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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.
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)
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.
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.