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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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Hopefully this competition means lower prices and more goodies.
And better open-source support?A merger/acquisition and Higher prices!!
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
I used to be all for ATI, but the current selection of cards from Nvidia is IMO more impressive, especially cards like the 6600GT which are pretty awesome in the $200 price range.
I've owned various nVidia and ATI video cards. My current PC is using an ATI RADEON 9600XT from ASUS. Its a bit dated now, but a very nice card overall. My other PC has a nVidia GeForce4 MX400 made by Chaintech. That card is quite a bit more dated, and was kind of mediocre to begin with.
Anyways, the point I'm slowly coming to, is that, essentially, I don't really care if I own an ATI or nVidia card. High end cards are high end cards. I've had few problems with either; although, I find reliability of anything made by ASUS is best. Benchmarks aside, you get what you pay for. And most of the "discussion" over which is better in reference to ATI and nVidia is pure fanboyism.
... with regards to the availbility of their high-end cards. When was the last time you saw a store (online or otherwise) that had a x800 (of any stripe) or high end 6800 in stock? Probably not in the last 3 or 4 months. I was considering upgrading from my 9800pro, but until better cards become more widely available the costs are going to remain prohibitive.
How about Matrox? Are they still in business?
Haven't heard anything from them for ages....
I don't need a signature.
Is Intel's 40% market share. Honestly, when I read that the biggest market is for the lower-end cards and the big guns are most for marketing and prestige I didn't imagine it was such a difference.
---- Take the Space Quiz!
I would love to see the market share numbers broken down into separate markets.
Who gets the market share in the high-end workstation market?
Macintosh market?
Linux market?
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 used before an nvidia MX440 with personal cinema. kind of old but the 3d worked fine in linux. Personal Cinema sucked because there was no linux support for the tv part. Windows was fine.
:( but that will require another 200US$ :(
I upgrade to a radeon 9600 pro and it has been only headaches since then:
- Installing 3d acceleration in linux is really hard.
- I got an additional ati tv card that I installed, after a couple of days any 3d application had really bad texture corruption. I wrote to ATI and they replace my 9800pro card (with no proof of purchase because I lost the recipt.)
- The tv card was uninstalled for a long time, but I installed again and boooom... really bad 3d screen corruption. I turn off my machine and the 9800 was fine after a restart but I removed the tv card. Now ATI asked me to sent the tv card back. (again without recipt).
- Even in simple 2D screens I got screen corruptions.
- I did not do any overclocking to the card.
- Everytime i search for problem on 9800 it seems that they have the tendency of running too hot and people install additional coolers. But why do I have to expend more money in coolers if I already pay for the 9800 pro???
It seems to me that ATI is aware that some of their cards are a POS because they keep sending me RMA forms (return forms) at any complain I send.
I want to go back to nvidia
Altough I think the 9800 ATI card sucks, the support has been OK.
And they told all this to an interviewee? RIGHT
-mkb
This certainly sounds like ATI fanboy FUD to me. nVidia has shown that they're capable of producing a quality product (hence their growing market share). I don't see why they'd suddenly veer from a path that's proven effective.
It really doesn't matter one way or the other. The video card market is fast paced and volatile. If nVidia does produce garbage, the market will react accordingly, and drop them like a hot rock.
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
They do release drivers, but they really suck. Performance is supposed to be below Windows performance (I don't know first hand since I don't have windows on a machine with an ATI card). Cards supported seems to be improving, but for a while they totally refused to support any of the mobility chipsets. We had to wait months in order to get a set of drivers for Xorg 6.8 that wouldn't crash when trying to use opengl. I have heard that there are lots of features that are currently not supported, but I haven't actually checked these claims (they aren't features that currently interest me). If my ATI card was in anuthing other than a laptop, I would have ripped it out and replaced it a long time ago (and I am kicking myself for not paying enough attention while ordering my laptop).
I've got a mind like a steel trap - it's got an animal's foot stuck in it.
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's graphics drivers suck. Would it be so hard guys to document your control registers so one of us out here could write a decent driver? Intel and AMD are wide open in this respect. Why aren't you?
an ill wind that blows no good
Unfortunately, the manufacturers obviously don't see enough value in open source drivers to offset the risk of patent suits and/or cloning of their special hardware features. It's a matter of perspective - we see no legitimate reason why they should not release their internal documentation to interested/qualified open source developers, but they probably see themselves sunk if they did. After all, look what happened to the trailblazers in open source graphics docs: 3Dfx, Matrox, 3DLabs, etc.
The only solution for people who value open source drivers is to stop buying their products and develop our own to compete with them. Relentless lobbying will only waste their time and make them less likely to deal with folks in the open source community.
For people who don't care about open source drivers as long as a binary driver works good enough for you, just go ahead and buy a card from the leading manufacturers. But don't blame Linux when the driver blows up or acts strangely. As long as these vendors refuse to cooperate with the open source development model, the onus is on them to go the extra mile and produce a stable product that interoperates with the open source world.
So far, they haven't done well at that challenge, suggesting that either open source developers are deliberately foiling them (some people believe the absence of a driver abstraction layer falls along these lines), they employ incompetent programmers, or they are simply not providing their best effort as a company towards Linux support. I suspect the latter, and only market share will change that. (Hence the driving force behind platform advocacy, as opposed to the 'zealot' label that platform advocates receive from neophytes who misunderstand or reject the fundamental correlation between platform market share and quality of vendor support)
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
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.