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The State of ATI Drivers on GNU/Linux
An anonymous reader writes "After 50 days of the Phoronix editor-in-chief exclusively using ATI Radeon hardware in his system, he has issued his final blog post dubbed The State of ATI Linux. Topics covered include the very low frame-rate performance, image quality, overclocking X.Org 7.1 support, Big Desktop/Dual Head, Linux CrossFire, and other relevant items to gamers and Linux enthusiasts. From the article 'While discussing this trial with a colleague that was not familiar with the quality of ATI's Linux drivers he immediately classified ATI Technologies as attempting to fine-tune a hull on a ship while there is a giant hole in the side. However, is this truly the case?'."
From my experience not good. I run gentoo and updating to xorg-7.1 has been somewhat of a hassle with a ati card. Ati has yet to offer drivers with xorg-7.1 support and as a result I have had to downgrade and mask many packages to make it so ati drivers will work. Maybe once xorg-7.2 is released we will get suport for 7.1.
Having had good experiences with my Radeon with the DRI drivers, I decided to purchase a computer with integrated radeon graphics.
And I really really truly regret it.
The main purpose of this computer was TV-Out, a feature only supported by the proprietary firegl drivers. The version I first got (8.16.20) didn't feature any overscan controls, so it sat in the middle of our television. After a couple of releases of this, we got 8.21.something which broke it even more - in fact, now you could only see the top third of any video you were watching with XV. At the same time of course, there was no 3d support at all.
Since then, I got a VGA->RGB Scart cable, and I've been able to switch back to the free drivers. The quality is significantly better - working 3d, a full screen picture and snappier menus. I plan to be very very careful when buying ATI again.
Yes.
The state of ATI drivers on Windows is pure crap. It's even worse on Linux.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
However, is this truly the case?'."
yes.
Use nVidia if you want performance. They use a standard code base between all OS's. 95%+ of the code that is in your Linux driver is in your windows driver. The drivers are stable and have great performance. This has been hashed out many times on various OpenGL forums...
...back in 2000 when I found that none of their products are fully functional in real OSes and are of questionable value in toy OSes. I moved to Voodoo, then NVidia and haven't looked back. Oh yes, I've had experience with the latest ATIs under Linux and I can say that they still suck completely. I just haven't actually bought their products myself. I'm speaking of a box I have here at work.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Yes, my experience is the same... fine tune a ship with a huge hole on its side.
Using dualhead is just unusable because the driver fucks up X and requires a full restart of the system each time I want to change users. Opengl apps crash randomly. It's just sad...
Nvidia all the way guys! Don't fall for the cheap ATI cards!
I sold my ATI on craigslist because of the SAD state of the drivers. In simple terms "they are just flat out crap drivers", all my XGL and Compiz problems were related to the ATI drivers. But as soon as I through in my Nvidia card (TI4600) XGL+Compiz has not crashed on me since and every thing is butter smooth. I should of known better to even try an ATI card (it was free) as I have been using Nvidia and Linux for awhile with out any issues for awhile now.
Sig
He completely discounts the gaming aspect. Folks, I can't get the drivers to do jack for 3d acceleration, and that's a deal-breaker in my mind. Short of fixing this, there is nothing that will convince me to buy another ATI-based laptop. I have an AMD 3400+ with 1GB of RAM and an ATI 9700 Mobility Radeon. The thing has amazing performance for windows and gaming, handling the native resolution of 1280x800 for almost every game that I've tried without much trouble (no it doesn't do 180 fps, but it is solid). I can't get more than just a few fps (say 10) under linux (Ubuntu 6.x), and installing the drivers also screwed up my resolution settings. I plan to reinstall in a few weeks, and will, at that time, try out Gentoo to see if I can get any further. Maybe I'll try Fedora as well.
The point is, without solid support for gaming, I don't care much about the drivers as long as I get a good display and reasonable 2d performance. But when I start gaming, I need the performance to just be there. There is no excuse for it not to be really freaking easy!
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Xorg has its drivers. They're woefully out of date (X1xx series cards being completely unsupported) and relatively few contain 3D support. And fglrx is everything that'd bad about proprietary software. My laptop (a Thinkpad T60) can't even boot into X using fglrx if it's running from battery power (you just get a blank screen.) Use "totem" and "Unreal Tournament 2004" often enough, and one will stop working - if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, you'll get enough kernel panics to require a full-on reboot.
