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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?
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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
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!
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
I agree completely, but once again I feel the companies will be hampered with the "but if we release the specs then company XYZ will start producing amazing graphics cards!" line on things. There's also the worry that, with full access to the specs, people will work around the "crippling" of cores that is supposed to mark the difference between a £100 card and a £400 card. Given the performance war that's been going on between nVidia and ATI since the year dot, I think the chances of either side relenting are slim.
;)*
So as a whole the problem is probably part IP, part marketing/management, like the AC in the post above mentioned.
*launches into "why can't we all just get along?" caterwauling
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
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...
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
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)
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...
...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
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Just let me know when I can use my ATI All-in-Wonder in a MythTV box... /hates ATI's MultiMedia Center software SO much..."
well... you could try something like snapstreams BeyondTV which supports the AIW and is leagues better than the bundled quasi-pvr applications...
Although even then I'm pretty "meh" on the AIW... I suggest picking up another tuner card that has a linux driver that uses a hardware encoder. (like the WinTV pvr250) You can use that with the OSS IVTV driver and MythTV and have a grand old time. =)
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
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.
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...
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
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....