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Graphics Software

ATI at the Top Graphics Chip Maker for 2004 323

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-blame-that-pixie-demo dept.
dirutz writes "ATI is at the top according to market share, but nVidia is catching up. Hopefully this competition means lower prices and more goodies."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

ATI at the Top Graphics Chip Maker for 2004 More

ATI at the Top Graphics Chip Maker for 2004

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  • Obligatory.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by drunkennewfiemidget ( 712572 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @11:16AM (#11528920)

    Hopefully this competition means lower prices and more goodies.

    And better open-source support?
    • Open-source support doesn't create any significant increase in income. It's a niche market that really isn't worth being invested in yet. Note that I said YET, not NEVER.
      I'm all for some open ATI drivers so I can finally move to ubuntu full-time, since my linux skills aren't quite up to par as far as doing kernel-fiddling. Unfortuneately, there's just not a significant market for it just yet.
    • How can this = to more competition? All that happend is the two graphics card companies switched positions. They charge similar prices - so they have no incentive to drop their prices. They offer similar support so they have no incentive to offer better open-source support.

      Now if another SEPARATE company enters the market, then it is more competition (assuming the company can gain enough people to go with them).

      All that happend here is the two best companies switched positions.

      • Re:Obligatory.. (Score:3, Interesting)

        by magarity ( 164372 )
        How can this = to more competition? All that happend is the two graphics card companies switched positions

        While it doesn't equal MORE competition, it does mean that competition is alive and well between the two companies. The alternative is that one company or the other has faded into obscurity and/or been bought up by the other. As long as there are even just two roughly equal players who constantly vie for the top spot, that's enough competition to keep things lively. Notice there *are* plenty of ot

  • Or... (Score:4, Funny)

    by 53cur!ty ( 588713 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @11:17AM (#11528929) Homepage
    A merger/acquisition and Higher prices!!

  • ATI may be there now... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Vip ( 11172 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @11:18AM (#11528942)
    However, given their stance on Linux drivers, my next purchase will be Nvidia. I don't like the fact that I can't use my DVI port because ATI doesn't feel like it.

    Vip

    • Re:ATI may be there now... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Lisandro ( 799651 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @11:26AM (#11529045)
      Please mode insightful. ATI might have the better hardware (or not, nVidia latest offerings are catching up IIRC); but their driver suck. Specially outside Windows.

      I'd love to buy a modern video card with OSS drivers - hell, i was planning to get a S3 Deltachrome when i though they might do that. But in the meantime, nVidia offers binary drivers for Windows/Linux/BSD that work flawlessly and never gave me an issue. I'm sold.
      • I'd love to buy a modern video card with OSS drivers

        How modern do you need? The Radeon 9200/9250 is supported out-of-the-box for accelerated 3D by a recent kernel + xorg. If you don't care about 3D, then the sky's the limit, pretty much.

        • Re:ATI may be there now... (Score:4, Interesting)

          by superpulpsicle ( 533373 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @11:39AM (#11529210)
          I bought the ATI Radeon 9800 and I was terribly disappointed. The fan fried not once, twice, but 3 times. I had paid almost $100 in RMA returns and shipping.

          I no longer can leave my PC running around the clock because I know the card would fry if I leave it up. I already have gigantic fans running with open case. No overclocking at all.

          Sorry ATI, but I am going back to Nvidia in my next purchase. ATI drivers are also terribly lousy. If you need a new Catalyst driver every month, you got problems. Half the games were always filled with overheated white dots. I treat my hardware with RTFM care. And I deal with another ATI product again.

          • Probably not ATI's fault. Did you actually buy card where not just the chipset, but the board was made by ATI? I bought a cheap ass nVidia 5200 and had the same problem. On a graphics board likely the only thing made by ATI or nVidia is the actual chipset, all other parts are provided by a separate manufacturer.

            Oh, and my Powercolor 9700pro has run like a dream for the last 5 months.
          • If you must keep your case open with gigantic fans running, you have more problems than just your video card. Even a 9800 simply does not generate that much heat. If you have gigantic fans, opening the case will probably make them less, not more, efficient.