I'm honestly wondering if I'd been better off going the GMA950 route. Intel's drivers aren't completely Free Software, but there's at least a cleaner design in there.
I've said it before, but I really think the FSF needs to do more than just fund reverse engineering efforts. While ATI may hate these efforts, they make ATI products more valuable and ultimately help ATI. A concerted campaign to raise capital to start a rival graphics card manufacturer strikes me as a better solution if this is possible. I'm aware of open source graphics card efforts (involving programming FPGAs et al) but I think the next step needs to be taken. I would invest in it.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
until Crossfire is supported I'm staying in Windows. I paid good money to reach the upper limits of available performance and any operating system that won't let me live there goes into the penalty box (VMWare).
Actually, ATI's lack of support for Crossfire and Creative's lack of support for X-Fi (along with their latest Sound APIs) are the things keeping Windows as my primary OS.
"poor"
Oh, the article was longer than that? Weird, there isn't much to say. I know this: If I had been able to see into the driver future two years ago, I would've bought a different notebook, one with an NVidia card.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
you had me at #!
NVIDIA has always been software engineer heavy - from what I've heard they have more people working on the drivers than on the hardware itself, and they've been that way at least since the late 90's.
John Carmack has said that NVIDIA is the gold standard. If he finds a bug on NVIDIA hardware it's something he did wrong, if it's a bug on hardware from anyone else they've invariably had a bug in their drivers.
I have an HP nw8240 laptop with a FireGL v5000. I've been running Ubuntu since I got it in November. I can't recall if I started with Breezy or a Dapper beta, but I've been using the fglrx drivers the whole time, and it's been fine for me. The only time I had to download the drivers from ati.com was to get an ACPI related fix that wasn't in the Ubuntu packaged version. Once that was included, I've been using the fglrx from the restricted repo, and that was during the Dapper beta, back in November/December. I was running Xgl during the beta, too, and still am. It did crash at first, but again it took less than a month to get an update pushed out to the repos that fixed it. I don't do any gaming, though.
Forget ATI's proprietary drivers. The fact remains that they are useless blobs of binary code. For old hardware, I get better performance and reliability using the radeon driver which comes with Xorg.
This free driver, however, needs improvement. This is where energy needs to be focused.
Other reason: I use OpenBSD. I can't use fglrx. Don't care about it. Won't do me any good. When people tell me about ATI drivers on Linux (read: fglrx nonsense), I tune them out. It is worthless information. It really is such a shame that Linux people are so willing to sell their soul to a proprietary driver.
A good driver (read: free) would mean freedom for all platforms. This would also give developers a chance to update the driver as things change, which would fix reliability problems.
Way back when, I had my old box set up as a dual-screen, dual-boot (linux/win98). 1 ATI card, 1 integrated video card. Both linux and Windows had no problem using both cards.
Now - upgrade to a better box, throw in a Radeon 9200, and nothing works properly except under SUSE. Ubuntu, for example, insists on using only the PCI card (doesn't matter which one you have configured as the primary in the bios, PCI or AGP).
So, throw on a copy of Windows. Ha - the situation is worse. W2003 uses the 9200, but in 4-bit "colour", 800x600 res. The other ATI card is invisible to the system. Installing the drivers - oh joy - they refuse to install. XP Pro? No real diff.
SuSE 10.0, on the other hand, saw and configured both cards. However, trying to install ATI's drivers under both Ubuntu and SUSE failed - the install program craps out.
When it comes to video cards, from now on ATI means "All Time Ignore". I didn't have these problems with the old GeForce 2 with TV-out that worked perfectly.
From their support site.
"Linux is a clone of the operating system UNIX"
If they don't even know what Linux is, how well do you think they can support it?
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Where from?? I've been (unsuccessfully) looking for such a thing for years ...
It's darned frustrating. I've written a fair number of graphics drivers in my day (all for BeOS, I'm afraid), so I have plenty of sympathy for driver writers trying to chase down lockups that happen very very infrequently.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I have a Dell Latitude D610, with the ATI R300 chipset. While the older drivers worked, the latest one, together with kernel 2.6.16.x, does provide good performance for a laptop. The frame rate reported by glxgears jumped from less than 200 to about 1000, 3d screensavers look very nice, and hooking up external monitors or projectors is a breeze.
