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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."
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.
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 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.
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!
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...
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."