            If you're really interested in not frying another card, and are willing to spend the shipping money for yet another RMA for a better use, try buying a decent chipset fan for about US $20-30. Throw the video card fan away. Is it not clear that the fa

        • If you don't care about 3D, then don't waste money on something more powerful than a Radeon 9200/9250.
          These cards will do fine for 2D, have passive cooling (quiet, no fan that can die on you) and are available with DVI port.
          Disclaimer: I don't know about the DVI support of the OSS driver.
        • I have a Radeon 9200 running in x.org... it is supported yes and it runs 3d... but the 3d code has several functions not implemented (the developers didnt get enough info from ati to implement them) one of the main problems the drivers have in x.org is transparency which brings the composite extension to a crawl... You can easily see that fire on tuxracer and watch the patterns tux makes in the snow, originally they rely heavily on transparency, due to the lack therof they dont work correctly. Also simply
      • nVidia offers binary drivers for Windows/Linux/BSD that work flawlessly

        My experience with people who say that is that they have never used nVidia drivers with multi-head under linux. Don't expect more than a few weeks of uptime in such a configuration.
      • ATI reserves a whole special mode for suckiness of their drivers with windows too. I have an AIW Radeon PCI which I aquired primarily for using with a secondary screen + TV-in. The problem is that the card will not use the TV-in functions if it is not the only card on the system. ATI's webpage does indicate that it won't work if it's not the primary card, but while setting PCI to primary does allow for the drivers to be found, it still does not capture. An email to ATI results in a bunch of canned responses
      • Tell them about it: http://apps.ati.com/linuxDfeedback/index.asp [ati.com]
      • I used to think the same. And then I got a non intel box (PPC). Suddenly the binary drivers from both ATI and nVidia were useless. And guess which chipset has better open source support? Hint: it isn't nVidia...

    • I use both ati and nvidia on Linux successfully (Score:5, Informative)

      by FreeUser ( 11483 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @11:35AM (#11529169)
      However, given their stance on Linux drivers, my next purchase will be Nvidia. I don't like the fact that I can't use my DVI port because ATI doesn't feel like it.

      echo "media-video/ati-drivers" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
      echo "media-video/ati-drivers-extra" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

      emerge -Du media-video/ati-drivers media-video/ati-drivers-extra

      or do whatever the equivelent is for your distribution to install the ati-drivers version 8.8.25, and run fglrxconfig to configure X accordingly.

      I've got ATI drivers running on a dual DVI card, on multiple heads in one case, and on a single 1920x1200 on another, and have used them in both 64-bit (opteron) and 32-bit (athlon/intel) environments. For ati 9250 and less I use the xfree drivers, for anything above that I use the new binary drivers.

      I've done the same with nvidia cards (although I've yet to find an nvidia card that doesn't flicker incessently at 1920x1200 resolution, despite using the DVI port rather than the analog port -- go figure).

      ATI is now releasing driver updates for Linux every 2 months ... similiar to nvidia. So get either one ... I've used both, and both have their strengths and weaknesses (e.g ATI drivers and celestia have issues and nvidia can't hold a stable image at 1920x1200 under Linux), and now that ATI has finally gotten their act together WRT Linux drivers, they are a viable competitor to nvidia in that market.

      In other words, you can pick whatever card you like the best and expect driver support on Linux for it now, on both 32-bit intel and 64-bit opteron at least. PPC users are stuck with the free drivers (which work fine on my powerbook 17" BTW), and unfortunately other platforms are similarly limited, but for 99.99% of us the support is pretty damn good at this point.
      • echo "media-video/ati-drivers" >>

        /etc/portage/package.keywords

        echo "media-video/ati-drivers-extra" >>

        /etc/portage/package.keywords

        emerge -Du media-video/ati-drivers media-video/ati-drivers-extra

        sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-6629-pkg1.run

      • how's performance? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Ender Ryan ( 79406 )
        How's the performance? How well does Doom 3 run?

        For some time now, people who have successfully gotten their ATI cards working have had to put up with very poor performance compared to Windows.

        I'd love to have another option for 3D on Linux :)

        • Re:how's performance? (Score:3, Informative)

          by FreeUser ( 11483 )
          How's the performance? How well does Doom 3 run?

