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40 Comments
- sq377, on 10/10/2007, -10/+40http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010380048%201305520548&bop=And&Order=PRICE
Seriously just stop trying with ati. - schestowitz, on 10/10/2007, -5/+26> Dissecting The ATI Linux Driver
Dissect it and leave it to rot on the operating table. you deserve something which works better with Linux. Been several years and no major improvements. Just promises... I still get cursor bugs (sometimes blinking in both minotors simultaneously). - mooninite, on 10/10/2007, -6/+22What's missing from this dissection?
Performance.
I guess that's because the performance delta of the fglrx driver has remained the same for *3 years* now. Why is that bad? Because your X1900 under Linux is as fast as a Geforce FX5200. Seriously, how does AMD/ATI still have contracts with OEMs with a driver like this? - geminitojanus, on 10/10/2007, -1/+15I was hoping this was someone's attempt at reverse engineering it, so we can finally ditch the need to suck on AMD's teat and build our own damned drivers, and probably get better performance at the same time.
- inactive, on 10/10/2007, -7/+18ATi has been sucking some fat ***** for a long time now--nVIDIA has better cards and better drivers. I can't understand why anyone would put up with their lame *****.
- abdrahman, on 10/10/2007, -0/+11I have a friend working at AMD, and all their machines run nVIDIA cards if they use linux, even the ones in the ATI department.......even ATI knows their drivers suck ass.
- greyfade, on 10/10/2007, -2/+11holy *****, that was *POINTLESS*.
- jdong, on 10/10/2007, -0/+8http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/12/142218
Same company that wants to use their chipsets to force DRM and lock access to the video card's framebuffer. BOO ATI, BOO AMD. - postaldave, on 10/10/2007, -2/+10i love competition in hardware but if ATI is going to suck this bad with drivers just let them die and have them take AMD with them.
- jdong, on 10/10/2007, -0/+8How does OpenGL excuse XV video tearing, or lack of AIGLX texture_from_pixmap support for Beryl, or random hardlocks and crashes from stopping X or switching between X and virtual terminals? And these problems have only gotten worse through later releases. 8.39.4 has taken hardlocking to a brand new level. X doesn't respond to SIGKILL and attempting to power off with X active results in a hang within ACPI subsystem code.
- jdong, on 10/10/2007, -1/+8Did some people forget to recharge their sarcasm detectors?
I'm not exactly an ATI fanboy: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r18755306-Re-Dell-pushes-ATI-to-make-better-drivers-for-Linux - jdong, on 10/10/2007, -4/+11WOW. I am absolutely convinced. Given ATI's history with excellent Linux support, I shall go recommend ATI products to all of my friends, and stock up on ATI cards before they go out of stock...
- Urusai, on 10/10/2007, -0/+7They plan on releasing AIGLX support concurrent with the Linux release of Duke Nukem Forever.
- schoate09, on 10/10/2007, -1/+7Same company *****.
- Coded1, on 10/10/2007, -0/+6This is garbage, 4 pages of graphs of file size changes and strings over the past 20 or so releases. What quote sums up the whole article?
"We have decided to dissect the last 19 months of driver releases from ATI/AMD to expose some interesting facts and what should be coming in the future."
Just an article of the driver in review. - meanfish, on 10/10/2007, -4/+9To be honest...I find this to be a very interesting article. It's hard to quantify a lot of what goes on with the ATI linux driver. I can tell you that in the last four years it's come a long, long way and is much more usable now than it was then in terms of installation.
What I see to be the fundamental issue with the ATI linux driver isn't actually a linux problem at all, but rather an OpenGL problem -- ATI sucks at OpenGL. You can track their rise to the top (a few years ago, they weren't even close to nVidia in marketshare) as resulting from the adoption of DirectX 8 (and later 9) as the de facto standard for pc games development. As they do Direct3D well, they had no reason to put resources into what they likely regarded as an obsolete toolkit for their consumer cards. Want proof? Try using the OpenGL driver for a game in Windows using the same card. You'll notice similar performance to what you perceive in Windows.
Additionally, driver releases have been much more regular and meaningful since AMD stepped in. I tend to agree with the theme of the article which is that big things are on the way. - TheShad0w, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5They are moving forward. Their problem is like others have said they have horrible OpenGL compatibility and their progress its unbelievably slow. I would stand at their defense but when my X800 still locks up and causes kernel panics on my laptop I need to see some drastic improvements before I will ever use them again.
- Spr0k3t, on 10/10/2007, -2/+6The Linux drivers for ATI are just as bad as the Windows drivers for ATI. I don't think it will get any better until they let someone else do their work.
- vuke69, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4Agreed.
