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- sishgupta, on 10/12/2007, -1/+35One of the reasons ATI lost my business this fall was because of their poor linux support.
Do I care that I've switched? No. All I care is that my 3d card works under linux.
Should ATI care that i switched? Yes. And so should all stakeholders. - staticfish, on 10/12/2007, -1/+33I'm totally buying NVidia when i build my next PC. This is the final straw for ATI. It's a shame because I love AMD, and thought AMD and ATI were cool companies.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+31That's not necessarily a bad thing. The FGLRX driver completely sucks balls. The ATI driver works a treat w/ my Radeon 9000 card. Edgy Eft came w/ 3D acceleration out of the box and AIGLX installed by default. All I had to do for the composite desktop effects was "sudo apt-get install Beryl". Then log out and back in.
***** ATI, and ***** FGLRX. When I buy a replacement it's definitely going to be an nVidia or Intel. - schestowitz, on 10/12/2007, -2/+26That's not the end of the world. It can still be enabled. ATi has done very little for Linux, so discouraging its off-the-shelf selection by GNU/Linux (Ubuntu?) users is a good thing.
By the way, have a look at Phoronix. They ran the Open Source Nvidia drivers yesterday... 3-D!!
Nouveau: glxgears on NV4x
,----[ Quote ]
| The exciting announcement, however, is word that the 3D driver is
| functioning with NV4x hardware and glxgears is now running. However,
| glxgears still has issues with pre-NV4x hardware. With glxgears now
| reported to function on NV4x hardware with Nouveau, we could not
| help but to try this. We had built everything from git on January
| 28, 2006, and yes, glxgears was running! The GPU was a NVIDIA
| GeForce 6150 and the Linux distribution used was Fedora Core 6.
`----
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=634&num=1
Maybe binary blobs are on their way out after all. But it's gradual. - carbon12, on 10/12/2007, -0/+22Let me just say, on behalf of all linux users: GO ***** YOURSELVES ATI.
- diggapleaze, on 10/12/2007, -1/+21don't you just wish there was an equivalent to the nouveau driver being worked on for ati? *sigh...
- sirhomer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+19Guys, if you really care about this it's time to send ATi letters and e-mails about how you feel. Enough is enough.
- strabes, on 10/12/2007, -1/+19lexmark printers barely work out of the box in windows
- postaldave, on 10/12/2007, -0/+18ran into this ATI crap on my the new pclinuxos beta that came out.
i for one was an ATI fanboy up until now. my next card will be an Nvidia.
also i hate broadcom, i hope they rot in hell. i'll never buy a wireless card with their
chipset ever again. - diggapleaze, on 10/12/2007, -0/+16ATI users: it looks like the fglrx (the closed-source ATI drivers) won't be installed by default, thus neither will desktop-effects. This can be a good thing or bad thing depending on your opinion. On the bright side, AIGLX was chosen over XGL :)
For the direct quote in the description, scroll about halfway down to the "Proprietary Drivers" section. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13I CAN NOT understand why this company's drivers are so damn broken!
ATI needs to (((FIX DRIVERS)))) - drag, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Yes...
I have 2 ATI cards, ATI 9200 and ATI x800 PCIe.
I bought both because they were supported by open source drivers. I would of bought Nvidia instead if it wasn't for that fact. I will probably never by another ATI card again unless they start to help out with open source drivers.
Most R100, R200, R300, and R400 series video cards are supported by Free software ATI and DRI drivers. Both 2d and 3d acceleration as well as AIGLX support.
Newer R500 and R600 cards have neither 2D OR 3D support. A independant developer who made basic 2D (VERY basic) for ATI R500 cards with the intention of releasing it as OSS was forbidden to by ATI, and he was stuck under NDA due to his day job and thus couldn't violate it.
Out of all of them the R200 series cards have the best support. These cards are typified by the ATI 8500 and ATI 9200 AGP cards. The ATI 8500 is the fastest from this series, the 9xxx models are designed to be lower-priced desktop peices, 8500 was the gaming card. Needless to say these things are very old cards, but are adiquate for Linux 3D desktop if you don't get too ambitious.