I don't know what the support is for desktop cards, but for laptops ATI is now a viable option to consider.
A lot of the negativity in previous comments seem to be based on past experiences - try the latest driver if you have a chance, you may be pleasantly surprised...
Of course that doesn't really matter much since the level of support the Intel chips provide is about the same as you get from the XFree Radeon driver. It's only when you start asking for fast 3D or multihead or any of those other features that the ATI drivers really look bad. Try running any modern game on an Intel graphics chip and you'll see why people prefer ATI and nVidia. I shudder at the thought of trying to use the Secondlife Linux client on an Intel graphics chip.
I read the internet for the articles.
This is a good time to justifiably bash a company without being modded a troll I'll take it. ATI drivers under linux are pure crap and thats putting it nicely they don't release drivers often and when they do they are always missing many features or the features or broken so they were probably better off being missing in the first place. I've been told that the reason for the difference in quality of the ati and nvidia linux drivers all boils down to corporate customers. Nvidia has a significantly large number of companies who require linux drivers and ATI doesn't and so the little guys who buy their top of the line ATI card to play doom 3 in linux suffer.
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
The rumours are that the next generation of intel graphics chips will be closer to competitive with whatever ATI and Nvidia have by then than the current ones. Presuming that is true, it sure would be nice if they maintain their current policy about open-source / open-specs for the chips.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Your OS is your soul.
Balmer is the devil.
RMS is Jesus. (looks like him, no?)
They might as well save everyone the hassle of "trying" to get ATI drivers to work & just say it's unsupported under linux.
.... til you reboot ...
They rarely work. And if they do work, chances are it took HOURS (at least) fscking with this & that til they work
I regret the day I ever bought an ATI card.
I'd rather eat a cold bowl of gorilla snot!
Linux does seem to get plenty of idiot wankers, but the rest of us still outnumber the BSD snobs. None of the serious kernel developers are willing to support interfaces for proprietary drivers, and nearly all are actively opposed to the concept.
Remember: it's the GPL camp that actively impedes proprietary software. If OS popularity went the other way, problems with proprietary drivers would be way worse. You'd need to run a special kernel compiled by ATI. The BSD license offers **zero** defense against proprietary stuff.
ATI's proprietary drivers breaks power management on Linux notebooks. If you put your notebook to sleep, video doesn't work upon resume. Shame on you, ATI.
"Actually, ATI's lack of support for Crossfire and Creative's lack of support for X-Fi (along with their latest Sound APIs) are the things keeping Windows as my primary OS." .pord dluohs uoy taht evitaerC dna ITA s'tI ,drawkcab ti tog uoY
Is it just me, or this "blog" look suspiciously like an astroturf op?
-- Let's go Viridian.
Sounds about right to me.
There was a time that I was a big ATI fan. But it's been a few years since that time. I'm now a satisfied nVidia customer. While I don't currently use Linux much, even on Windows the nVidia drivers just work better. I've noticed that, on too many web forums for various games, seeing other players complaining about problems with ATI. Hardly ever see nVidia customers with complaints like that. One could argue that maybe the game developers are developing and doing most of their testing with nVidia, so that ATI is getting the shaft. Maybe. I dunno. Don't really care. That's ATI's problem. I just now that stuff just works with my GF4, and when it comes time to upgrade (I know, most people upgraded long ago lol - I'm very financially conservative), I'll most likely upgrade to another nVidia card.
ATI could maybe win me back if they could produce drivers that worked well on both Windows and Linux, and open-sourced the drivers. I'd rather have open source/free drivers than closed. Conversely, I'd rather have closed drivers that give me full functionality, then crippled open-source drivers that lack major areas of functionality (which was the state of open source ATI drivers for awhile - things may have changed, I don't know) and where they did have functionality, it was significantly inferior in performance to the proprietary drivers. Unfortunately, it sounds like, from some other users' comments, that with ATI you get the worst of both worlds - the open source, third-party developed drivers, which lack some functionality or performance, in some cases work *better* than the proprietary drivers, which means that Linux users are pretty much getting the shaft either way.
