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Graphics Software Linux

ATI Updates Linux Drivers 460

Posted by michael from the second-class-citizens dept.
GraWil writes "Famed graphics card maker and documented Linux supporter ATI has refreshed its proprietary Linux drivers (3.11.1) for the Radeon and FireGL series cards. Unfortunately, many of the previous comments still apply and it seems that ATI is not yet committed to supporting Linux well. The procedure for installing is now documented in a separate how-to but it seems that quite a few are stuck in an endless cycle of compiling kernels with/without DRI/AGPGART/RADEON/DBE (insert random module here). For those with strong enough feelings, ATI is seeking feedback on these drivers."
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ATI Updates Linux Drivers More

ATI Updates Linux Drivers

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  • Contradiction (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Reducer2001 ( 197985 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:48AM (#10148502) Homepage
    The article starts off: documented Linux supporter ATI. And then goes on to say: ATI is not yet committed to supporting Linux well.
    So which is it?

    • Re:Contradiction (Score:5, Insightful)

      by etymxris ( 121288 ) * on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:51AM (#10148543)
      I think the "documented" adjective was a bit sarcastic. It was likely meant to point out how ATI supports Linux with their words, but not their actions.

      • Re:Contradiction (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        The best part is how if you click on the "documented" link, it takes you to a mailing list post from ATI announcing a press release or linux support page or something... I can't tell what it should have been since the link is dead. :-)

      • Re:Contradiction (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Curtman ( 556920 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @09:16AM (#10148772)
        The other clue was that the documentation is almost 5 years old. They used to fund development of open source drivers, now they feed us binary only drivers that sort of work and we have to wait for their release schedule.

        • Re:Contradiction (Score:5, Insightful)

          by 16K Ram Pack ( 690082 ) <tim DOT almond AT gmail DOT com> on Friday September 03, 2004 @11:06AM (#10149793) Homepage
          If anyone from ATi is listening, I'll tell them something. Mindshare is really important.

          My last 3 graphics cards are ATi. I'm not sure why I bought one last time, but I'm sure that part of the reason was that I'd had 2 before and they'd done the job very well.

          Same reason why I'm buying another Palm pilot and not a Pocket PC.

          Now, let's say that I want to get on Linux. I'll probably ask around for best card for compatibility. Then, I'll go with that and probably stick with it.

          If ATi don't care about Linux now, they could lose mindshare/fandom on Linux in the future when ownership reaches a point where everyone has to properly support Linux.

      • Re:Contradiction (Score:4, Insightful)

        by NoMercy ( 105420 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @04:26PM (#10153291)
        ATI Helped open-source driver development where Nvidia just gave out binaries, ATI got praise for there stance but everyone bought nvidia because they couln't run quake3 on the ATI boards under linux, so ATI reliese a binary like nvidia, and we decide to slam ATI for it?

        As far as I can work out, ATI are being a lot more open-source friendly than nvidia are. And in this day of licenced patented tech being used in drivers to allow any form of advanced graphics, there not really to blame.

        Please moan about software patents.

    • Re:Contradiction (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jejones ( 115979 )
      Considering that the "documented" links to a post that links to an ATI page that doesn't exist, I think I know which it is. (Having an AIW Radeon, which ATI's new drivers don't support, and finding that ATI points you at the GATOS project if you want to use the TV tuner on your AIW card, is more on the order of "finding a trout in the milk" evidence.)

    • They support it but don't understand it (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Omni-Cognate ( 620505 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @10:12AM (#10149293)

      At least that's my theory.

      I've got a Radeon 9800SE All-In-Wonder, which has the new(ish) Rage Theatre 200 chip. This isn't supported by GATOS. I should, of course, have checked this before buying the machine, but there you go. The reason it isn't supported is because it's really complicated and all though ATI have released some specs (under NDA), the GATOS developer(s) haven't gotten round to doing the huge amount of work involved in writing a driver.

      I say developer(s), because I think the effort to support the Rage Theatre 200 actually consists of one bloke, called Vlad or something. I think he might be a student of some kind. This may be completely wrong, and I don't want to cause any offence, but that's the impression I've got - one single developer working on the Rage Theatre 200 driver, intermittently, as a hobby. There's been a "don't expect anything for at least 6 months" notice on the website for nearly a year.

      The value of open source software is that if something is used by many people and has a long lifetime, the community can build that piece of software into something valuable for everyone, with minimal cost and maximum gain for the participants. This, at least to me, seems to be the key feature of open source.

