ATI Radeon and Linux drivers

Does anyone from ATI want to comment on this story?

Humus maybe? I know you develop OpenGL apps on ATI hardware.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/30/123225

Signal-to-noise is pretty low at slashdot as per usual. I’d like it if someone would dispel the FUD from the truth.

The ATi website still lists the Linux stuff, and I don’t see any word about stopping the support for Linux.

The ‘Not Supported’ note is normal, NVIDIA drivers aren’t officially supported either, afaik.

And this guy from the ‘article’ clicked some link (‘Discontinued Products’) at ATi.com wich doesn’t have anything to do with Linux, why the <censure> does he think it does?

I think this is just the usual FUD by the kids from /.
(that’s why I never visit sites like that)

Originally posted by richardve:
The ATi website still lists the Linux stuff, and I don’t see any word about stopping the support for Linux.

But I haven’t heard anything about the level of support they are offering either.


And this guy from the ‘article’ clicked some link (‘Discontinued Products’) at ATi.com wich doesn’t have anything to do with Linux, why the <censure> does he think it does?

Yeah. He did sound somewhat of a dumbass. That’s why I wanted to get clarification.


I think this is just the usual FUD by the kids from /.
(that’s why I never visit sites like that)

Pretty much every site/person has their biases. It is really important to understand the context in which you obtain information.

I’m seriously considering purchasing an Ati product. I run an NV22 at home. And a Radeon 9000 at work. Both have worked well for me.

My work machine is an XP box. My home machine is a Linux box.

I just wish somebody at Ati clarify would clarify their position in terms of Linux. Else I’d end up purchasing an Nvidia product by default.

There is some truth to that statement though. Right now I am looking at buying a new video card for my computer. The latest ATI card leads in almost everything but nvidia leads in linux support(drivers mainly) ATI gives some info to 3rd party developers(XFree) for driver development. I seriously doubt they tell them everything about there hardware. nvidia develops there own linux drivers so they have all the info on there card. Im going with nvidia because ive talked with alot of linux guys and they all agree nvidia will run better on linux.

[This message has been edited by nukem (edited 07-01-2003).]

I urge PK to think very carefully when considering getting an ATI card to run under Linux. I have installed both nVidia and ATI cards under Linux (Redhat 7, 8, and 9 and Mandrake 8 and 9) and have experienced substantial pain at getting the Radeon card to work. Please check out posts here in the Linux form about ATI cards. Also look at www.linuxquestions.com as an indication of what you have to do. You may have to recompile your kernel to disable MTRR and DRI support and/or downgrade your XFree86 to version 4.2 if you want drivers from ATI’s site. Compiling a kernel isn’t that hard (although I did have issues with getting modules to work); downgrading XFree 4.3 to 4.2 is a nightmare of interwoven dependancies. I finally got my Radeon card to work under RH9 by modifying the firmware on my graphics card to trick the drivers into thinking I had a built by ATI rather than just a powered-by ATI card. However, I seem to still have intermittant crashes when using OpenGL, and I am still remain unconvinced that the drivers are working properly.

Think very, VERY carefully about using an ATI card under Linux.

Originally posted by nukem:
Im going with nvidia because ive talked with alot of linux guys and they all agree nvidia will run better on linux.

Let me second that, NVIDIA on Linux is absolutely the best (and easiest).

Here’s the scoop on ATI. I installed a Radeon 9800pro on RedHat 9 recently. RedHat 9 uses XFree86 4.3. The latest driver on ATI’s site only supports XFree86 4.2 and the 9700 line of cards, and it didn’t work on my machine at all.

After posting on linuxquestions.org I was pointed to http://www.schneider-digital.de/html/download_ati.html where I downloaded the glx1_linux_X4.3.zip
file. It appears to be just like the ATI driver except that it works just fine on my machine. When you install it you’ll see that it specifically mentions support the Radeon 9800 line. I should mention that it’s still harder to install than the NVidia driver; I had to compile it myself but the intructions for getting the job done were decent.

Anyway, while I was doing that I also contacted support at ATI three times to ask if they were going to upgrade their Linux drivers. Each time they seemed to not read my email and just point me to useless ATI webpages that I had already read. I’d be glad to hear about it if someone can get any useful information out of them.

I had no difficulties with a ATI 9000, no problem with the official drivers, no problem with X 4.1+DRI and no problem using GATOS.sourcefore.net (the fastest option). latest claim even all AV-options work (I never testet that). I use debian stable/testing.

Originally posted by ati_fan:
I had no difficulties with a ATI 9000

How did you test? With your own stuff or Q3A/RTCW/UT/UT2k3?

Originally posted by m2:
[b] How did you test? With your own stuff or Q3A/RTCW/UT/UT2k3?

[/b]

since I am not really a gamer, so I did no excessive testing, but at least quake2/SDL/openInventor run fine+fast.
I use blender (http://www.blender.org) semi-professionally for 5 years (just making a 20 minute movie with ~100 scenes) and speedup in 3D is tremendous compared to geforce2, of course. Performance with old blender-benchmarks comes close to onyx2 infinite reality…

I also do some coding (I am a student of computerscience) using openGL/Mesa, GLUT and GLX and everything works fine here.

I even sold my Indigo2 HighImpact AA now … I like passive cooling (no fan==no noise), and since
I never liked nvidias driver-policy, I became an ati_fan

[sorry for my poor english, it’s not my mother’s tongue]

Originally posted by ati_fan:
I use blender […]. Performance with old blender-benchmarks comes close to onyx2 infinite reality…

I also do some coding (I am a student of computerscience) using openGL/Mesa, GLUT and GLX and everything works fine here.

I’m not sure which drivers you are using, I’m guessing the DRI drivers, since you mentioned not liking NVIDIA’s driver policy.

I don’t think blender puts much stress on the card in terms of fancy features (vertex or fragment programs for example) so I’d guess blender will run fine with any DRI-supported card. Quake2 doesn’t do anything fancy either (some multipass things, but that’s about it).

The reason why I ask is that even if I love ATI hardware, their linux drivers suck when it comes to supporting all the features on the hardware, which you can’t say of NVIDIA. I’d love if NVIDIA were more open regarding documentation (ATI scores more points here) but I have to say I like the company’s attitude towards OpenGL, which I’m not sure I can say about ATI. NVIDIA offers driver support for Linux on x86, AMD-64 and IA-64. Furthermore they support FreeBSD, too. ATI is still struggling with Linux on x86. I don’t know who’s been shoving money in NVIDIA’s general direction to do this (there are rumours involving certain institutions in a particular country that will remain unnamed), but until now NVIDIA has done a good job with that money. Could it be better? Yes, definitely.

Back to your post, any graphics card produced in the last year or so runs circles around an IR2, IR3 and IR4 in almost every aspect. The IRs have features that perhaps will make it to a consumer’s card at some point in the future, but you can’t trade programmability for that.

Edit: I’m sorry, I just noticed you did say you are using the DRI drivers.

[This message has been edited by m2 (edited 07-11-2003).]

This topic was automatically closed 183 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.