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ATi Drivers for Linux that Work?

Posted by Cliff on from the what-have-you-done-in-this-situation dept.

James F. Hitchens asks: "I used to run Red-Hat Enterprise vs.3, just recently I switched to fedora core 3. The reason for my change was because I could not get my ATi Radeon 9600 All in Wonder to work. I hoped that Fedora was a little more advanced in the area of 3D acceleration (so I could play Unreal Tournament 2004 and Tux-racer). Yet again it was not to be, ne worke pas. Can anyone tell me what I need to do to make this work? The drivers that ATi supplies on their website are, in short, crap."

9 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Anandtech recently did (another) article on this by bersl2 · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://www.anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=2302

  2. Re:Buy NVidia by Odinson · · Score: 3, Informative
    "Currently I don't think it's possible to buy a card with OpenGL that has working DVI on Linux with Free drivers... really sucks."

    Probably the best GPL driven video card is the ATI 8500. Still buggy with occational crashes, but everything (OpenGL etc) works.

    The ATI drivers are excelent for this card also, but core 3 (x.org) is not supported. Supposedly this December there will be new ones.

    --
    Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
  3. I agree by DarkDust · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've got a PC with Radeon at work, and in the last two years I've tried three times to get the ATi drivers to work with hardware 3D... I've never managed to get it run.

    In contrast, I've never had any problems with nVidia's drivers... not on my TNT2, not on my GeForce 1 and not on the GeForce WhatEver that a friend of mine has. nVidia does a very good job with their drivers, IMHO. I'm not that happy thay they're closed source at least but they Just Work (tm).

    This is why I won't ever buy a ATi card. They treat Linux users as third class citizens, unfortunately...

    1. Re:I agree by turgid · · Score: 2, Informative
      The best graphics card I ever bought was my Creative Labs nVidia TNT2 Ultra, almost exactly 5 years ago. It's still running, in my second PC, minus 2 or 3 blades on the cooling fan. It's in a K6-2/500 on a TMC TI5VGF motherboard with 512M RAM and Linux 2.4.x running a fairly recent nVidia binary driver.

      18 months ago I tried a cheap, no-name GeForce MX440 in that machine which had terrible image quality. It was very fast in comparison (CPU usage went to 0% on 3d stuff :-) and Quake III was achieving 3x the frame rate i.e. 75-80fps) but after 10 months it broke and dabs wouldn't give me my money back.

      Last year, I upgraded to an Athlon XP2000+ and after a while decided to buy a Creative Labs GeForce 5600. It mostly works, except AGP doesn't, so I might have well bought something half the price. Allegedly there are incompatibilities between the 5600 and the KT400a chipset. Anyway, in recent months, I have had terribly stability problems with it. I've tried all the recent nVidia drivers (and the Xorg ones too) but every so often , when doing normal 2D stuff, when the screen gets very busy, it locks up. They mouse still works but the keyboard doesn't.

      If you ssh in over the network from another machine, the X server appears to be taking up all the CPU time. If you're quick, you can get it before it reaches 100%, and run startx to regain keyboard control and get the screen back (the screen is otherwise completely blank and the keyboard is dead).

      Unfortunately, I've been way to busy to submit a proper bug report to nVidia due to work, but it's really damn annoyong when you log in to work and start of a few builds and the build log causes your screen to freeze. :-(

      After reading the comments here, I doubt I'll be buying an ATI for my main box. I might try one to get some more performance out of the old machine for a approx. UKP25, but I think I might get a low-end nVidia for the main machine for about UKP40.

      I'm getting an Acer Ferrari 3400+ laptop soon. That has 128M ATi graphics on board. I'll be running Solaris 10 on that. We'll see how Sun's Xorg server copes...

      --
      Stick Men
  4. Rage3D by HRbnjR · · Score: 4, Informative

    The best forum to read/ask this topic is at Rage3D.

    They have howto's, patches, and some ATI dev's even post there.

  5. Buy a matrox card by keesh · · Score: 2, Informative

    Matrox cards (at least, most of them) are actually properly supported under Linux, complete with vendor-supplied open source drivers. Sure, the 3d performance sucks, but they're better than ATI or nVidia offerings for 2d.

  6. Re:Buy an nvidia card by Curtman · · Score: 2, Informative

    So you said the same thing yourself.

    I'm talking about the free driver. The story is talking about the ATI binary driver.

    Even with this older hardware using OSS drivers, I couldn't come up with how I should be able to have 3D-acceleration (Utah-GLX) and video capture (Gatos)

    Well thats probably because Utah-GLX isn't what you want. DRI is, and its included with Xorg. And you can use Gatos and DRI at the same time.

  7. Tips on getting ATI drivers to work by manjunaths · · Score: 4, Informative

    I got my ATI 9600 radeon pro working with the 2.6.x kernels. Here is a short procedure of how I go about it.
    1. First install the rpm based drivers. Now if you look under /lib/modules, you will see the ATI drivers directory fglrx/. Go to the build_mod/ directory and do a ./make.sh.

    2. Now it should autodetect the existence of 2.6.x drivers and it will do some stuff. cd back to fglrx directory and do your usual ./make_install.

    3. After this cd to your kernel directory where fglrx.ko is installed and delete it.

    4. Then cd to /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x and delete everything except the Makefile.
    I do a
    rm -f *.o *.ko *.GCC3 *.c *.h

    5. Now do a make in the 2.6.x directory.

    6. Copy the fglrx.ko to the kernel directory where fglrx.ko was there.

    7. Now run your fglrxconfig or whatever to create the XF86Config-4.

    8. I have a nforce based chipset, so I enable the nforce motherboard drivers during kernel compilation and set this option on in my XF86Config.

    Option "UseInternalAGPGART" "no"
    I have an AMD so I need to switch off mtrr

    Option "mtrr" "off"

    9. Now try a X, remember you need a dri enabled kernel and you need to have enabled dri in your xf86config.

    If you look in your /var/log/XFree86.0.log, it should say DRI initialization successful. I have used this procedure to get acceleration working at both work (firegl card) and home (radeon 9600). Both on intel and nforce chipsets. But you may need a little more hacking around to get it working.
    And for all those people who say nvidia chips are better. Once you get the ATI drivers working, they are a good competition to nvidia. In fact ATI had things like quad buffer opengl stereo on X, which was why I switched. Also I don't have a vaccum cleaner running inside my box.

    If you (or anybody) get it working please reply to this post, so I can write a feedback report on the ATI website.

    Good luck.
    Hope this helps.
    --
    Slashdot: Tabloid for the nerds. Stuff that doesn't matter.
  8. FC Drivers by mtippett · · Score: 5, Informative

    Okay, I am involved in the Linux Development at ATI. We have drivers which will be released shortly that will support XOrg 6.8, AMD64 and GLSL.

    We have worked with the guys at Livna for drivers for FC2 - and are ready to go with FC3, once the new drivers are released.

    Some links for those who care...

    http://bugzilla.livna.org/show_bug.cgi?id=308
    http://bugzilla.livna.org/show_bug.cgi?id=296

    And through Fedorafaq.org

    http://www.fedorafaq.org/#radeon

    All I can say, is watch this space.