The fastest ATI card supported by R300 DRI and 'ati' drivers are the ATI x800 or ATI x850 PCIe cards. These are 'R400' series models. These are fast enough to play most games, however compatability is not good on certain games due to the fact that these drivers are relatively new. Due to the reverse engineered nature of the drivers they aren't realy adiquate for Doom3 games.
Beware that some R300/R400 ones are not supporte. Ones that have 'hypermemory' (not sure of the name) that have support for pulling main memory from the system (like they start off with 64megs of 'real' ram, but can steal your system ram to get 128 megs).. these are typically not support as the people reverse engineering these devices can't figure the memory management details.
Note that this is all Free software drivers I am talking about.
However if you are purchasing a machine or a notebook with the goal of running Linux, with the highest priority being the desktop and stability, then you want to get Intel onboard devices.
The ones to look for, at this current time, is the 945g chipset that has the GMA 950 video chipset. This will have full 3d and 2d support out of the box for all relatively recent Linux distro releases. The only 'gotcha' is that you need the 915resolution program to use non-standard resolutions (for example: widescreen laptop). This hacks the vbios to include these special resolutions.
This will provide adiquate performance for 3D desktops in Linux, but only smaller games. The most sophisticated game you can easily play using these chipsets in Linux will be 'Return to Castle Wolfenstien'. They'll play newer games, but you start to run into compatability and performance problems.
The 'next generation' chipset from Intel that is desirable is the G965 which includes the GMA x3000 chipset. This chipset is on par with modern low-to-mid range ATI and Nvidia when it comes to hardware features. However currently Linux hardware support is unoptimized, immature and therefore you probably won't see any real performance advantage over the 945g chipset. It will work, but it won't realy be able to take advantage of the features. This card should be fast enough to support games up to the level of complexity of UT2004, and possibly Doom3.
Within the next couple years these cards are going to be best performaning and will support the most features for the Linux desktop. They will be especially desirable if your a mobile desktop user and will be the first to support advanced things like hotplugable monitors, projectors, and other features that Linux has traditionally had much trouble with in the past.
ATI and Nvidia will be playing catchup in terms of desktop features. And open source drivers for those will always be second-rate until those companies learn to support linux properly.
If you absolutely need video game performance and compatability then Nvidia's propriatory drivers are your only real choice. They don't offer the same stability as the Intel stuff, but offer 3d performance that is on-par with Windows gaming performance. Otherwise go with Intel. Avoid ATI unless you already own it or are stuck with it in your laptop or whatnot.
In the future Intel may be offering discrete video game cards.
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/01/23/intel_discrete_gpu_return/
Intel has seemed to commit itself to open source Linux support. They have hired several major X.org developers and has it as their goal to make it possible to have full Linux support as soon as their cards hit the market.
This would be very nice. It should finally make fully free and open source gaming platform a reality.
Keith Packard is 'the man' behind X.org. He is basicly responsable for the renewed development interest and direction behind X.org developments (him getting kicked out of XFree86 for 'making waves' was a huge motivational factor) and is the guy behind things like composite extensions, xfontconfig, and numerious other X technologies that help make life on a Linux desktop tolerable.
He is now employed by Intel and very recently given a speech to Debian on the X.org 7.2 release and what expected features your going to see with 7.3.
http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2007/video/monday/monday_1430_debian.ogg - EricJD, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Darn... My laptop has an ATI Mobility Radeon X1400
- ZippidyDoo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Same here, fglrx is so evil.
- darkyoshi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9This is the one situation where Intel graphics rock. Go GMA950! (I never thought I'd say that)
- postaldave, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9my last system build is a AMD with an ATI card. and had good luck up until now.
i will not go vista so hardware MUST support *unix.
i will be going with intel with my next board and a nvidia card. - LegendarySock, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8SiS. Complain when you have an SiS. You shut the hell up right now.