      ATI seem to have gotten the wrong end of the stick and decided that the value of the open source community is that a multi-million dollar corporation can print out a copy of it's specs, along with an NDA of some description, and as if by magic, some student, perhaps called Vlad, will appear out of thin air and do all it's work for it.

      Some points for ATI:

      1. If you have to sign an NDA to write a driver, the open-source community cannot properly collaborate on it.
      2. The commercial value for ATI of being able to support Linux is a hell of higher then the educational or entertainment value to a hobbyist in writing a driver.
      3. Linux users are a significant market for desktop hardware. Significant enough, at least, to be worth writing a driver for.
      4. If you seriously think that people want your products badly enough that they are going to sign NDAs and then toil away for free to write drivers, just so that they can have the privilege of paying you full whack for your hardware, you've got another thing coming
      5. If number 4 isn't the way you think, then it would be less insulting if you just owned up and said you don't think it's worth supporting Linux, rather than hiding behind this "supporting third party projects" crap.

      Rant over. I make no claims as to the accuracy of the above. In fact I hereby certify that the above is guaranteed to be inaccurate in some way. Please correct me. The emotion is real, though. I'm just fed up with having to reboot into Windows to watch TV.

      • Vlad is definitely not a student. He's a ridiculusly smart guy who's been working on GATOS forever. ATI has had this NDA deal with GATOS for a long time too, since way before nVidia ever put out an OS driver. ATI was revolutionary with their support for Linux (they provided documentation at a time when noone even knew what Linux was).

        GATOS' own success has been it's biggest downfall. Because there was something there that was working pretty well, I imagine Linux support was never high on ATI's radar.

        A

  • Lack of expertese? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:48AM (#10148504)
    Maybe ATi just plain don't know how to make decent X/Linux drivers? A graphics card manufacturer like ATi would not traditionally hire people with relevent experience, and I doubt they can justify the expense of hiring a specialist to do nothing but create Linux drivers.

    Of course, Open Source could help them here, but we all know the arguments for and against that.

    • Re:Lack of expertese? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by slunk1 ( 694204 ) *
      > and I doubt they can justify the expense of hiring a specialist to do nothing but create Linux drivers

      Uhh... I don't they're hurting for cash. If they chose to, I'm sure they could bankroll a position or two for this purpose

    • Lack of staff... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Svartalf ( 2997 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @09:09AM (#10148710) Homepage
      It's more like lack of staff, I believe. They've got something like roughly 4% as many developers doing Linux development as they do Windows developers- and these are developers dedicated to Linux driver development.

      And they HAVE recently hired relevent experience- Michel Danzer just hired on out there and he's one of the DRI team's better developers. I don't know if the problems are due to them not doing something like NVidia (which is that their driver core is largely the same codebase for Linux and Windows...) or if it's that combined with the shortage of capable people working on them.

  • wishful thinking. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bagel2ooo ( 106312 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:48AM (#10148507)
    I've been hoping that some of these companies would do similar to what Google did (before this TopCoder) thing and issue a bounty of sorts to get these done. Perhaps the winner/winning group could get the right to develop the *n?x driver and possibly have it made into a paid over time position of sorts. As long as they pay less than they would in house + paperwork it seems both parties would make out pretty well.

    • Re:wishful thinking. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I've been hoping that some of these companies would do similar to what Google did (before this TopCoder) thing and issue a bounty of sorts to get these done.

      The reason people are complaining is because for the fastest 3D acceleration support, people are using binary-only drivers (from both ATI and nVidia). These drivers are binary because both companies do not want to publish human readable details about their 3D acceleration. They only provide information to 3rd-parties under NDA (non-disclosure agreeme

      • Re:wishful thinking. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by jmorris42 ( 1458 ) * <jmorris@[ ]u.org ['bea' in gap]> on Friday September 03, 2004 @11:09AM (#10149828)
        > These drivers are binary because both companies do not want to publish
        > human readable details about their 3D acceleration.

        Actually I suspect another culprit. ATI used to release complete hardware details under NDA to the XFree86 folks, which is why I have decent 3D support on my AMD64 machine with the last card with Open Source drivers, the Radeon 9200. DirectX9 is the dividing line. No card with DX9 support has specs available under any terms that permit an Open Source code release. So three guesses who is reponsible, especially since neither ATI nor NVidia will even discuss WHY they can't release specs. Only one entity can inspire that much fear.

        • Then those two companies are full of pussies. Look, ATI and nVidia make up the majority of the high performance graphics card market. Nearly everyone has a card from them in one form or another. It's their choice to support a particular platform, too.