But, if they would release their drivers under a free software license, they could possibly involve the open source development community in helping them improve their drivers. If that happened, they would probably end up with both better drivers, and more brand loyalty from Linux users. Of course, they may not care that much about Linux users, but I would say getting free, skilled labor to help them debug their drivers (which should help them on Windows to some extent, too, I would wager) could be a big boon for them on Windows as well.
I purchased a Compaq Presario R4000 with the Radeon integrated graphics, took me forever to get native resolution off the widescreen, I have NO acceleration, never got it to work. I am NEVER buying ATI again. NOT for my desktop and NEVER EVER with a laptop. It's been an absolute nightmare and I've been using linux since 1999. I have an older Nvidia MX440 on my desktop, runs great. I use it with my 37 inch VIZIO LCD TV. It's awesome, but sometimes laggy. Need to upgrade to a newer Nvidia. Stay away from ATI if you wish to do anything 3D accelerated in Linux!
I have had good luck with my Radeon 7200 using the open source drivers that come with X. I think you need to stick with older cards that are really supported. The hard part is getting one.
Sorry to the ATI guys, but I switched from a ATI 9600XT to a similar Nvidia card to get 3d games working. With ATI was imposible to me. But with Nvidia a few simple steps and its done, I can play all my 3d games, even the windows games with wine. I think the architecture Nvidia has able better drivers, maybe the architecture ATI has is too complex to make simple drivers.
-Woof woof woof!
Dual head? Si! And added a third monitor using an old ATI PCI card. Followed all the xinerama posts closely until they all meshed together nicely. THe third one is too old, so I've ditched that.
Even got better refresh rates on the CRTs while the Win2K drivers (Which I've given up d-loading) can only give me 60Hz on the second monitor. So I had high hopes for my Radeon 7000 and d-loaded the most recent driver, at least the 8.14 was packaged as an RPM. But fglrx is not for the 7000 VE, and I stayed with the radeon driver from xorg.
Sadly, no 3D and no acceleration in Linux force me to dual boot to Win2K, just for Classic Quaking. Heck, if the ATI can't even play that, you know it sux.
I've noticed that the ones bragging about high framerates from their ATIs aren't gamers or are not running a multihead setup, so one is pretty much SOL in what seems to be a fairly common setup nowadays.
Is ATI really this bad or were they asked to stay away from Linux in order to get the XBox 360 deal instead of Nvidia? This kind of thing has happened many times already, so with the $$ involved in XBox 360 deals, ATI surely would give up making Linux 3D or even good 2D a priority.
And have you noticed all the laptops coming out with ATI video chips in them?
DON'T BUY LAPTOPS WITH ATI CHIPS. period.
The Open Graphics Project comes up pretty high in google searches. When someone writes an article like this, it tells me that they didn't even TRY to do their homework. From reading the article (yeah, I read it!), it would appear that the author isn't seriously looking for alternatives. It's reasonable enough to evaluate ATI and nVidia drivers. What's unreasonable is to make everything totally one-sided by not mentioning the alternatives.
A portion of our software we build at my company requires 3D acceleration for design work.
After about a week of wrestling with ATI drivers and cards we gave up and decided it was cheaper to ship an NVIDIA card with Linux driver CD with our software than to try and support ATI.
The ATI drivers never could do a cloned display correctly with differing resolutions, despite spending hours trying to tweak 30 or so parameters in the config file. The NVIDIA drivers did it in two lines first try.
Most of our customers who have switched thank us for forcing them to do it.
I don't think the point is about open source drivers per se. It's about providing working drivers (open source or otherwise) for hardware that lots of people paid lots of money for.
And intel has already stated that their next gen chip will be fully supported in linux with dri.
There are people that keep pushing the myth that ATI is pro-open source and the nVidia is not. The truth is that ATI is more like nVidia but ATI's marketing keeps pointing to Gatos. In reality, ATI does almost worse than nothing to support Gatos development.
