Michael writes "Back in September AMD had announced a new ATI Linux driver as well as opening up their GPU specifications, and today they have taken an additional step to better support the Linux OS. With the just-announced Radeon HD 4850 RV770 they have provided same-day Linux support, and the Linux driver is now shipping alongside the Windows driver on their product CDs. In addition, they are encouraging their AIB partners to showcase Tux on the product packaging as a sign of Linux support. Last but certainly not least, AMD is committed from top-to-bottom product support on Linux and they will be introducing high-end features in their Linux driver such as MultiGPU CrossFire technology. Phoronix has a run-down on AMD's evolutionary leap in Linux support along with information on the open-source support for the RV770 GPU."
I wasn't even aware they supported windows? At least that has been my experience with their horrible drivers.
Odd I've found Catalyst releases to be the better of the two heavy weights. Not great since they've both aimed to become more than the simple dialog boxes needed. Especially on older hardware... You can hard boil an egg by the time Nvidia control panel launches on my girlfriends 750mhz duron w/ a nvidia 6600. Funny that, the driver options run slower then any currently installed program on it!
That arguement is getting old though. GPU's have become so complex that exposing the bare bones instruction set and how to code to the silicon doesn't give away trade secrets much more than publishing the latest x86 instruction set exposes Intel or AMD trade secrets.
I think the bigger issue is or was, at least with graphics drivers, the optimizations in the drivers themselves.
Nvidia uses basically the same driver for every card they've made, and a lot of times new drivers will give more performance to older cards(within reason of course). It's these optimizations they don't want seen, not the hardware itself.
But there are a lot more then games in Linux that needs good 3-D drivers, compiz-fusion to name one. Granted it might be nearly useless when it comes to productivity, but it is one major thing to convince people to use Linux rather then Windows and if you can demonstrate it easier with a Ubuntu live-CD rather then an install, more people will use Linux.
I disagree that Compiz is nearly useless. It's very easy to switch desktops and find other windows while developing. It's almost as useful as a 2nd monitor.
In fact, Linux support is my #1 deciding factor in deciding on a laptop or video card. Like a lot of others I dual-boot, XP for gaming, Ubuntu for all else. Since nvidia & ATI are nearly equal, dollar for dollar, for gaming then Compiz support becomes the default deciding factor.
ATI supporting Linux opens up a whole world of, for instance, new laptop choices. The cheap embedded GPUs in the laptops will run Compiz without sweating.
ATI supporting Linux opens up a whole world of, for instance, new laptop choices.
And this is where things are headed -- cheap laptops, specifically with reasonable graphics and in the developing world. By encouraging Linux on laptops AMD/ATI moves the market to what they think they can dominate. They are hoping to realize the benefits of the AMD/ATI merger this way.
For me, compiz fusion has become really useful. My widescreen notebook has limited vertical screen real estate, so the ability to get rid of the bottom bar and use window scaling to find running apps is great. The ability to fade windows and look underneath them is also great. Up until recently, I have bought nVidia, because while the drivers are non free blobs, they have tended to just work. Now that's changing and this additional step in promoting Linux support means that the next graphics I buy will ATI.
I don't really play games except occasionally and the games that are available for Linux are more than enough. It's the advertised support for desktop effects and apps like blender that has me sold, but maybe the fact that they are pushing for Tux to be included on the box means that the mindshare has increased to the point where more games will follow.
Any scripts in/etc/acpi/battery.d will run when the laptop is unplugged. You could create a script in this directory that kills compiz, and also create a script in/etc/acpi/ac.d to start compiz when you plug it in.
Quake 4, Doom 3, Quakewars:ET, just to name a few. In recent years (particularly from id), we've seen huge increases in developers supporting Linux natively, or at least with a WINE wrapper, the way EA does it. Now with more than half of the video card market supporting Linux, developers won't be so hesitant to make a native Linux client for their games. Plus there's those Linux users who need a decent video card to use Blender. Now they're not restricted to nVidia cards.
I dunno if this is a point or not, but apparently there are people running Age of Conan and Team Fortress 2 under Wine (and a host of other games I a certain); I imagine they will be happy that they can get better (hopefully) drivers for their graphicscard.