          If both companies dropped driver support for DirectX 9, what could MS possibly do to them? MS would be on the losing side, for all of a sudden their flagship graphics libary no longer works. Of course, there would be a bit of discontent amongst gamers, mo

  • Installer? (Score:5, Informative)

    by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:48AM (#10148509)
    The nVidia installer is GPLd, they could use that rather than writing a huge howto. I guess ATI using software from nVidia would be a bit uncomfortable for them though ...
    • I guess ATI using software from nVidia would be a bit uncomfortable for them though ...

      IIRC, the NVidia installer is the Loki Installer that was created by Loki games (RIP), not NVidia's code.

      • Re:Installer? (Score:3, Informative)

        by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 )
        Nope, you can go get it from CVS I think. I checked it out one time, it's definitely their code, though it may be *based* on parts of Loki most of it is new.

  • Be Careful (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ATI, Remeber Diamond wouldn't release drivers specs for Linux either....

  • You mean windows is better than linux at something (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I never had to compile my windows kernel to get video working.

    Just saying...
    • It is more a difference in system architecture than it is a matter of one system being better than the other.

    • Re:You mean windows is better than linux at someth (Score:5, Insightful)

      by etymxris ( 121288 ) * on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:55AM (#10148576)
      If the user interface is nice enough, does it really matter what exact steps are taken to install the driver? Even today, you hardly realize that a recompilation is going on with nvidia drivers, as they provide a nice little progress bar. To the user, the progress bar could represent copying files, compiling them from source, or whatever, he doesn't really care.
      • For the compilation to work (which i'd note is a *text* mode installer, not exactly 21st century is it?) you need the kernel source and developer tools installed. This is a really huge set of software that you have to install, keep up to date etc - a security update to the kernel can mean a 40mb download if you have the sources installed too.

        And even then the process is prone to inexplicable failures.

        I'm beginning to think the only way we'll see easy driver installation on Linux is if people fork the s

        • I'm beginning to think the only way we'll see easy driver installation on Linux is if people fork the stable kernel series - while Linus and the gang make all the changes they like to the unstable series, a separate team is preserving ABI compatibility whilst backporting non breaking changes.

          You mean like Red Hat has been doing for at least 5 years? (I am not implying Red Hat is the only major distro to do this, I simply don't have the experience with any others to know either way)

    • >I never had to compile my windows kernel to get video working.

      Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've never had a Linux system become completely unable to boot because of a bad video driver.

      On Windows? It has happened often.

      Maybe you need to look again for something Windows is "better" at.
    • Well, of course. The one "leg up" on Linux that Windows has and will continue to have for the forseeable future is that it's excessively convenient. It's already there. It probably came on your computer. You generally don't need to make any extra effort to use it. You seldom need to make any significant extra effort to use the made-for-Windoze devices, either. And you won't scare anybody away with fear of the strange and unfamiliar if you use Windows.
    • No, it just means ATI is REALLY bad at making drivers on other platforms.
    • This is the usual "Windows market share is better at something".

      The reason stuff "just works" in Windows is because every hardware developer out there has limited resources and gets the biggest payoff from making sure it works well in Windows.

  • Nvidia and ATI (Score:3, Insightful)

    by scifience ( 674659 ) * <webmaster@scifience.net> on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:49AM (#10148514) Homepage
    ATI makes some nice cards, but only for Windows users. Their Linux drivers are infamous for a reason.
    If you are using Linux and want properly designed drivers, you really have no choice except to use an nVidia card.

    • Re:Nvidia and ATI (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AsnFkr ( 545033 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:55AM (#10148574) Homepage Journal
      Just two years ago most people despised ATI's Windows drivers as well, at least in comparison to Nvidia's. Give them time to come around, I'm sure they will.

      • Re:Nvidia and ATI (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Skuto ( 171945 )
        I've been waiting for 2 years for decent Windows drivers and my patience is ALSO up.

      • Re:Nvidia and ATI (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Apathetic1 ( 631198 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @09:29AM (#10148883) Journal
        Some people still despise ATI's Windows drivers. The latest version of the Catalyst Drivers for Windows XP broke multi-monitor support on my Radeon 9000. Rolled back the driver to an older version and it works fine.

        C'mon, guys. You make great cards, how about some decent drivers?