On of the first attempts by ATI to provide an actual ATI supported package for Linux was the VHA Kit. This was supposed to be a library/SDK made by ATI and Loki Games to allow Linux access to the Rage chipset support for hardware assisted decompression of MPEG2 so that iDCT did not need to be done in software. When I have asked ATI about the VHA kit and if they have any commitment to providing on-going support for hardware assisted iDCT for Linux, they claimed that the kit was never distributed because of lack of interested in the community. This seems really fishy since release of the kit even made it on Slashdot and there where several comments at the time expressing interest. Later, a former developer from Loki stated that do to limitations in the Rage chipset implimentation of moving data back and forth, it was faster just to do iDCT in software.
Then the Radeon came out which should have addressed the limitations in the Rage. And nVidea released their closed source drivers with iDCT. While it is possible to do iDCT in software for the 480i resolution of DVDs, for HDTV tuners such as pcHDTV, a nVidea card is almost a requirement to view 720p and 1080i MPEG2 streams. ATI got so many requests for iDCT support that they put online a FAQ on their support site claiming that Gatos was working on the issue. In reality, the Gatos mailing list had posted multiple times that they where not working on iDCT at all. When I contacted ATI requesting to get the Radeon specs needed to support the iDCT support myself, they stated that such information is *NEVER* released outside of ATI. They went to explain that even if the developer signs a NDA, they still will never release the specs to do iDCT support.
Then the All-in-Wonder 8500 which was supported by Gatos was discontinued so I contacted ATI to offer my help to work on Gatos support of the All-in-Wonder 9700. They ask me to be patient and they would be getting back to me. A couple *YEARS* later and they still haven't gotten back to me. According to Gatos, they have gotten around to providing the specs and example hardware to one of the developers. But while Gatos is "open source" in the fact it is GPL, no one else can be much help to the project since the Gatos developers can't legally give the specs to any potental developers. All they can do is tell potental developers to contact ATI which result again with a request to be patient for *YEARS*.
The All-in-Windows 9700 is now discontinued and the new mainstream AIW card is the AIW 2006. Gatos doesn't even claim to have been provided any specs for this newer card. The ATI prioritary drivers provide no support for the tuner at all. And ATI continue to blow off requests from any potental developers except for the ones they already have an established relationship.
And for some reason that eludes me, people still claim that ATI does a better job of supporting the Linux community than nVidia! Does ATI's drivers provide iDCT support for Linux? nVidia's drivers do. If you call ATI right now asking for driver programming specs for any shipping Radeon chipset, do they actually provide it or tell you to just wait (and wait and wait and wait)? nVidia is at least honest about what programming specs they will openly release and what they won't.
There are essentially only two graphics card companies that count in the world: ATi and NVidia. If ATi documents their card interfaces well enough that open-source drivers can be written, NVidia WILL steal their technology, and vice-versa.
This isn't so much a threat to business models in the software business because there is WAY more competition and charging for support is a valid way to make cash.
What do you want them to do? Give away the hardware and charge for support? Yeah. Good luck with that.
+++ATH0
Well, unfortunately, ATI doesn't see it that way. Their profit margins are razor thin. They're not about to sink more than token effort into supporting a minority user base. They would make negative profit. To them, if you want to use their products, you can use them the way they're intended. Otherwise, buy something else. The fact that something else doesn't exist is not their probem. This is a business we're talking about, and in business, profit is the top concern. If you want to do humanitarian work, you start a non-profit. If you want to make profit, you start a business. That's why we have terms like "business" and "non-profit" to describe these kinds of entities. For the most part, don't expect non-business things to come out of businesses. (There are exceptions, but ATI isn't one of them.)
I've got an Acer Aspire 5670 with CoreDuo 1.66Ghz, 1GB ram, ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 (128 ram, 512 hypermem), 15.4" WXGA and I've had not trouble with graphics. I can do dual desktop (though, as a college student I find it hard to make space for a second monitor), graphics editing, video, gaming. I haven't said once "gee, I wish these drivers were better so I could do that". So, where did I go wrong?
-Tim Louden
Their are wonderful OSS drivers for 2D features, it is hardware-accelerated 3D where things fall short. HA3D means AGP or PCI-Express, not PCI. Even with support there is no way the OGP is going to release anything usable on that front for YEARS.
, 39352584-2,00.htm
On the other hand, Intel has been providing specs and source code for their integrated graphics chipsets. This includes hardware accelerated 3D, though the chips aren't up to the nVidia and ATI top or upper-mid range. Hardware T&L is missing, for one thing. However, their next refresh of those chips should get much closer and should still have excellent OSS drivers.