Steam runs quite nicely once you figure out the browser and font issues. Everyone talk about games on Linux like there aren't any but i consider myself a gamer and there is only one OS on my computer
Nexuiz is better than quite a few FPS's I've played and i didn't even have to pay for it.
I also have Prey, Guild Wars, Starcraft, Grand Theft Auto 2, Diablo 2, Age of Wonders and all the games on my steam account installed.
Some of them might be older but they are still damn fun. Besides the only way to get games on Linux is to have a demand for them. As someone with a single OS I'm helping to creating that demand.
Those are all ID titles. ID have always been very strong Linux supporters, way before Linux was even beginning to catch on, and have offered native ports of most of their products.
I have to admit that the nicest thing about it as a developer I can actually throw a kernel and some library's on a CD and the end user can boot it since at its lowest level it is compatible with almost every hardware architecture (086-present) I can run my code on any computer out there. Now with native Java on its way and real 3d drivers I bet I could challenge any MS box as long as I get driver support, and that's the way it's looking.
Most of us dual-boot, especially for games. For everything else, there's Linux and it's good to know that driver support isn't half arsed for once (barring the fact that it's probably the binary only driver on the CD).
Shared video memory harasses the memory bus and has a huge impact on general performance. Linear reads are nice, until every few cache lines you have to wait for a fresh row precharge and a card toying with a new chunk of video memory, then do another precharge and CAS to get back on track. Back to random memory reads.
NUMA architecture-- Intel doesn't do it-- really, REALLY helps with this on all but one of the CPUs in the machine.
My choice in the last 5 years were cards by Nvidia only. The reasons are obvisouly. Their drivers work (on Linux).
I also prefer cards without active cooling and ATI ist known for many cards with passive cooling which consume low power.
So, if the drivers they made are pretty good, especially the OpenGL implementation (i write simple OpenGL programs and i use Blender),
they could be a very good choice for me. But after years of bad experiences with ATI on my Linux-powered notebooks,
i'm sceptic and wait until the responses to their drivers are positive.
I don't want slow, errorneous and CPU-intensive 3D-support through DRI again.
hell, even on windows xp nvidia (piss be upon them) has not released accelerated video drivers for their year-old 8series cards!
I was one of the suckers who bought an 8-series thinking the 'hardware accel' onboard would finally solve my HD playback tearing issues. nvidia is infamous for video stutter and tearing unless you use 'magical commercial' dvd playback programs. the regular free ones don't seem to have the magic and the magic is NOT in the xp driver, that's for sure. and there's no way in hell I'm going to convert to vista just to get their new driver support. so basically, I have a 'fast frame buffer' in the 8series card but there's a whole lot of hardware that is sitting idle due to their 'push' to vista and how they want to force the DRM of vista on people.
ATI was worse; but maybe things have changed? I simply want to have glitch-free playback of HD sources on some kind of video card and NOT be locked into vista or commercial players.
but for now, I've settled on the popcorn hour [popcornhour.com] box. it Just Plain Works(tm), is fanless and does NOT care about which OS you use to serve networked files to it.
i don't run a linux system at home. I'm a gamer during the evenings, and an OpenGL programmer and law student during the day time. There has simply been no need for me to. Since term ended I decided to give my beloved KDE ago and try out KDE 4.0 using Kubuntu via the Wubi installer. Fantastic package... it all went swimmingly well
Until... The proprietary nvidia driver decided its automatic screen mode (res and refresh rate) was best, and ignored any attempt to add a modeline to xorg.conf. I had to (gasp) look at the back of my monitor and add the v and h frequencies myself. Sadly the nvidia driver simply ignores my monitors EDID.
I've been a long long proponent of "if it works" proprietary drivers in the kernel, such as nvidia's, providing they are robust and either equally or a more significantly more beneficial component to the system than others more important. But that was back when I accepted the fact there was an amount of tinkering to be done, or there was an amount of work to be done to glue things together. As the linux "system" becomes better at handling things automatically, the flaws in proprietary drivers are becoming less forgiveable because they are a bottleneck. When proprietary pieces of technology can't be glued together because they're at fault, I begin see the issues. In my case the nvidia driver finally became a more significant hindrance to my system, than a graphically accelerated benefit when correctly configured.