      • Re:Nvidia and ATI (Score:3, Informative)

        by ipgeek ( 551180 )

        ATI has been steadily releasing newer versions of their linux drivers over the past year (and I commend them for doing that). What has been frustrating is that the general experience has been that performance has degraded with many of the recent 3.xx releases, at least in comparison to the old 2.8 release which was already pretty fast and stable for my ATI card. I think part of the problem has been the push to support the most recent chipsets which has definitely complicated the driver releases.

        btw, thi

    • ATI makes some nice cards, but only for Windows users. Their Linux drivers are infamous for a reason. If you are using Linux and want properly designed drivers, you really have no choice except to use an nVidia card.
      Gee, *thanks* for the great timing. I ordered an ATI Radeon card just last night intending to use it with Fedora.

      I thought we hated nVidia because THEY wouldn't open up their drivers.
      • Neither have opened up their drivers. The difference is that Nvidia's installer works really well and ATI's is a piece of crap. I'm using a Radeon 9600 Pro on Fedora Core 2, I've decided to stick with the default X.org radeon driver because it's such a hassle to get the vendor driver to work on FC2.

        If you decide to just use the default driver it works well enough with xv overlays etc. except of course there's no 3D acceleration. The open source nvidia driver is exactly the same.
    • On the x86 platform. They also make cards for the PPC platform. So better to say "but only for users of closed platforms."
    • WOAH!

      That's only true under these conditions:

      Your ATI card is new enough that there aren't open drivers for it (R300 or later) yet, and you actually use 3D in Linux.

      I myself use a RADEON 7500 and it has fully-accelerated 2D/3D in XFree86 and XOrg, and it has for a LONG time now. The native support in the latest XOrg release has across-the-board full 2D acceleration for all RADEON chipsets, even the new ones.

      GPL'd linux drivers are usually a bit behind the cutting-edge hardware, because there's a lag tim

  • Comments from an ATI engineer (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:49AM (#10148516)
    If enough people leave the right kind of feedback, those drivers will be made open source.

    There are just a few followers in management who think we need to follow NVidia's business model. They are wrong.
    • There's too much proprietary licensed code in these drivers for them ever to be open sourced. ATI and nVidia don't have ownership of alot of the code. At least nVidia did the decent thing and GPL'd their "glue" code which they do have control over (maybe ATI have too, but I'm not familiar with their drivers).

      To be frank, I'm just glad that these companies are supporting Linux at all, although I don't think we'll see a major change in the status quo until Linux CAD workstations become more popular, in which

      • There's too much proprietary licensed code in these drivers for them ever to be open sourced.

        That doesn't matter. No one wants their (not very good) driver code anyway. What is needed is the proper technical specifications. The GPL code can be clean-roomed from that.

        • I agree completely, but once again I feel the companies will be hampered with the "but if we release the specs then company XYZ will start producing amazing graphics cards!" line on things. There's also the worry that, with full access to the specs, people will work around the "crippling" of cores that is supposed to mark the difference between a £100 card and a £400 card. Given the performance war that's been going on between nVidia and ATI since the year dot, I think the chances of either side
    • I think the best feedback you can provide is a note indicating that as a result of the fact that the ATI card you would have liked to use did not work out of the box in a Linux instalation, you have returned it and used the money on an nVidia card instead. Further you are advising your peers that they will get a much better result by using nVidea cards if they choose to run Linux.

      You may want to note that you would be happy to help them test their cards and drivers under Linux, but if you are going to do t
    • But nVidia's business model is to release as much of their driver code as they are legally permitted to (at least, that's what they say). Most likely, there's some patent licensing agreement involved which would mean that, even if nVidia were to release the source to their drivers, it wouldn't be legal for anyone else to do anything useful with it anyway. So nVidia would be doing the right thing by not inserting code of questionable legality into the kernel tree.

      In any case, binary-only drivers aren't real
    • I refuse to taint my kernel by using an NVidia card. On the other hand my ATI AIW 7500 still lacks functionality. The GATOS project is great but crippled and held back by lack of specs. I'm not expecting ATI to come out and GPL code for their drivers. All I ask is that the data sheets for the hardware be made available so drivers can be made. As things currently stand I will not buy any new ATI products. I'm not a gamer and what I have works. I'd like to buy a new card but what good would it be to ha

  • Why use ATIs drivers? (Score:5, Informative)

    by cerberusss ( 660701 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:49AM (#10148520) Journal
    I use the ones provided with XFree86 and/or from DRI. Runs like a charm. I don't bother with those binaries at all.
    • Last time I checked, the DRI drivers run only on ancient hardware, and for anything from this century, you needed the binary drivers. Has this changed?
    • These DRI drivers gets you hardware accelerated opengl on
      all (newer) ati cards ?

    • Re:Why use ATIs drivers? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by tjw ( 27390 )

      The DRI drivers only support ATI cards up to the Radeon 9200 (rv280). It appears that ATI will be following NVidia's footsteps by not releasing specs for their newer cards.