Intel offers much more hope than OGP ever will, as noble as that effort is.
http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man4/i810.4.html
http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The OGP's goal is to release USABLE 3D for 3D desktop support. It won't be YEARS for that. Most Linux users just want the 3D features supported for relatively basic stuff, like 3D desktops with transparent windows and the like. Not games. This sort of thing is WELL within the capacity of the OGP in the short term.
Besides, the long term goal of the OGP is to have open hardware. Wouldn't you like that? Don't kill them based on their short-term goals. Think about the future, lest you never end up with open hardware.
Well, the last time I looked at the OGP wiki was back in late February and there was almost no indication of progress. I understand this was people were actually DOING things and didn't have time to update the website, but it still gave me the impression of going to take forever.
Looking at it again gives me much more hope for the future. They seem to have made a lot of progress and updated the site. Very nice.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I am for open source drivers. After all, I bought a video card I would like to use that piece of hardware anyway I see fit (not necessarily with Windows or Linux).
But I can't place all the blame on ATI or NVidia for the state of drivers. Some blame lies with the Kernel Developers.
Before you start sending me hate mail, hear me out...
The kernel developers went with ideology rather than reliability when it came to the driver API. They purposely manipulate their API and hope that this will give ATI and NVidia some incentive to open source their drivers. Apparently, the only thing that is being accomplished is the poor end user experience.
Make a stable API that the binary only drivers can link to and remove any excuse these companies have for their poor support of Linux. This way we can have a better user experience in Linux.
I know:
"But this flies in the face of what we want which is OSS... If you don't like it, make your own kernel... You have angered the kernel gods!"
So excuse me for asking the kernel developers to be the "bigger man" and do whatever it takes to help the linux users...
I am experiencing "vendor lock in" since I am stuck with the ATI Radeon 7500 mobility chip that came with my laptop. I can't change out the GPU, but I can change the OS. Why force me to use windows?
In reality, I run Linux on my laptop and have "acceptable" performance mainly because I use windows to play games. But what if I wanted to play games in linux?
I feel that as long as ATI and NVidia refuse to open source their drivers and the kernel developers refuse to "stabilize" their API, the end users will remain stuck in the cross fire and articles complaining about video drivers will continue to exist. BTW, when a non-linux user read articles like above, he/she reads "stay away from linux, windows is hardware friendly"...
Well, I'm unpopular enough....
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
There are huge problems with Intel's video chipsets:
- Every Intel video solution I've seen uses solely 'shared memory' - e.g., your system's main memory rather than dedicated RAM
- Intel likes to offload everything to the CPU
- Performance is not up to par compared to Nvidia, ATI, or even S3.
The software support for Intel's solution is VERY good, but until the above drawbacks are addressed, I'll choose Nvidia's free/proprietary solution over Intel's Free/Free solution.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Bite your tongue! If you check out the Gatos project web site, you'll note that ATI actually sent the Gatos folks a couple of video cards. How dare you say ATI doesn't care about supporting a growing market segment?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I agree completely with the parent, and add to that a reminder that the open-source process has proven to be a better development model than the proprietary model. If hardware makers would publish interface specs and leave the software -- the drivers -- to the FOSS community, the result would be far better than what the manufacturers could do themselves. Better drivers mean more sales. esr makes this point in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar."
Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project
They'll have to do better than that to get me off Nvidia. Yes, Nvidia is proprietary, closed, and does have some problems. They also are rarely more than one minor version behind either kernel or X, and I haven't yet run into something that I can do on Windows that I can't do on Linux with these cards.
It is exciting, yes. I would buy Intel graphics if they were as good as or better than that generation of ATI or Nvidia -- especially if they were willing to work with the community, not just release specs and let someone else do all the work. I imagine they could release most of their Windows source, also. I would love to have all my hardware fully supported in the mainstream kernel, without having to choose inferior hardware.
The problem is, I have to pick one of the two: open solutions, or best possible hardware for my budget. Can I buy a $200 Intel card, and have it support all the things that my $200 Nvidia card does? Dual-headed DVI output (with very high resolution), comparable performance, with all the fun pixel, vertex, and gemoetry shaders and other features -- maybe even match the DirectX 10 cards, but using OpenGL 2.1?