I have a Radeon 9800 Pro that I bought when it was still the fastest card available. At the time I was still dual booting windows for games, so I really didn't mind the poor Linux performance. But now I haven't even had windows installed even as a dual boot for a couple of years, and I am left with a $350 video card that gets trounced on by your average on-board graphics. Now I'm looking to get a cheap (under $50) video card just to make performance bearable until I can afford to build a new computer. What a waste... - tylerjames, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3this article could have been so much shorter
can it do compositing in linux yet: yes or no? - Ngai, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3ohh i knew i shouldn't of ever bought that 9800 pro...
- wazzledoozle2, on 10/10/2007, -3/+6Because OEM's couldnt give a shat about linux on consumer desktops.
- ConceptJunkie, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2My last laptop was a Sony VAIO with ATI graphics that ran XP and it wouldn't even run most 3D games at all without serious flaws in rendering that made the games unplayable. I'm glad you had better results because in my experience (which goes back to Windows 3 days) ATI has always sucked.
- JohnnyXmas, on 10/10/2007, -1/+3STFU with the constant Nvidia plugs. MANY of us have VERY NICE laptops that came with nonremovable ATI chips. It's GREAT that there is such an insistence on improving driver performance.
- tech42er, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2I don't know. I thought I'd be screwed to Hell and back because I have integrated ATI graphics. I'm using the restricted driver with XGL and Beryl seems to run fine. It's not ideal, but I haven't had a problem yet. My grapics sucked in Vista though. Couldn't play anything other than Counter-Strike. My next computer will probably have nVidia or Intel graphics.
- jdong, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Xgl's performance sucks, it's an unsupported codebase, and by default it opens up a public TCP port. Most ways of configuring Xgl also require deactivation of X11 MIT cookies, which further reduces the security of a X windows setup. I do a lot of the Xgl maintaining myself for Ubuntu's packages, and it's been a lot of work. The code is FAR from enlightening and should be totally obsolete now. The sooner we're done with it, the better.
- Wootery, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2An Intel/nVidia monopoly would be bad for everyone - what needs to happen is for ATi to be shown that people won't put up with their godawful drivers any more.
- asimo8, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I have a Thinkpad T60P with a ATI FireGL V5250 (ATI X1800 equivalent). It's a kick-ass video card, especially for a laptop and especially for a Thinkpad. Works great in windows but in Linux I can't even run Beryl.
I use Nvidia exclusively on my desktops. It's easy to say to get a Nvidia card but you can't do that for a laptop. - vuke69, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1At least give them a little credit. I bet they could have it done in time for the Windows release of DNF if they really tried.
- jdong, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2How's your standby/resume support? How's your Beryl/Compiz without RAM-eating, security-hole-prone Xgl hacks?
Yeah... thought so. - jdong, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Yeah, in my experience my X1400's performance in drawing 2D windows and moving windows around BARELY matches my Intel i915 integrated video (that's rigth -- not even GMA950 -- i915)... This card should be capable of a LOT more but sadly ATI/AMD doesnt' seem to care. And fglrx is more than likely your culprit for failure to suspend.
- smacksaw, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1The 2900 it pretty nice except it can't even handle HD video. Useless for my HTPC - 8600 here I come.
- Muncher, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I don't use AIGLX, Compiz, or Beryl, and I don't play *any* games. I guess the performance is theoretically bad for stuff like Blender, but I guess my X1900XT is fast enough to mostly compensate for the suckage. I'm not saying that the drivers are anything remotely close to good, but they work just fine for me.
Oh, and about the standby thing, that's caused by the ATI drivers? Yes, I must admit that bugs me a little bit. I guess now I *do* have a reason to be unsatisfied. : ( - strabes, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1No AIGLX composite support, terrible 3d acceleration. It even lags on really simple 2d games like x-moto.
Mobility X1400 here. - JonForTheWin, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Because OEMs don't give a ***** about YOU
- Qiuu, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0This driver gave me in a less than year old ati card about the same performance of a 6 year old nvidia card with the nvidia linux drivers. The ati card has twice the vram and better specs.
- Qiuu, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0I can't wait! I've been waiting a long time for that game!
- tylerjames, on 10/10/2007, -3/+1is that some kind of code for "never"?
- smurf22, on 10/10/2007, -6/+4I bought a AMD processor cuz it was cheap, yay for AMD, booo for ATI
- Muncher, on 10/10/2007, -7/+2I'm still lacking any reason to be unsatisfied with the current ATI drivers. Sure, it sucks for the Fedora 7 people, but I do all my gaming and stuff in XP, so I couldn't care less about having stellar 3D performance in Linux.
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