Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

20 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Buy an nvidia card by jpmkm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Buy an nvidia card by Curtman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Buy an nvidia card by Ibn+al-Hazardous · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Yes, I am a biological organism. All rumors to the contrary are just that, rumors.
    3. 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.

    4. Re:Buy an nvidia card by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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."

      --
      Comment of the year
  2. New drivers sometime this month by G-Licious! · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ATI's drivers have been like this forever, even after they introduced the bi-monthly releases.
    In a couple of recent interviews, however, they said the next drivers, due for release sometime this month, are going to be tagged Catalyst aswell, whatever that means. But I'm expecting somewhat bigger improvements compared to the last couple of drivers we've had, and that's pretty much the last of my hopes.

    1. Re:New drivers sometime this month by AllUsernamesAreGone · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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 :/

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

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

  4. 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
  5. 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
    2. Re:I agree by turgid · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Which is about as helpful as "It doesn't work.

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

      --
      Stick Men
  6. 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.

  7. Re:Buy NVidia by Paul+Jakma · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Surely the Ati FireGL 8800/8700 would be better? Hard to find though. Or what about the Radeon 9200? That's surely available clocked higher than the older 8500.

    My 9200's work quite well with FC3 btw.

    --
    I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
  8. 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.

  9. 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.
  10. I wonder if... by wowbagger · · Score: 3, Interesting
    We had a discussion at my place of work that I'd like to let the /. peanut gallery review:

    Currently, there is much discussion about the meaning of the IBM sell-off of its PC division. One of the current conjectures is that IBM might be preparing to release a low-cost PowerPC based machine for home use.

    Now, if that is the case, I could see IBM going to both ATI and nVidia and saying:
    OK, Sparky, here's the deal: we need a good video chip for our systems. That chip needs to have a Free driver for Linux - binary is not acceptable as the system will be PPC.

    Now, our buddies over at Apple also want in on this action, so this chip would have to have accelerated 3D that was worth a damn, as well as other features to make Aqua run well - and we are working on the same sort of things with Xorg.

    So, this can go down one of three ways:
    1. We could spend the millions to design our own GPU, using strained silicon on insulator, low-K dielectrics, and copper interconnects, and blow you out of the water.
    2. You release the specs on your chip, and we will help you remove/replace any IPR you don't own in the drivers. AND, we would offer to fab your chips for you, using SSOI, low-K, and copper. Your chips get a performance boost and power reduction, we get what we want, and everybody is happy.
    3. OR, we could go to your competitors and make them the same offer.

    So, which shall it be?


    Now, the question is, how likely is this?
    --
    www.eFax.com are spammers
  11. What I did.. by WhatAmIDoingHere · · Score: 2, Funny

    I was wondering how to get the most out of my 9800 AIW PRO, so I installed Windows and the latest Cats and everything just works.

    Interesting.

    --
    Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
  12. Re:Anandtech recently did (another) article on thi by BoomerSooner · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  13. 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.