It's finally the time to say the bottleneck in Linux on the desktop is edging towards drivers, so very slowly.
This sounds like a complete about face from a few years ago. I stopped completely using ATI products a few years ago when the fire drivers did funny things with the frame buffer object, and the official line was that there was no plan to have it ever fixed in the Linux drivers. I will have to reconsider my position now.
"AMD's proprietary driver is now on par with NVIDIA's Linux driver"
That's a bold statement my friend. Granted, they've made huge leaps over their pos drivers of not too long ago, but I think it's a little too soon to make a claim like that.
Just look at the known issues with the latest driver:
Moving the mouse or tapping a key may fail to close an OpenGL screen-saver and bring the user back to the x desktop.
Hmm, can't rely on stopping an opengl screensaver... that's not too good.
And looking at what's just fixed in this driver:
Quake 3 Arena (demo): Segmentation faults no longer occur when attempting to play the game.
Quake3: Corruption is no longer noticed when changing the display resolution when the game is running.
Wow, they just got quake3 working. Hey, we all know quake3 pushes opengl to it's limits and this is to be expected.
Don't mean to bash on them as it's great they are doing this. As far as buying an ati card, I've gone from when hell freezes over to cautious optimism.
But as I said, things are looking a lot better and I'll definitely consider ati for my next purchase, I just wouldn't run out and do it tomorrow.
After AMD bought ATI and make claims that they were going to go full bore and fully support Linux I said. "When I see it, I will believe it."
Well, today I make the shift from Nvidia to ATI. I stuck with Nvidia because I had didn't have much trouble getting OpenGL apps to work in Linux and I hear horror stories about ATI and Linux.
By this time in 2010 or so there will be a flood of El Cheapo GNU/Linux boxes, laptops, mini-notebooks, handhelds, appliances, vibrators, toasters, shoe horns, you name it.
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday June 19 2008, @07:11PM (#23867093)
You need to support it with your buying decisions.
AMD is without equal in the x86 space right now in terms of openness. They release specs, and they write and release code. All the Family 10 support in coreboot (a.k.a. Linuxbios) was written by AMD employees. We saw this open approach earlier with the K8, then Hypertransport, then the Geode CPUs used in the One Laptop Per Child, now we see the same trend in graphics. AMD is on a roll right now with openness.
I just, yesterday, downloaded the "BIOS programmers guide" for the AMD FAM10. This is the kind of information that few vendors release.
If you care about having this kind of access to hardware specs, you need to vote -- with your purchasing $$$. AMD has taken a huge gamble on openness. Keep that in mind next time you need a machine.
AMD also gave a lot of help to initially port the Linux kernel to AMD64 processors (they kind of coordinated the whole thing via www.x86-64.org), and they continue to be an important contributor to the Linux kernel (I see many patches related to chipset drivers, SATA, etc). The also contribute to OpenSolaris, OpenJDK, KVM [qumranet.com] (NPT support, Vista / XP 64-bit bugfixes, etc). AFAIK most of these open source contributions are made by AMD employees from the OSRC (Operating System Research Center) [amd.com] group.
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday June 19 2008, @07:19PM (#23867139)
It's worth noting that the 4850 is apparently quite the speed demon when it comes to Windows games too, and a very good choice at $199 (for reference, the GTX 260 and GTX 280 are the brand new $400/$649 nvidia cards).
Well, I am one of the Linux users who has been avoiding ATI as well, mostly due to the horror stories. I have live some myself (thx Atheros wireless), and now I do check how well is the support of the hardware in Linux before make a purchase.
Until now, at least the NVidia drivers works fairly well, so NVidia has been my choice.
But, if ATI is really opening up like this, and NVidia doesn't open up, most likely ATI will be my next graphic card when I get a new comp in the next months.
Do you get HD acceleration offloading computation from the CPU? If so is it supported by the likes of ffmpeg etc.?
