilt packages. OK, sure, there should really be a nice GUI, but at least they provide Linux drivers in the first place unlike some other manufacturers...
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?
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.
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.
Vlad is definitely not a student. He's a ridiculusly smart guy who's been working on GATOS forever. ATI has had this NDA deal with GATOS for a long time too, since way before nVidia ever put out an OS driver. ATI was revolutionary with their support for Linux (they provided documentation at a time when noone even knew what Linux was).
GATOS' own success has been it's biggest downfall. Because there was something there that was working pretty well, I imagine Linux support was never high on ATI's radar.
At any rate, I don't think there's a tremendous economic incentive for ATI to provide world-class Linux drivers. Remember, this is a commodity market so there's got to be tremendous volume for the numbers to work out right.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
Superior in what way? The X drivers for NVIDIA don't support OpenGL at all, don't support RENDER acceleration, and are significantly slower on x11perf. They are more stable on certain configurations, but on all the platforms I've used NVIDIA's drivers on, I don't think I've ever had them hard-lock.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...