- Snoopsor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8@diggapleaze
One of the developers for Nouveau did a talk with the lugradio guys, and said that he originally started trying to write an open source ati driver, but gave up for the nvidia one instead, and that they would not be working in an ati driver in the future, because of the difficulties. It's a worthwhile interview. http://lugradio.org/episodes/69 - postaldave, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7that did in fact work and used it to with pclinuxos .93 but i still want broadcom to rot in hell.
- postaldave, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7that what i don't understand about things like this and wireless cards. sure linux users only buy a very small part of the hardware out there but we DECIDE for most of the people out there for those reasons you stated.
if it wasn't for all those stupid prebuilt systems we would have it our way. the only thing left is to put REAL pressure on those large computer builders to use hardware we want so when people leave the darkside they can bring their hardware with them.
- erkokite, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7I had ATI on my linux comp until recently. It was a nightmare. For all ATI users out there who want to use linux or vice versa, save yourself a major headache and just buy an nvidia card.
- damentz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Heheheh, no opengl with ati in Vista anyway, looks like your stuck in XP if you want to even remotely play games. ;)
- 7of7, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Go for Nvidia. My Nvidia 6800 ran Compiz smoothly and sexily and I'd imagine it'll be that same with Beryl if they get the bugs worked out. If Ubuntu comes pre Berylfied or has the option of installing it without messing with xorg or anything else than I guess I'll be back to triple booting Vista and XP and Ubuntu.
- mlw4428, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6***** that *****. Next card is definately Nvidia. ***** ATI and their "we don't give a ***** about Linux" attitude. If an ATI Exec is reading over this you'd better take this as a sign of troubling times for your company if you don't change your attitude.
- damentz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6I don't think ati thinks that linux users are a worthy consumer. The problem is word of mouth, and since most linux users are PC guru's that lesser knowledgeable users look up to for computer help and are very persuasive due to higher level knowledge, ati actually lost market share. Check the latest steam survey's for proof.
- geronimo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I have an ATI mobility card in my laptop. I no longer use beryl with fglrx, it would just lock up every few hours and this is with the latest drivers. Plus it won't work with big desktop(like nvidia's twinview except it's terrible). So I am down to using ati's bigdesktop to make my two monitors act as one. Except there's a fgrlx bug - if you have two different resolutions then your mouse pointer becomes offset from where the mouse is. So I have to periodically "touch" the top of the screen to calibrate it.
Needless to say, it's nvidia next time, I had nothing but warm fuzzy goodness last time I used nvidia's propietary driver on linux. - scooper86, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4there are free ati drivers out, i cant remember what theyre called though, maybe radeon or something, dont work with newer cards but people have reported getting it working with aiglx
- postaldave, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5dam, my laptop has a savage video chip. trust me, it could be worse.
- cawpin, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5I'm with all the others on this. I had a 9800 Pro 256 MB card and went and bought a replacement NVidia GeForce 6800 XT jsut a couple of months ago because of the easier setup and better support for open source. I will probably never buy another ATI card again.
- drag, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4The real solution is to avoid ATI cards for the time being.
Currently the choices for Linux are:
Intel -- They provide open source drivers and have smooth 3d desktop performance as well as enough performance for simplier games. Use these if open source, stability, and ease of maintainance is important.
Nvidia -- They provide good windows-quality Linux 3d drivers. Not as stable as Intel (usually) and are more work to maintain (usually), but offer performance on par with Windows 3d drivers and higher compatability for games. So use Nvidia if performance is paramount.
ATI -- Use it if you got it. Otherwise avoid. - erkokite, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3they are called radeon, under device section in xorg.conf, set it to "radeon"
- evilspoons, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6Unless it's a laser, you're probably better off without it anyway ; )
- nailer, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4"All the spec says is that newer ati cards may not be supported, and even that decision is not final yet."
Feisty Fawn is due in April (I'm using it now). ATI say composite isn't supported (ie, won't work) work on their cards. There are no betas where composite works. If this was goingto change, we'd know about it yet.
