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ATI at the Top Graphics Chip Maker for 2004
dirutz writes "ATI is at the top according to market share, but nVidia is catching up. Hopefully this competition means lower prices and more goodies."
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However, given their stance on Linux drivers, my next purchase will be Nvidia. I don't like the fact that I can't use my DVI port because ATI doesn't feel like it.
Vip
Matrox are moving more towards the business end of the market, rather than 3d and games. They produce a variety of multimonitor systems, like this.
Pretty impressive, IMHO.
I hope the Open Graphics project will make inroads into the graphics business, and force Nvidia and ATI to make the specs to their cards public. They can have a big market if all computers intended to run FOSS are equipted with one of their cards. And if the majority of computers in Brazil are destined to run FOSS for financial reasons, that's a huge market for their hardware.
Nvidia and ATI are really paranoid about their IP - at one point Nvidia even refused to share the specs for an ethernet card they made. The FOSS comunity doesn't want their schemas for the hardware, just the interface so that quality open source dirvers can be made and Linux/*BSD can have state of the art graphics capailities.
When they decided that they would not compete in the "game market" and instead released a card with features an insignificant minority wanted.
Their failure is that the game oriented graphics business lands the name on storeshelves. Right now most game geeks can only name two suppliers of video card chips, Nvidia and ATI.
Matrox was great up until the G400 era where they slipped of the path and disappeared into obscurity.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
However, given their stance on Linux drivers, my next purchase will be Nvidia. I don't like the fact that I can't use my DVI port because ATI doesn't feel like it.
/etc/portage/package.keywords /etc/portage/package.keywords
... similiar to nvidia. So get either one ... I've used both, and both have their strengths and weaknesses (e.g ATI drivers and celestia have issues and nvidia can't hold a stable image at 1920x1200 under Linux), and now that ATI has finally gotten their act together WRT Linux drivers, they are a viable competitor to nvidia in that market.
echo "media-video/ati-drivers" >>
echo "media-video/ati-drivers-extra" >>
emerge -Du media-video/ati-drivers media-video/ati-drivers-extra
or do whatever the equivelent is for your distribution to install the ati-drivers version 8.8.25, and run fglrxconfig to configure X accordingly.
I've got ATI drivers running on a dual DVI card, on multiple heads in one case, and on a single 1920x1200 on another, and have used them in both 64-bit (opteron) and 32-bit (athlon/intel) environments. For ati 9250 and less I use the xfree drivers, for anything above that I use the new binary drivers.
I've done the same with nvidia cards (although I've yet to find an nvidia card that doesn't flicker incessently at 1920x1200 resolution, despite using the DVI port rather than the analog port -- go figure).
ATI is now releasing driver updates for Linux every 2 months
In other words, you can pick whatever card you like the best and expect driver support on Linux for it now, on both 32-bit intel and 64-bit opteron at least. PPC users are stuck with the free drivers (which work fine on my powerbook 17" BTW), and unfortunately other platforms are similarly limited, but for 99.99% of us the support is pretty damn good at this point.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I'm still running a G550 on my Debian sid system with XFree86 and KDE, but after some recent upgrades/updates, I'm no longer able to get it to run OpenGL stuff. Obviously, this sucks, so now I'm on the verge of dumping it in favor of something from nVidia.
Presumably the remaining 15% is everyone else (S3, Matrox, etc). I am quite surprised Intel is losing out. I recently acquired an old ThinkPad to do some development (porting from OS X to GNUstep) on, and to play the games that don't run on my Mac, and found the performance of the integrated graphics to be quite acceptable (admittedly, I think the most recent thing I'm running on it is Tribes). I imagine that for everyone other than hard-core gamers Intel chips are perfectly acceptable.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
How's the performance? How well does Doom 3 run?
That's a very good question, and unfortunately one I cannot answer personally. I am very happy with the performance of the new drivers (except for celestia, which has rendering issues), but frankly I haven't had time to mess around with Doom 3, unreal tournament, or other games (beyond a quick zip down the slopes with tuxracer). I do use blender a fair amount, which works great for what it's worth. For better information than I can give there is a pretty lively thread on the Gentoo Forums
here where people compare results, problems, and the like.
The ATI drivers in question came out around Jan 17th IIRC, so many other threads talking about lousy ATI support refer to the older drivers that had been rotting for a year or two, and their comments are quite frankly out of date and no longer accurate. Prior to Jan 17th ATI support for Linux was abysmal, but I've been very happy with the new drivers (except for celestia issues, which I noted before), and ATI has committed to continuing to update the drivers every couple of months. Still, there are never any guarantees with closed-source, proprietary software that releases will keep coming, be it nvidia or ati.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
read this and support the opensource movement
http://kerneltrap.org/node/4622
http://kerneltrap.org/node/4622
as it spreads out to new fields of endeavour.
good luck to all the open and honest initiatives and fair projects, social practices and helpful goodwilling people around the world.
cooperation and openness help this world better than pure capitalism and monetary systems.
cheers.
No, this is an outright lie. I know people who work there in QA, and nobody at NV is as stupid as the parent tries to suggest.
Who cares about market share, monthly volumes and top-of-the-line performance when 90% of the features of an ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder card are NOT available on Linux? It's only a couple a weeks ago the first feature-less driver for the X.org / 2.6 kernel came out!
You're wrong. There is no documentation available for anything newer than i810/i815 except under NDA. And for the latest chips, they don't provide docs at all (yet).
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
Have you tried upgrading your DRM kernel module to something newer? If you are running a bleeding edge DRI, you are probably going to run into trouble unless you keep your kernel module up to date too.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
they don't provide docs on the wireless functions either. But even having docs on the 810/815 is enough to get reasonably functional drivers working. On the ATi front, the last decent drivers I've seen there were for the Rage128 chips from what... five years ago?
ATI's method of competing has been to lie continually about the future of being able to use this feature. For example, back in 2000, ATI announced the VHA SDK to allow Linux users access to the MPEG2 accelerators on their cards. After 5 years of waiting, ATI still has not released this to the general public. Instead, they claimed in a FAQ that the GATOS project is currently working toward hardware assisted IDCT... But the GATOS project had already publically announced "no planned support."
So, I contacted ATI developer relations via the web in 2003 and waited three months. They never got back to me. So, I contacted them by phone, they confirmed the following:
They stated they would get back to me about my interest in assisting in writting a driver for the iDCT support. It has now been OVER A YEAR and they have refused to contact me back.
Bottom line: ATI lied to the Linux community to maximize sales to those that where interested in this specific feature. ATI will NEVER HONOR their feature announcements to the Linux community.