ATi Drivers for Linux that Work?

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."

Comments

Buy an nvidia card

[jpmkm]

That's what I had to do. No amount of distribution switching is going to help. It's all the same stuff underneath. Ati's drivers are worthless, plain and simple. NVidia's drivers are awesome. Hell, an old ti4200 or something will probably perform better than the best ati card simply because of driver differences.

Re:Buy an nvidia card

[Curtman]

For anyone who prefers a free driver, nvidia isn't even an option. The open source ATI driver is very good, and Xorg CVS now has Gatos for ATI All In Wonder cards merged in. ATI should be putting big resources behind Xorg, because its reputation in the Linux/FOSS community hinges on the fate of that driver.

With the willingness of the Xorg team to finally address some of the issues people have been bitching about all these years, ATI has an opportunity to be the leader in Linux graphics drivers again. We need to point this out to ATI very loudly, and invitingly. These ATI are teh suxxors stories don't help one bit.

Re:Buy an nvidia card

[Ibn al-Hazardous]

He didn't exactly say "ATI are teh suxxors". He said that performance of the ATI drivers are not up to par. I assume he speaks of 3D performance - 'cause if he does, he's very right. Why can't we say what's obvious? Because you are afraid we'll miff someone with a big ego?

As for Nvidia drivers not being free, well ATI drivers for cards later than 9200 (IIRC), that have any 3D support, are not free either. And they will never be, because there is intellectual property in them that doesn't belong to ATI (says ATI). So, this guy will use a non-free driver no matter what.

If he would want both 3D and the AllInWonder features - he will have to alternate between different drivers (ie he will have to restart X). That's ATI's support for you.

I have recently been shopping for a video card - and I was very tempted by a 9600AiW; but when I got a hang of the problems - it turned out that the MSI5900XT was a much better buy, since I run Linux exclusively.

Re:Buy an nvidia card

[Blakey Rat]

BTW, next time someone asks if Linux is ready for the home user's desktop, I'm pasting a link to this post. "Tough luck, buy another video card," in my opinion, does not constitute "ready for the desktop."

Re:Anandtech recently did (another) article on thi

[BoomerSooner]

Here's what I did:
telinit 3
fglrxconfig
cd /etc/X11
mv xorg.conf xorg.conf.bak
ln -sf xf86Config -4 xorg.conf
telinit 5
(for mouse)
mice = /dev/input/mice

Use ATI driver and setup using XConfigurator then repoint the X.org file to that one and it works fine. I found this in a blog somewhere and worked like a charm.

Re:New drivers sometime this month

[AllUsernamesAreGone]

It needs it. A while ago I bought a 9800 and openGL performance was so poor under linux (after the half a day and two kernel recompiles it took me to get the drivers to work at all) that it was slower than the GF Ti4600 it replaced. It was so bad that the 9800 was sold on and I put the Ti4600 back in. My last upgrade was to a GF 6800GT, I'm not going to touch ATI again until they make using their drivers as simple as NVidia's

sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-XXXX-pkg1.run

and I get remotely decent performance from their driver and opengl implementation. Shame really, ATI hardware is good, they just seem to hire muppets to write the software for them :/

Re:I agree

[turgid]

Which is about as helpful as "It doesn't work.

Quite. Having open source drivers has something to be said for it.