ATI don't find the Linux market to be worth employing someone to keep their drivers up to the same standards as Intel or NVIDIAs. - tokyopimp, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3So freaking true, I've installed several versions of linux and with my 7600GT I never have a problem with a 20" widescreen LCD. With my last system I couldn't even get many distros to even recognize my ATI card, and sometimes my 17 inch CRT would be totally at the wrong resolution. I'm sure I could have looked up fixes and what not, but I shouldn't have to, it was just annoying.
ATI and Creative Labs, I won't buy anything from them until they support Linux... well at least ATI kind of gives a crap, Creative could care less. - KevinJim, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3It's seems to me that nVidia AND ATI don't get it. Whenever they don't support Linux they will lose consumers ( the trade among those two must end) . Open up the god damn Drivers...
- damentz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Didn't they do this for Windows? They need to go on the driver fixing rampage they started 2 years ago over windows, for their linux drivers, seriously.
- Phocion55, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I agree. But here's your best bet with Broadcom 43xx chipsets: http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/
- elijahalcantara, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I just sold my ATI card for an Nvidia. It really doesn't work well.
- diggapleaze, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3well, I can only fit so many words in the title :) That's why I explained it in further detail with the description. Believe me, if I had more space I would have fit it in...so my description explicitly says that users with FOSS-friendly ati cards won't have it disabled.
- jejones, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@Jiu-Jitsu:
If nVidia supported open source, they'd release sufficient information to allow people to write open source device drivers for their hardware with feature and performance parity with their proprietary drivers, and that would run on all the CPUs that Linux runs on. nVidia does support Linux to the extent that they provide proprietary Linux drivers for what, x86 and x86-64? "We have BOTH kinds o' music here--country AND western!" - Jiu-Jitsu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Nvidia has supported open source for some time so whenever I buy or recommend a card it has an Nvidia chip in it.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@ theratster
When I installed Edgy, it came with the 'ati' driver installed by default. Runs like a charm too, never bothered trying any other driver. - KennMac, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Jesus christ, if you're going to spam a site, at least give people a reason to hang around once they're there. That's quite possibly the shoddiest, half-assed, ***** attempt at a website I've ever seen.
- theratster, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Although in Ubuntu Edgy, with an ATI card, beryl seems to work fine without an explicit install of fglrx. Does Edgy use the open source, or the proprietary drivers by default?
- mercurysquad, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2This story/title is grossly inaccurate. All the spec says is that newer ati cards may not be supported, and even that decision is not final yet.
- praxis22, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@drag
Props to you for the post, nice summary.
I'm running Beryl on Edgy (AMD64) with the "radeon" driver and an AGP X800XT, with both composite & DRI working, only problem I have is that firefox 2.0 scrolls slowly, (as compared to using the Gnome metacity desktop.) I'm hoping a 64bit version of swiftfox may fix this at some point, but the latest Beryl beta went in fine just this weekend.
fglrx on the other hand just didn't want to know at all. - KennMac, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4The radeon driver supports only older cards (9200 and under, etc.) with very limited 3D capability. xgl and beryl run like ass on the radeon driver.
- sirhomer, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3ATi needs to get off their a$$ and make some working Linux drivers
- jbond, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3"ATI -- Use it if you got it." And that's the problem with laptops.
I'm not exactly pushing the boundaries here but I've given up on a test Ubuntu install on an ancient Dell Inspiron 4000 with an ATI Mobility M3 card. Graphic performance sucks. The Fonts suck. And the overall experience is horrible compared with XP. Now maybe that's all fixable but after a weekend of searching, I can't manage it.
If Linux on the desktop is ever going to seriously make inroads into the MS/Apple duopoly, then graphics performance and fonts must be at least as good, straight out of the box and without any tweaking. - smiley2billion, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2When I ditched my ATi 9800 Pro I decided on an eVGA Nvidia 6800 GS OC for the explicit reason that nvidia is much better supported under linux. I'd never owned an nvidia before and held out for a long time before buying the 6800. Due to the (lack of) actions of ATi they lost a long time customer.
Also, I'm very pleased with what the 6800 can do for the very low cost. Compiz runs as smooth as eggs, plus you can most all current games at very good resolutions. -
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