AMD's New Card Supports Linux From the Get-Go 352
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."
Re:Demand? (Score:5, Interesting)
nVidia, where art thou? (Score:3, Interesting)
Is nVidia even paying attention to this, or are they just going to let AMD have the majority of the Linux graphics market?
finally (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:linux games (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:nVidia, where art thou? (Score:2, Interesting)
Now once games-makers get hold of it, things may/might change.
Fedora 9 (Score:1, Interesting)
Hopefully the radeonhd project will get open source accelerated 3D working soon.
H.264 decoding? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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.
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.
This could be big (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Make it easier for people who are running to find a retail upgrade (wanna see what I mean? Try finding a Linux supported scanner at a retail shop)
2. Increase exposure for the "brand" - That bored sales rep will notice the new logo (nothing to do on those long spans when the store is dead but check out the merchandise boxes). Next time someone opens up with "Hey I'm looking for product x for Linux" the consumer will get a response other than "Can't help you".
3. Encourage more manufacturers to support Linux out of the box (hey if it helps sales...)
Lastly people will start asking about the cute penguin on the box! It's a huge win!
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.
Re:linux games (Score:5, Interesting)
Conflicting messages... (Score:4, Interesting)
All these new features are very likely being added to ATI's binary driver, and will be a long time coming in the FOSS driver. And while nVidia's driver isn't great, it has (in my experience) been much better than ATI's. Keep in mind that the nVidia driver has had most of these things (SLI, etc) for a very long time.
However, both ATI and nVidia's binary drivers suck giant donkey balls, unless something has changed with ATI since I last owned one of their cards. Intel's drivers have been better in every respect. If Intel's Larabee is what's promised...
I don't think this is so much about FOSS being better than proprietary. I think it's got at least as much to do with the moving target of the Linux kernel -- the most reliable way to get a working driver on Linux is to open the source and work with the kernel devs. This is almost certainly not true on other platforms, but it is on Linux.
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.
Re:But.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:linux games (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It might help their Windows drivers (Score:3, Interesting)
The reason Nvidia and ATI never wanted to disclose drivers and APIs is that the drivers are the difference between a GeForce and a Quadro, or a Radeon and a FireGL.
Re:AMD sees the writing on the wall (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't forget the supercomputer geeks. I'm sure they'd like to write an order for 4000 of those Tflop graphics cards and 2000 maxed out server procs to the guy that wants to be number one on Top500.org next year.
Supercomputer geeks don't run windows.
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:HD acceleration? ffmpeg support? (Score:4, Interesting)
The point is right now my video card isn't doing the work - my 3Ghz C2D is instead. I'd REALLY rather offload that work to the GPU as would MANY others who wish to build cheap HTPC. IF ATI actually supported hardware accel of video on Linux then I might switch but if it's much like the closed NVIDIA drivers and simply supports a limited feature set then I might as well stick to NVIDIA and brute it with the CPUs cores. Right now the NVIDIA drivers are stable and working, ATI on the other hand has been no end of issues for the users and apparently some added work for the developers to support. Where's the beef?
Since they are claiming Linux "parity" with NVIDIA's LINUX feature set (gee....) then IMO they aren't supporting acceleration like they *DO* on Windows already - in which case this announcement is so much a hand job bullshit thing. Give me feature parity with WINDOWS drivers - that means hardware acceleration of HD video codecs like H.264 and MPEG - and I'll be tempted to switch from my already working card and risk their drivers.
Re:linux games (Score:3, Interesting)
But then one day I woke up to a frozen computer and when I restarted all I got was the file missing message. I was really pissed because i was in the middle of ripping and encoding an old family movie for a friend and when i went to reinstall i couldn't find my XP cd and the Ubuntu one was sitting on top of my computer from showing someone the live CD that i just threw it in and haven't looked back.
Its been wonderful. It's been about 6 months since then and already I've manged to get two friends too ditch windows as well both of who play quite a lot of games on steam. I was really shocked at how easy it was these are guys who know a bit about computers but have never touched a linux box i managed to get them to change because they had both used vista and knew it wasn't for them but were tired of xp after using if for the last 6-7 year and ready for a big change.
The best was my 2nd friend who switched he had been surfing and tried to click on a link and missed by a bit and hit an ad (this was in firefox mind you) and had his whole desktop changed to look like a mac desktop and all his screen res and other options taken away. He was pretty pissed about that.