    • Re:Why use ATIs drivers? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by pp ( 4753 )
      Because they only support older models (pre-Radeon 9600 or so). While some work to add open source support to the R300 series is being done, it doesn't work yet. http://volodya-project.sourceforge.net/R300.php seems to be the site of the effort.

      From what I've used the binary drivers, they're not _that_ hard to get running, on a friends fc2
      laptop it was a matter of copying a few dri header files from the kernel sourcecode (the ATI drivers should be including a copy of these since there's no guarantee the ke
    • Well sure... if you've got a pre-8500 Radeon, thats great. For anything more recent you'll get zero acceleration (2D or 3D) with the XFree/Xorg drivers. Which is not to say that you get great acceleration with ATI's driver, but you get something.

  • Time to switch (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Aggrajag ( 716041 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:51AM (#10148538)
    I am not the only one who is either thinking about or has already switched to Nvidia just because of the drivers.

    I have been waiting for a year for proper drivers for Linux but as they still have not materialized the next card will be Nvidia, no question about that.

    • Re:Time to switch (Score:2, Insightful)

      by krgallagher ( 743575 )
      " I am not the only one who is either thinking about or has already switched to Nvidia just because of the drivers."

      I made the switch about a year ago. I have never looked back.

      I read ATI's instalation instruction for SuSE, and feel sorry for anyone who has to follow them. On my SuSE instalations, to install Nvidia's driver I just launch Yast2 and do an online update. I get the drivers straight from SuSE let Yast install them. It is a snap.

    • Nope, you're not the only one. I was a previous ATI owner, and I loved my Radeon 8500. The thing that moved me to nVidia was the lack of quality in the Windows drivers; it seemed like things got worse for me with every driver release (one would have texture corruption in games; in the next release, that would be fixed, but then certain textures would show through objects they were behind, etc.). The last straw was a bug that was a problem for me in every driver after 4.2, which wouldn't let me set the mo

    • Re:Time to switch (Score:3, Insightful)

      by grasshoppa ( 657393 )
      Not the only one.

      I have a 9700pro which I love under windows, but which gave me grey hairs installing under linux.

      My next card will very likely be nvidia. I say very likely, because I don't upgrade often, so if ATI manages to get some decent drivers together that are easy to install, I may stick with them.

      However, were I to upgrade tomorrow, it'd be nvidia. I'm simply disgusted with ATI right now.

  • Yeah.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JoeLinux ( 20366 ) <joelinux@ g m a i l . c om> on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:51AM (#10148545)
    I got an idea: How about some 64-bit drivers. I'm sick and tired of my AMD64 3400+ having a GL refresh rate of a dead dog, or having to run it in 32-bit mode

    (Which I refuse to do. I got 64-bits, I'm using them damnit. If I wanted to run a 32-bit OS, I'd run windows)

    • Re:Yeah.... (Score:5, Informative)

      by DarkSarin ( 651985 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:56AM (#10148592) Homepage Journal
      try nvidia--they have 64 bit drivers both for windows and linux.

      Seriously, many people here rag on nvidia for their binary-only stuff, but they DO provide drivers for a VERY broad range of OS's, unlike many other companies. They may not support open source, but the DO support their customers in a greater degree than many companies, even when those customers want to do some fairly weird stuff!

  • Ati and Linux?? (Score:5, Informative)

    by rjelks ( 635588 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:51AM (#10148547) Homepage
    I'll believe that when my crappy Radeon supports 3D and my TV tuner at the same time.

    If ATI's drivers don't cut it for you, this [sourceforge.net] project has been helping out for a long time.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:54AM (#10148562)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:If ATI can't be bothered producing quality driv (Score:5, Insightful)

      by latroM ( 652152 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @09:15AM (#10148762) Homepage Journal
      Since I ran into a Linux brick wall with them (no specs, no binary drivers) my last two purchases have been Nvidia. I recommend the same for you if you use Linux.

      I wouldn't. The thing is that proprietary drivers and no documentation are against the principles of F/OSS. If I had to recommend a graphics card, it would be ATI radeon 8500 which works well with Free drivers (accelerated OpenGL etc.)

      If you encourage hardware companies to keep their documentation secret you will have a future where you have to use non-free drivers for all your hardware. That is a disaster from the perspective of both Open Source and Free Software movements. I would like you all to understand that the software freedom has a value and functionality is not the only meter of the goodness of software.
      • In general you are right but NOT if you develop a 3D engine like I do. I absolutely need the drivers to be as good as they can be (and on cards better then a Radeon 8500). And I'm sorry to say but on linux the ATI closed drivers are still the best (most features) but are very bad compared to nVidia drivers for linux.

