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."

Comments

ATI may be there now...

[Vip]

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

Open Video/Graphics Cards

[billybob2]

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.

The lost relevance

[Shivetya]

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.

Re:The lost relevance

[TheRaven64]

I have a G550, and it's a very nice card for a non-graphics workstation. It supports 2D acceleration under X, and provides a crisper image quality than I've seen on nVidia and ATi cards. If I had a need for a good quality 2D card but didn't need 3D, I'd go with Matrox. Unfortunately for them, I don't have such a need.

I use both ati and nvidia on Linux successfully

[FreeUser]

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.

echo "media-video/ati-drivers" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
echo "media-video/ati-drivers-extra" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

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 ... 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.

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.

Re:Matrox?

[FridayBob]

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.

Nvidia is catching up?!

[thehunger]

As any Linux users will tell you (and there are supposed to be a few among this crowd), it is ATI that is playing catchup. As far as making Linux drivers available for their products, that is.

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!

ATI competition == more vapor for Linux

[linux11]

pcHDTV recommends using a nVidia video card to view HDTV on Linux. It isn't that ATI's hardware isn't capable of hardware accelrated MPEG decoding (iDCT). It is just that ATI refuses to do anything other than lie to the Linux community about being able to use this hardware feature. Linux users that buy ATI have to pay for the circuits just the same as those that buy nVidia but in the case of ATI, the feature is completely useless on Linux. Hence the recommendation to buy nVidia from pcHDTV.

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:

• ATI has no plans to ever release the announced VHA SDK to the general public
  
• Because of "lack of interest" (I guess on ATI's part, because there is plenty of interest to be found on Linux mailing lists), they feel no obligation to ever honor the press release
  
• ATI has never release specs for doing iDCT to the GATOS project and does not expect the GATOS project to be able to support iDCT
  
• When ATI's Linux FAQ stated that GATOS would be providing support, ATI already knew they had a policy which required withholding the specifications on how to write drivers to use the iDCT acceleration feature.
  

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.