All in all my advice for people thinking of a change is that unless you have some program that you need that you know for sure won't work in Linux (hell i have IE installed and it work's fine you would be amazed what wine can do)Just try to make a full switch if you can't go back to windows or try to dual boot but i think most people overestimate how much they need windows i thought for sure i would be back within days but here i am 6 months later with no plans to ever install windows again.
finally someone gets it (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:But.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Not saying ATI is perfect, but at least I've never taken one back because moving the mouse with ANY level of acceleration than none would lock it up instantly (with no accel it would take almost a full minute to lock the card).
4 cards, two different makers and three different base chipsets on two different boxes. one doa and one all but and one could just barely be coaxed in to surviving 2d only with riva tuner to underclock about 25-30% and one that could be outperformed by x800-xt AIW it was replacing (8600gt). Three of these cards were used in an NVIDIA motherboard.
All anectedotal of course, but after that many failures in a row I'm not interested in trying again anytime soon.
Mycroft
Video decoding support? No? No Thanks. (Score:3, Interesting)
The summary, claiming linux drivers on par with Windows seems to be overstating it a bit. From what I can see, there is still no sign of being able to use all the video acceleration capabilities of their cards.
So, what else are they offering? I guess it must be full 3D acceleration capabilities. That's great for all those linux 3D games, but what I want is a card that will offload decoding of high definition MPEG2 and H.264 decoding.
Their hardware supports it, but still no signs of Linux support.
I guess if VAAPI ever matures, along with improved Linux driver support, the Intel integrated video will be better than anything ATI or even Nvidia can offer for Linux.
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It isn't just games (Score:3, Interesting)
What I find interesting is that 768 vertical pixels seemed like enough when I had only 1024 going from side to side. Now that I have 1680 going from side to side, even 1050 vertical pixels do not seem to be enough. I know that it is because of the aspect ratio and DPI resolution, but still, the effect is interesting.
Re:Older computers and XP on minimal configs. (Score:3, Interesting)
Isn't that always the case, how we have time for /. and naught else...
As far as C:\Program Files\Common Files there's a lot of crufty stuff, if you're looking to slim the disk space. If you're looking for lowest overhead, then you can muck about in there, but disk is not usually at a premium anymore (unless you're trying to hit a USB disk size).
Two places where you can make some substantial disk space available at the expense of all else is to make sure you never enable hibernation and to reduce the page file to the minimum that gives you the performance you need. If you're going for size, set it for either 0 (I don't think it allows this) or like 2 MB. Also, make sure you turn off all indexing crap, etc. I do that before I start doing anything.
Lastly, once you have Windows (not with apps, just barebones) where you want it, defrag until the lines quit moving. Then you can install your apps.
For something small and portable without MS Vis Studio, I do something like a 5GB vHD, depending on my mood when I create it. Sometimes I'll do 4. XP needs a miminum of 2 to do anything useful, and 4 is kind of cutting it. No bigger than 8, unless you either do a lot of rendering (temp files) or if you are into that whole sado-mas thing. Anything over 8 (talking in round numbers, not percents or fractions) cannot be reasonably burned to a DVD without compression, and that'll suxors big time if you run into that problem. Also, you'll have to wait a while transferring over the network (assuming brick level backup of the whole vHD on occasion to another box) if you don't have GigE all the way around, so the smaller the disk size the better.
There are guys out there who will slim an install till they can't remove another file without disrupting Windows Core functionality. I'll offer this if you get hooked on slimming. IE and Explorer share the same core, and that core is the same core that the rest of the system uses for the APIs. So the Save As... dialog is the same all the way through (interesting note, this is part of why they could never say they had removed IE from the system after a certain point. Because of these shared libs. That would be like saying Gnome is only gone if you don't have any GTK libs on your system, or whatever).
So, hope that helps, and I'm usually available over gmail, and I love this sort of thing. To me, slimming is the ME of CS, so there you have it.
Last note before I jet for the evening. Yoda am I not, hmmm. Yoda, meet soon enough, you will.
This sold me. (Score:2, Interesting)
Well Done AMD (Score:1, Interesting)
This is the reason I will support AMD over other vendors .. they really make an effort to support the *nix community ..
Re:Older computers and XP on minimal configs. (Score:2, Interesting)
If you had a Valid XP professional license, and replaced the copy installed with a stripped down backup copy from the net, what laws have been broken?
You would still just be using one copy as your license allows.
(cue someone to tell me why I'm wrong)