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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?'."
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...
you had me at #!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.