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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...
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!
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)
"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 #!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Having some experience with writing free software drivers for ATI cards I must (sadly) concur.
The problem is that it takes up to a year to make a half-way usable 3d driver - with the specs. Which means the developers should get specifications at least 6 months before the release of the new card for the drivers to be of relevance.
The reality is that we are lucky to get specifications 1 year after the release has happenned.
With regard to open hardware this is a great idea for many reasons beside the availability of specs.
For example, I would really, really, not mind paying extra $5 so that the graphics card does not lockup the moment it receives a slightly malformed command. Or so that it has a timeout and does not hang the PCI bus forever on a wrong address. The general-purpose CPUs have got this for ages - they just throw an interrupt and go on.
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.
It'd be less of a problem if they
1. Spent more time to document the damn hardware
2. Opened the interface to the public.
The problem is the hardware is always in a state of flux and just incremental improvements. Your GeForce 7800 is probably based on the same HDL source as the 6600 with appropriate changes. This means that legacy symbol names from one project creep up into the new space. You get odd names, combined with lack of comments and documentation [compliance] leads to hardware with "oops" that the drivers have to work around.
Things could vastly improve for the customer if they stopped pretending that they know best. I know for a fact that companies like ATI and Nvidia spend a good deal of time [re: cost of the video card] in DRM technologies. Basically they don't give two shits about you as a customer so long as you
a) feel inadequate with your 75W GPU and buy the next best thing next quarter
b) fully comply with their "dominance" of your machine, force you to run windows, force you to use their bloaty drivers, use their drm, etc
I tolerate Nvidia solely because their kernel modules work decently [well not anymore as they're not keeping pace with xorg development]. Opening the 2D and 3D accelerators to the public can only serve to make the hardware more popular.
Their value is in the hardware and the ability to develiver it. Not the interface that puts a triangle on the screen.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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.
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 hidden premise here is that somehow documenting the interface will make it easier for competitors to 'steal' some advantage. That's so obviously wrong in so many ways it's shocking someone would assert it in good faith.
What are they going to do? Copy the interface so their card will be compatible with the other cards drivers? Well, yes, I suppose someone could do that. Wouldn't necessarily even be a bad thing (standard interfaces are generally considered a good thing, even ad hoc standards.) But this is a far cry from somehow "stealing" the actual video card technology. That technology is, in many cases, patented, rather than protected as a trade secret, so the competition can (and you can bet, has) gone and read the patents right off anyway. They just can't legally imitate it too closely. And to the extent there are things in hardware that *are* trade-secrets, a disection of one of the cards would be a much better way to get at them. Looking at the external interface is the last method one would use to try to disect the inner workings of a device. Note that refusing to disclose the interface doesn't do jack to stop the competitors from disecting the hardware.
No, I'm sorry, that whole line of argument is utter nonsense.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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...
How is documenting "register F7C0 does foo" going to reveal how the chip is actually architected?
How is not documenting the registers going to prevent NVidia from putting an ATI chip under an electron microscope to analyze their circuits?
Face it. If you're one chip fab competing against another one, documenting the externally-exposed registers for programmers is NOT going to deter your competitors in the slightest, nor is releasing binary-only drivers. Remember, decompiling code for reverse engineering IS legal (just don't copy & paste the code , recompile, and call it your own, that's copyright infringement) and decompilers are readily available, so there is NO advantage ATI has over Nvidia, or NVidia has over ATI by not open sourcing drivers.
The only thing that they are doing is alienating potential customers and slowing down the progression of open source. NVidia does have an advantage because while ATI's drivers totally suck, NVidia's drivers actually work so most of us accept NVidia's drivers. Of course, if I were wanting to upgrade from xorg 6.9 to 7.1 right now, I'd be pissing and moaning about binary-only releases right now (the fact that I am STILL running a piece of shit ATI card now is immaterial ATM).
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
"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.
If they make the specs public then people will know when the company hacks the drivers to cheat at benchmarks. I'm sure most companies, to some extent, mess with the card to make the benchmark programs happy. It's just too important for them not to manage that kind of publicity. So if the specks were public then they might get caught by someone saying. "HEY your card doesn't do what the benchmarks say it does".
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.