Lots of folks using the XBMC Linux port have had NOTHING but problems with ATI, meanwhile NVIDIA is damn near PnP using ENVY to load their drivers. Frankly I do not care wo's card I buy, I want it to properly support my HTPC setup and right now that is NVIDIA even though it's not got hardware acceleration working - I've got the CPU to decode it instead.
You're wrong, unless of course your into the whole buy now wait 2 weeks, sell for 101%...
Gaming is HUGE, Linux is gaining every day, as far as I see it they can't go wrong here, because its not like its Linux only, it still supports Windows, they probably hired one or 2 people to code the Linux drivers... so what, no real loss there, and if they created their own little open-source driver thing it would be no loss at all really, and I think its fairly safe to say that Linux isn't going anywhere, and will be increasing the market share consistently for years to come...
They are creating the demand (in part) now we just have to wait for the supply (the game devs)...
Historically nVidia's linux drivers absolutely crushed ATi's, giving nVidia quite a bit of momentum with the part of Linux crowd that would take advantage of greater-than-Intel graphics cards. If AMD starts getting some momentum nVidia may have a reason to even consider doing something more for their Linux consumers. It'll be a while yet.
Everything starts out small. Getting deeply involved in the right thing when it's small and there's little competition is how you become the dominant player in tomorrow's huge, profitable market. Just look at Microsoft.
Yadda yadda yadda... Please stop playing the FOSS zealot if you don't know what your talking about. ATI HAS released the specs to their cards unlike nVidia. The new card already runs with the FOSS driver. The FOSS driver is improving daily.
Dude, the card already works with the open-source xf86-driver-ati thanks to the code-sharing and documentation provided by ATI. Pretty soon the R6xx series (The generation I've got) will have 3D hardware acceleration as the R5xx series has now. It's not perfect and complete support, but it's getting there and progress has been excellent. If you really want to support a company that's supporting Linux, you would buy an ATI (Or Intel?) card. NVidia sure as hell isn't talking about any F/OSS drivers.
But.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:But.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
It might help their Windows drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
People debugging their Linux rivers will often also be helping to debug their Windows drivers too!
Hw vendors should really use OSS more to help them get more eyeballs on the code.
Parent
Re:It might help their Windows drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:It might help their Windows drivers (Score:5, Interesting)
Nvidia uses basically the same driver for every card they've made, and a lot of times new drivers will give more performance to older cards(within reason of course). It's these optimizations they don't want seen, not the hardware itself.
Parent
Re:It might help their Windows drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
Since it was convenient to use that as a reason not to open-source the drivers.
Parent
linux games (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:linux games (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:linux games (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:linux games (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:linux games (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, Linux support is my #1 deciding factor in deciding on a laptop or video card. Like a lot of others I dual-boot, XP for gaming, Ubuntu for all else. Since nvidia & ATI are nearly equal, dollar for dollar, for gaming then Compiz support becomes the default deciding factor.
ATI supporting Linux opens up a whole world of, for instance, new laptop choices. The cheap embedded GPUs in the laptops will run Compiz without sweating.
Parent
finally someone gets it (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
It isn't just games (Score:5, Insightful)
For me, compiz fusion has become really useful. My widescreen notebook has limited vertical screen real estate, so the ability to get rid of the bottom bar and use window scaling to find running apps is great. The ability to fade windows and look underneath them is also great. Up until recently, I have bought nVidia, because while the drivers are non free blobs, they have tended to just work. Now that's changing and this additional step in promoting Linux support means that the next graphics I buy will ATI.
I don't really play games except occasionally and the games that are available for Linux are more than enough. It's the advertised support for desktop effects and apps like blender that has me sold, but maybe the fact that they are pushing for Tux to be included on the box means that the mindshare has increased to the point where more games will follow.
Parent
Re:It isn't just games (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:linux games (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:linux games (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:linux games (Score:5, Insightful)
Nexuiz is better than quite a few FPS's I've played and i didn't even have to pay for it.
I also have Prey, Guild Wars, Starcraft, Grand Theft Auto 2, Diablo 2, Age of Wonders and all the games on my steam account installed.
Some of them might be older but they are still damn fun. Besides the only way to get games on Linux is to have a demand for them. As someone with a single OS I'm helping to creating that demand.