        Free software is good and I'm all for it but there are cases where features DO matter.

        Greetings,

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:54AM (#10148573)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • ATI problem ? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:56AM (#10148586)
    I'm not sure the problem is with ATI.
    I see no reason why the drivers cannot be binary just like on Windows. There needs to be a pragmatic approach to this, one which lets binary drivers exist with an interface that doesn't change all the time.
    GPL is perfect for GNU tools and the Linux kernel, but has no place for drivers. If always enforced for drivers, then manufacturers just will never support a Linux kernel.
    For example, if glibc was change from LGPL to GPL, then Linux would die overnight for commerce, and commerce is what is driving Linux into the enterprise.

    • Re:ATI problem ? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Sunspire ( 784352 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @09:43AM (#10149000)
      It's most certainly an ATI problem.

      Instead of still supporting crap like XFree86 4.1 they need make sure their driver installs without incident on the most used Linux distributions at present time. That means that at least on Fedora Core, SuSE and Mandrake it should be as easy as running "sh ati-installer.run" (like the Nvidia installer). There's no second step to that procedure, just restarting X. Also how hard could it be to provide some AMD64 builds? Who cares if nobody uses them, the lack itself reflects poorly on the company when compared to Nvidia.

      The fglrxconfig utility is a joke, asking you everything from your keymap to mouse model. It's a fundamentally flawed concept. They need to swallow their pride, study the Nvidia installer and replicate it exactly.

      I have cards from both manufacturers, the most recent one being an ATI. However, if this situation doesn't change I know what my next card and my recommendation to others will be.
    • Go back and crawl under you rock, you moron.

      We do not want proprietary drivers. I prefer no drivers to proprietary drivers. When a Linux box begins crashing because of some weird proprietary drivers, who do you think most customers will blame?

  • didn't think it would be long... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:57AM (#10148603)
    before people started comparing the ATI drivers on windows vs linux..

    here's my take:

    I've got a laptop and a desktop, but with ATI cards in them. Setting up the video card properly on my laptop (windows) was a huge pain. It's a "mobile" card so finding the exact driver was... well.. painful. Go to HP (laptop manufact.) go to ATI, try this.. try that. Nothing worked right (often the installer would say I didn't HAVE an ATI card).

    Then I went to install the ATI driver for linux (gentoo). Same problem. This driver, that driver.. big pain in the arse.

    In hindsight, I would have gotten an nvidia card. I got my PVR (which also runs gentoo) and stuck my old geforce2 card in there. Not a single problem from day one getting the card to work in X... svideo out and everything worked almost flawlessly the first time (any problems I found out later were my own).

    so, my take... but nvidia. they might not have the super duper fastest card all the time, but it's close enough that the saved time on driver headaches makes it well worth it.

  • WARNING (Score:3, Informative)

    by Pluribus ( 690506 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @08:59AM (#10148622) Journal
    The 3.9 driver is much higher quality than the 3.11.1 drivers... I have had a ton of user complaints regarding black textures related to ARB_fragment_programs... Disabling the ARB_fragment_programs caused the driver to run the system out of RAM and die. Having the users revert to 3.9 solved all of those issues. It has caused that drivers advanced functions to get blacklisted in at least one commercial game.

  • DVI still broken on 9200 (Score:4, Informative)

    by rimcrazy ( 146022 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @09:00AM (#10148639)
    Piss me off. Got a Dell 2001FP to work with a second machine I set up. Figured for what I needed I didn't need to get a 9600 so I went for a 9200 only to find out that for some reason the DVI output is hosed. After some googling found no one else can seem to make it work either. Not a hardware problem as it works fine in windows. Never again for ATI.....

  • A bit late... (Score:5, Informative)

    by JDevers ( 83155 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @09:07AM (#10148696)
    I knew that sometimes /. isn't exactly quick on the uptake, but these drivers first appears AUGUST FIFTH, very nearly a month ago. It really doesn't take much to get a front page posting anymore.

    Hey, did you guys here about this crazy Utah company suing International Business Machines???

  • ATI cannot make working 3D drivers (Score:5, Interesting)

    by UberLord ( 631313 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @09:10AM (#10148721) Homepage
    Seriously, I've been on the ATI beta testing team (although not anymore) and submitted feedback for every driver release to date.