The problem is, while I love open solutions, I'm sick of being ridiculed by the "My XP never crashes" people for choosing last year's tech simply because it's open.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Unfortunately not many of us can afford $1000 (US Dollars that is) for a card that performs worse than what is currently given to us with the bottom end nVIDIA products or Intel products. Its nice in theory but not viable to %99 of the target audience. Right now its buy nVIDIA if you are a gamer and Intel if you want decent app performance but could give 2 shits on gaming. Do I like that, no. Competition rocks. But lets have some REAL competition.
Sigs are nice guns
"I plan to be very very careful when buying ATI again."
After learning exactly how "awesome" ATI's driver support was when I tried to setup 3D with my Radeon 8500 (and also Xinerama, etc) to play WoW under Cedega, in both 32-bit and 64-bit modes, I switched to nVidia and haven't looked back (yes, nVidia's drivers ran with Cedega and WoW in both 32-bit and 64-bit Linux installs perfectly well).
So, I suggest to you, to never buy ATI again. Saying you'll be careful when buying ATI again, is like saying you'll be careful when shoving a live scorpion into your pants again. ATI is shit. Regardless of what their hardware might do, if you don't have drivers to make it do it, it's the same as not having the card!
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I'm sick of being ridiculed by the "My XP never crashes" people for choosing last year's tech simply because it's open.
Sounds like your problem is not a lack of all the bells and whistles that you will probably never fully use, but rather that you have a weak ego and feel that keeping up with the jonses is paramount.
You didn't do much looking into this if you think they're trying to sell a $1000 graphics card.
To me, it depends entirely on the use. For my wife's PC (no real 3D required), I went with Intel since I knew 3d would go straight out of the box, no fussing with un-user-friendly driver installs and X configs. For my own desktop usage, it'd be ATI or nVidia, leaning slightly toward ATI for their prior Linux Free driver support. For notebooks, however, 3d is much less important to me than reliable suspend/resume, which I'm unable to get with ATI and which I get in spades from Intel.
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Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but ATI has long since had issues of creating stable and viable drivers for its products. I'm sure you all remember the ATI Rage Fury Maxx which debuted some six or seven years ago. It not only came with two onboard video processing units, but also promised to be the fastest video card on the market for its time in its price range, $150 USD. So what happened to this card, you say? As it turns out ATI was only capable of providing drivers that were compatible with Windows 98 in an age when Windows 2000 was just becoming popular. Initially ATI posted that they were in the process of making Windows 2000 drivers for the card, only to retract the statement a year later with a note saying that Windows 2000 didn't support multiple video processing units on a single video card. If anything I doubt the problem was with Windows 2000.
Not having learned from my previous experience with ATI, I later purchased an ATI HDTV Wonder more than a year after its release. At which point I had long since upgraded my system to a dual 1800+ Athlon MP system running Windows XP SP2. Upon installing the card in my now year old system I once again faced issues with the quality of ATI's drivers. In fact the drivers that shipped with the card refused to install properly. The result was I then had to download all new drivers from ATI's website. However the frustration did not end there. After downloading the drivers it took nearly four hours to get the new and pristine drivers to install, much too long for any average user. Once installed the performance was sub optimal at best, even on my dual processor system which the market was only just beginning to catch up to in terms of speed.
Reluctantly the story doesn't end there. About the same time I bought the ATI HDTV Wonder, I also purchased a Compaq laptop that had, that's right you guessed it, an onboard ATI Radeon Mobility U1 video card and an AMD Athlon 2800+ processor. In its original configuration, running Windows XP SP2, the card worked great. I was content with the performance and the speed of the card given that it was in a laptop after all. However, having recently decided to switch to Linux on my laptop for security among other reasons, I immediately felt the issues associated with the onboard ATI chipset. While Linux supposedly provides full support of this card through DRI, I have yet to get 3D acceleration working properly on my laptop despite having invested a large amount of time tweaking the settings for the ati driver module in my xorg.conf file. Eventually I did what most others would do, I turned to ATI's most recent proprietary fglrx driver only to find that my card was not even listed as being supported in Linux by ATI. With a little bit of tweaking I was finally able to get my card to work with the ATI fglrx drivers by specifying a different ChipId. Unfortunately the ATI fglrx driver then reported that it couldn't communicate with the fglrx kernel driver, and therefore 3D acceleration was again disabled. Furthermore, I found ATI's drivers only to provide a slight improvement over those developed by the Linux community and thus hardly worth the effort.