Parent
Re:linux games (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:linux games (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Arrrgh, Swedish chef destroyed my post! (Score:5, Informative)
Bork bork bork!
Don't forget Savage [s2games.com], worth a mention as they've been supporting Linux for years. They're Indy too, no DRM bullshit, just good games.
Parent
Demand? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Demand? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Demand? (Score:5, Informative)
NUMA architecture-- Intel doesn't do it-- really, REALLY helps with this on all but one of the CPUs in the machine.
Parent
Demand? Yes. (Score:5, Interesting)
I also prefer cards without active cooling and ATI ist known for many cards with passive cooling which consume low power.
So, if the drivers they made are pretty good, especially the OpenGL implementation (i write simple OpenGL programs and i use Blender),
they could be a very good choice for me. But after years of bad experiences with ATI on my Linux-powered notebooks,
i'm sceptic and wait until the responses to their drivers are positive.
I don't want slow, errorneous and CPU-intensive 3D-support through DRI again.
Parent
Signs (Score:4, Funny)
Isn't this one of the first signs of the apocalypse?
high-def features? (Score:5, Informative)
hell, even on windows xp nvidia (piss be upon them) has not released accelerated video drivers for their year-old 8series cards!
I was one of the suckers who bought an 8-series thinking the 'hardware accel' onboard would finally solve my HD playback tearing issues. nvidia is infamous for video stutter and tearing unless you use 'magical commercial' dvd playback programs. the regular free ones don't seem to have the magic and the magic is NOT in the xp driver, that's for sure. and there's no way in hell I'm going to convert to vista just to get their new driver support. so basically, I have a 'fast frame buffer' in the 8series card but there's a whole lot of hardware that is sitting idle due to their 'push' to vista and how they want to force the DRM of vista on people.
ATI was worse; but maybe things have changed? I simply want to have glitch-free playback of HD sources on some kind of video card and NOT be locked into vista or commercial players.
but for now, I've settled on the popcorn hour [popcornhour.com] box. it Just Plain Works(tm), is fanless and does NOT care about which OS you use to serve networked files to it.
i heart this (Score:5, Insightful)
Until... The proprietary nvidia driver decided its automatic screen mode (res and refresh rate) was best, and ignored any attempt to add a modeline to xorg.conf. I had to (gasp) look at the back of my monitor and add the v and h frequencies myself. Sadly the nvidia driver simply ignores my monitors EDID.
I've been a long long proponent of "if it works" proprietary drivers in the kernel, such as nvidia's, providing they are robust and either equally or a more significantly more beneficial component to the system than others more important. But that was back when I accepted the fact there was an amount of tinkering to be done, or there was an amount of work to be done to glue things together. As the linux "system" becomes better at handling things automatically, the flaws in proprietary drivers are becoming less forgiveable because they are a bottleneck. When proprietary pieces of technology can't be glued together because they're at fault, I begin see the issues. In my case the nvidia driver finally became a more significant hindrance to my system, than a graphically accelerated benefit when correctly configured.
It's finally the time to say the bottleneck in Linux on the desktop is edging towards drivers, so very slowly.
Matt
finally (Score:4, Interesting)
It's Already Working With Open-Source Driver Too (Score:5, Informative)
H.264 decoding? (Score:4, Interesting)
Waiting for a supported TV card (Score:5, Informative)
Hauppauge cards are supported to some extent but getting their remote controls to work is a pain in the butt, even on MythTV based distros!
In fact, getting the remote control to work is more of an exercise in frustration than anything else.
Ask and ye shall receive (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.pchdtv.com/ [pchdtv.com]
Not sure about your troubles with remotes, but that doesn't have anything to do with the TV card.
Parent
I think they're jumping the gun. (Score:4, Interesting)
"AMD's proprietary driver is now on par with NVIDIA's Linux driver"
That's a bold statement my friend. Granted, they've made huge leaps over their pos drivers of not too long ago, but I think it's a little too soon to make a claim like that.
Just look at the known issues with the latest driver:
Moving the mouse or tapping a key may fail to close an OpenGL screen-saver and bring the user back to the x desktop.