    I cannot get 3D working (2D works fine) with my 9800 pro - although exactly the same setup works fine on my old 8500 for 3D.

    ATI have not responded to my emails, to my feedback, to any forum posts (although that isn't unexpected) - and this just plain sucks.

    Please, if you want a 3D card in Linux, check people have the same hardware and it works if you're after an ATI card. Although only a small group of people have this issue, it is real and does exist.

    Gentoo discussion [gentoo.org]
    Rage 3D discussion [rage3d.com]

    Quick Summary Enabling DRI causes X eat all my CPU and not start unless I have a working framebuffer.
    With a working framebuffer I get screen corruption, menus and windows are not drawn properly and running any OpenGL application causes X to hang and eat all my CPU.

    In both cases I can ssh into my box and kill X or the OpenGL app and I can use the box again.

    The only common demoninator seems to be Asus motherboards with certain ATI cards - but the same hardware works fine for Windows XP!

  • XvMC support for high def video playback (Score:3, Informative)

    by linuxguy ( 98493 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @09:13AM (#10148737) Homepage
    Nvidia drivers support XvMC extensions. This allows me to watch HDTV video clips even with a relatively weak CPU. Last time I checked ATI's drivers did not support XvMC under Linux. Briefly looking through the release notes, it doesn't look like this has changed. NVIDIA is still the card to get for people wishing to play high def video content smoothly under Linux.

  • 64-bit support (Score:2, Informative)

    by thujone ( 652629 )
    Check out this rant about ATI's broken promises for 64-bit and Linux [gmane.org]...

  • I've had problems (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @09:16AM (#10148777) Homepage Journal
    I updated my old ATI 7500 All in Wonder to a 9600 AIW, thinking that "ATI tries to support the community - they are releasing some specs to the DRI developers, if not for the newest boards."

    First, the proprietary drivers do not work with Xorg - only XFree.

    Second, they will lock up solid if you are running 4K kernel stacks - you need to have 8K stacks. Ven then, while their glxgears program runs, I cannot run UT2003 - as soon as I try to launch the game the monitor shuts down and the system locks.

    Third, for reasons unknown I've lost all Xv support - so video playback sucks and I can no longer access my PCHDTV card.

    Fourth, GATOS and the proprietary drivers don't mix - so you cannot use the tuner section at all.

    I've asked one of the ATI developers who hangs out on the DRI mailing list to push for ATI deploying a Bugzilla-like tracking system, and to support the tuner in the proprietary drivers (since all they need to do is make the tuners an Xv subsystem).

    So, let us all /. ATI into realising that they need to support us BETTER - after all, telling people "Sorry, our drivers don't work with DirectX 9.0, you have to downgrade to DirectX 8.0" would not fly, so why should we be told to downgrade from XFree80 4.4 or Xorg to XFree86 4.3?

    Of course, past experience [slashdot.org] suggests that this /. story will be, as the bard put it, ".. a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" [slashdot.org].

  • Radeon 7500 (Score:5, Informative)

    by maximilln ( 654768 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @09:19AM (#10148803) Homepage Journal
    Still no support for the Radeon 7500.

    Gatos [sf.net] and DRI [sf.net] both provide functionality. It's not really necessary, though, the stock kmod radeon and stock Xf86 radeon drivers work.

    Except for that pesky s-video port. The kernel has no trouble putting the console screen on the TV but only the VESA driver is successful for Xf86. The VESA driver isn't fast enough to watch DVDs.

    Pick and choose, I've tried all the combos:
    kmod: 2.4.18-2.6.7, Gatos, DRI
    drivers: Xf86 4.1.0-Xf4.3.0, Gatos, DRI

    Put the kmod on the x-axis and the drivers on the y-axis and make a matrix. I've tried them all. Only the VESA driver will correctly get the sync values for the s-video port with a Radeon 7500. I've tried the math to convert VESA screenmodes to modelines with no luck.

  • It's Easy! (Score:5, Funny)

    by punkrockguy318 ( 808639 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @09:28AM (#10148869) Homepage
    It's actually pretty easy to get 3D working if you have an ATI Card. 1) Sell your ATI card on eBay 2) Pick up a nVidia 3) Boom! Your done. Easy! I don't see why so many people are having problems...

  • I don't get it... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ryanvm ( 247662 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @09:50AM (#10149085)
    I don't get it, what does Artificial Turd Industries have to do with geek news?

  • ATI drivers & SMP hardware (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dberger ( 44485 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @09:52AM (#10149101)
    I had bought a 9600XT after reading several reviews that gave it outstanding marks for "fps/$." Some OpenGL apps were fine (and plenty fast), but others (notably Wine) crashed my box. Turns out the drivers were oopsing when running an SMP kernel on SMP hardware.