After these three incidents, only one thing is certain, I will never buy another ATI product.
You know, Matrox doesn't have the fastest cards, but they do have Free drivers that support 3D. Since you've failed to mention them, perhaps you've failed to do your homework as well!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Well, unfortunately, ATI doesn't see it that way. Their profit margins are razor thin. They're not about to sink more than token effort into supporting a minority user base
What is this nonsense ? We bought the product like anybody else, so we are entitled to have support.
Besides, we are not asking for effort from them to support us, just some docs so that we support ourselves.
Try at least to understand what this is about.
They would make negative profit
That's not what happened to NVidia. NVidia won the movie studios market thanks to their (limited) support.
To them, if you want to use their products, you can use them the way they're intended
That's what we are trying to do but we can't because they do not provide us what we need.
Too bad for them. Do you realise that the current situation is that ATI cards are a "no go" ? Even if you have 3D support, you have no kind of support for accelerated MPEG2 or MPEG4 viewing, which you pay for.
Otherwise, buy something else
That's exactly what we do.
The fact that something else doesn't exist is not their probem. This is a business we're talking about, and in business, profit is the top concern. If you want to do humanitarian work, you start a non-profit
What BS is that ? We PAID for the card. In case you can't understand, I repeat : we PAID for the card like anyone else using Windows.
So where did you find the humanitarian work ? Morons like you will ensure we do not buy any ATI card anymore.
The fact that it's better to use the integrated chipset from Intel or Via instead of ATI (as at least, you don't pay for features you can't use) should be a hint to you that sth is very wrong with ATI.
And I was a BIG supporter of ATI before.
For the most part, don't expect non-business things to come out of businesses. (There are exceptions, but ATI isn't one of them.)
Except that providing drivers so that we can use your hardware is the basics of a business like ATI.
Apparently I did:
- the-open-graphics-project/
http://linux.wordpress.com/2006/07/19/introducing
Sigs are nice guns
As the article CLEARLY states, the development board is at least $1000, and the graphics card will be at most $200. (Actually it just said $1000 and $200, but I have inside information.)
I'm immune, All AMD and Nvidia for years now. Haven't seen a thing to change my attitude to date.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Nvidia probably has already reverse-engineered lots of ATI cards. It's not a secret that quite all hardware makers reverse-engineer the competitors products to check if they break any of their patents and to get new ideas. Same is - probably - true of ATI.
They won't admit it, anyway, for obvious reasons.
I'm on Gentoo/xorg, on amd64, full closed/binary nvidia drivers, PCI Express, and everything works, out of the box.
I really don't know what's wrong with your setup. I might be able to help you over at irc.freenode.net#gentoo
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Or that I genuinely enjoy games, but I do get sick of hearing "Linux can't do games". So every time someone says that, I drag them over and make them watch a beautiful Quake 4 on my 20" LCD screen.... on Gentoo Linux.
I am wondering if I shouldn't just buy a Wii and stop upgrading my computer, though. No worrying about open hardware on the desktop that way...
Funny that you should call it a weak ego, though. Maybe it's just a more focused one. There are so many other ways where I could care less about "keeping up with the Joneses".
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Well having inside info is alot better than most ;D
I am willing to part with 200 at this point if I can expect to see a PCIE card for a similar price in a year or two. But for agp even, that is very high cost for a low end video card. Just because I not only have the cash to burn, but am willing to do so on principle alone is rare. I hope that we can agree there. I do recall (not having the time to refer to actual sections) that the first run was supposed to be the reprogrammable chips, but still, that is alot more than even most hardcore gamers spend. For a regular dude (like me), that is a decent Dell that can run linux to show off to coworkers (which works BTW. Got 2 hooked running it themselves and another 5 interested. Go Ubuntu and Linspire!).
Thanks however for the added info. At this point the more data the better.
Sigs are nice guns