Hmm, can't rely on stopping an opengl screensaver... that's not too good.
And looking at what's just fixed in this driver:
Quake 3 Arena (demo): Segmentation faults no longer occur when attempting to play the game.
Quake3: Corruption is no longer noticed when changing the display resolution when the game is running.
Wow, they just got quake3 working. Hey, we all know quake3 pushes opengl to it's limits and this is to be expected.
Don't mean to bash on them as it's great they are doing this. As far as buying an ati card, I've gone from when hell freezes over to cautious optimism.
But as I said, things are looking a lot better and I'll definitely consider ati for my next purchase, I just wouldn't run out and do it tomorrow.
just what I've been waiting for... (Score:5, Funny)
After AMD bought ATI (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, today I make the shift from Nvidia to ATI. I stuck with Nvidia because I had didn't have much trouble getting OpenGL apps to work in Linux and I hear horror stories about ATI and Linux.
^&@$#l?/)(**!!!1!!! (Score:5, Funny)
AMD sees the writing on the wall (Score:5, Insightful)
AMD wants in on that stuff.
If you really care about open source (Score:5, Insightful)
AMD is without equal in the x86 space right now in terms of openness. They release specs, and they write and release code. All the Family 10 support in coreboot (a.k.a. Linuxbios) was written by AMD employees. We saw this open approach earlier with the K8, then Hypertransport, then the Geode CPUs used in the One Laptop Per Child, now we see the same trend in graphics. AMD is on a roll right now with openness.
I just, yesterday, downloaded the "BIOS programmers guide" for the AMD FAM10. This is the kind of information that few vendors release.
If you care about having this kind of access to hardware specs, you need to vote -- with your purchasing $$$. AMD has taken a huge gamble on openness. Keep that in mind next time you need a machine.
Ron Minnich (who forgot his password)
Re:If you really care about open source (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Not a slacker when it comes to Windows either... (Score:5, Informative)
Anandtech [anandtech.com]
Tech Report [techreport.com]
Good news (Score:4, Interesting)
Until now, at least the NVidia drivers works fairly well, so NVidia has been my choice.
But, if ATI is really opening up like this, and NVidia doesn't open up, most likely ATI will be my next graphic card when I get a new comp in the next months.
AMD Support (Score:5, Funny)
Oh God anyone got a hanky?
-Hack
HD acceleration? ffmpeg support? (Score:5, Interesting)
Lots of folks using the XBMC Linux port have had NOTHING but problems with ATI, meanwhile NVIDIA is damn near PnP using ENVY to load their drivers. Frankly I do not care wo's card I buy, I want it to properly support my HTPC setup and right now that is NVIDIA even though it's not got hardware acceleration working - I've got the CPU to decode it instead.
Re:losing strategy (Score:5, Insightful)
Gaming is HUGE, Linux is gaining every day, as far as I see it they can't go wrong here, because its not like its Linux only, it still supports Windows, they probably hired one or 2 people to code the Linux drivers... so what, no real loss there, and if they created their own little open-source driver thing it would be no loss at all really, and I think its fairly safe to say that Linux isn't going anywhere, and will be increasing the market share consistently for years to come...
They are creating the demand (in part) now we just have to wait for the supply (the game devs)...
Parent
Re:losing strategy (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:nVidia, where art thou? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:nVidia, where art thou? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:nVidia, where art thou? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:But is this open? (Score:5, Informative)
Please stop playing the FOSS zealot if you don't know what your talking about.
ATI HAS released the specs to their cards unlike nVidia. The new card already runs with the FOSS driver. The FOSS driver is improving daily.
Parent
Re:But is this open? (Score:5, Informative)
Dude, the card already works with the open-source xf86-driver-ati thanks to the code-sharing and documentation provided by ATI. Pretty soon the R6xx series (The generation I've got) will have 3D hardware acceleration as the R5xx series has now. It's not perfect and complete support, but it's getting there and progress has been excellent. If you really want to support a company that's supporting Linux, you would buy an ATI (Or Intel?) card. NVidia sure as hell isn't talking about any F/OSS drivers.
Parent