    After reporting the (reproducable) kernel oops, I waited 7 months for the next driver release in the hopes it would be fixed. No such luck. I ditched my 9600XT and bought a GeForce 5700U - it just works.

    What's sorta ironic is that the 5700U (a massive card, with a huge fan, several passive heatsyncs that requires it's own power input) is in the same "performance ballpark" on most tests (and significantly underperforms on some, like pixel shading, IIRC) as the 9600XT (a small card, with a small fan, and no passive heatsyncs).

    It's a great contrast between design elegance and brute force. If ATI could write working drivers...
  • ...the first graphics card vendor to release stable, open drivers for their top product lines is going to sell a shit load of cards to all of us that are annoyed by the current state of drivers ;)
    I would resent buying another card this soon (I shelled out a few hundred quid on a GF3Ti500 a while back), but I'd spend a few hundred more for a card that was fast and worked flawlessly and I suspect many others would too. Hell I've even been considering giving up UT2004 and going back to an old Matrox card that is fully supported.
    Having said that, I am grateful that nVidia have any support at all and being able to run native 64bit drivers on my amd64 rig is excellent and the nVidia installer generally does a pretty good job, but it would be so so much better if support was as much a part of the OS as for all my other hardware.

    So, graphics card companies, take a chance!

  • Fedora driver packages for Nvidia and ATI (Score:3, Interesting)

    by moZer ( 83729 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @10:07AM (#10149246) Homepage
    For Fedora Core users, the Nvidia graphics driver is already packaged, and soon ATI's driver will be too. Installation is one command:

    yum install nvidia-glx (or fglrx)

    That's it. No configuration, no compilation, nothing. You don't even have to reboot. Even easier than Windows. The drivers are provided by the Livna.org repository (http://rpm.livna.org).

    Progress on the ATI driver can be monitored here:

    http://bugzilla.livna.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211

    As of right now, the published version of the Nvidia driver is 1.0.6106, with 6111 coming out shortly.

    Some of the improvments made by the livna re-packaging can be read about here:

    http://rpm.livna.org/livna-switcher.html

    The same applies to the ATI driver.

    Note: an ATI employee (M Tippett) has been heavily involved in the packaging process, which shows real committment from ATI's side. Nvidia has not even bothered to answer a request to put a link on their driver download page to rpm.livna.org.

    /Peter Backlund

  • They want feedback.... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Druss.the.legend ( 701439 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @10:12AM (#10149302)
    How bout 12000+ signatures of annoyed linux users. http://www.petitiononline.com/atipet/petition.html Also this issue and petition has been submitted to /. for 2 weeks now.

  • Nvidia's a Better Bet (Score:3, Informative)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @11:05AM (#10149785) Homepage Journal
    This is old news, those drivers have been out for a couple of weeks now. They support neither PCI express nor AMD64. If you have one of those two systems, Nvidia's drivers support them now. If you read the readmes for both the ATI and Nvidia drivers, you'll see that the Nvidia one is much more comprehensive and complete, as well.

    Unfortunately my new desktop came with an ATI PCI Express card so I can't get 3D acceleration on it (2D works if I lie to the driver about what the card is.) I'm not planning on holding my breath waiting for ATI to get a driver out the door "Eventually," and I'm certainly not going to make the mistake of buying their hardware again.

  • can someone explain why no open spec? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sloth jr ( 88200 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @04:49PM (#10153513)
    I am not a video driver development, so I'm almost assuredly being naive here - but I would have thought most of ATI/NVIDIA's intellectual property would be invested within their GPU. As far as device drivers are concerned, aren't these just black boxes - eg, send opcode x, operand y, get output z? What's to protect here? Isn't the details of the engine that need to be protected (corporate-wise), rather than the programming interface?

    sloth jr

  • There's something else wrong (Score:3, Interesting)

    by r_j_prahad ( 309298 ) <r_j_prahadNO@SPAMhotmail.com> on Friday September 03, 2004 @06:01PM (#10154058)
    I gotta ask... whatever happened to Matrox? Did they fall off the edge of the earth? What about Voodoo and the others? What is wrong with this industry that we've only got two viable choices left in video display cards when it comes time to buy a new PC? Even in the Windows world, that's a horrifying thought, that the video market is so close to becoming yet another monopoly that we'll have to deal with.

    I have a dozen times more choices in what to wipe my butt with after a dump. I guess you're better off being an asshole than being in the computer biz....

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