          That's a very good question, and unfortunately one I cannot answer personally. I am very happy with the performance of the new drivers (except for celestia, which has rendering issues), but frankly I haven't had time to mess around with Doom 3, unreal tournament, or other games (beyond a quick zip down the slopes with tuxracer). I do use blender a fair amount, which works great for what it's worth. For better information than I can give there is a pretty
          • Reading down the first page of that link, people are reporting Doom 3 and UT2k4 working and being playable. No hint as to performance though.

            Oh well, from the sounds of it, they are indeed improving a lot. Which is cool.

            BTW, How is your novel coming along? I read the first many chapters of it at one point, and bookmarked it to read later. I see it's still in 3rd draft. Being the author, could you tell me if I should read it now, or would you recommend waiting for further revision?

            • BTW, How is your novel coming along? I read the first many chapters of it at one point, and bookmarked it to read later. I see it's still in 3rd draft. Being the author, could you tell me if I should read it now, or would you recommend waiting for further revision?

              Thanks for the interest! :-)

              It's still being actively edited, and getting quite a bit better along the way. I'm up to Chapter 15 (out of 50 ... a couple of pointless chapters have been dropped and a couple combined into one). I'd wait a bit b
      • ...now that ATI has finally gotten their act together WRT Linux drivers, they are a viable competitor to nvidia in that market.

        I'm glad to hear that. Any word on full Linux support for the All-in-Wonder cards or HDTV Wonder? Last time I looked, they are only doing drivers for "sufficiently recent" cards, meaning that I with my AIW Radeon am out of luck--is that still the case?
    • However, given their stance on Linux drivers, my next purchase will be Nvidia.

      Mine too.

      Unfortunately, this means diddly-squat in the grand scheme of things. As long as ATI can convince Dell and the top few PC vendors that they have the best solution for Windows, then we lose.
      • Sometimes it may seem like Dell owns the PC world, but they still face competition from other vendors (notably HP). Graphics is a good way to differentiate your box from the others.

        Most people don't really understand the difference between various graphics cards. But I do, and everyone I know that buys a PC asks me about it. I suspect that many (if not most) PC buyers have a knowledgeable friend help them the same way.

        Many if not most major vendor systems equip their lower end systems with integrated g
    • However, given their stance on Linux drivers, my next purchase will be Nvidia.

      Oh, you mean the proprietary non-free drivers for GNU/Linux on x86 which taint your kernel. I think I'll pass and use my Radeon 8500 until there is a better card with Free drivers. Open Graphics Project comes to mind.
    • nvidia's binary drivers are not without problems either (at least, i could never get them to work right last time i tried on my laptop). i ended up using the open source nv driver that ships with XFree, at which point, i was no better off than if i had been using an ati card.

      right now, both companies offer incomplete binary only drivers for *nix, so i see no real reason to pick one over the other on that basis.

  • Actually, I've been more impressed with Nvidia... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Goronmon ( 652094 ) * on Monday January 31, 2005 @11:19AM (#11528964)
    I used to be all for ATI, but the current selection of cards from Nvidia is IMO more impressive, especially cards like the 6600GT which are pretty awesome in the $200 price range.
    • ATI is currently selling very few cards. Everyone knows the best value is in the 6600GT and 6800GT.

      The x700 series, is just garbage.

      The 9600 XT has the same performance for the same price, the 9800 pro is also the same price.

      ATI has so little fab space they simply don't reflect market pressures.

  • Low-end? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PornMaster ( 749461 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @11:21AM (#11528980) Homepage
    On the shelves at CompUSA, there seem to be a plethora of ATI cards with 9200s in them. Is the total volume shipped as relevant if ATI's bottom-feeding?
    • so? they still count as graphics cards.

      it's not about which is best, which costs the most or which gets the best bang per buck.

  • I've owned various nVidia and ATI video cards. My current PC is using an ATI RADEON 9600XT from ASUS. Its a bit dated now, but a very nice card overall. My other PC has a nVidia GeForce4 MX400 made by Chaintech. That card is quite a bit more dated, and was kind of mediocre to begin with.

    Anyways, the point I'm slowly coming to, is that, essentially, I don't really care if I own an ATI or nVidia card. High end cards are high end cards. I've had few problems with either; although, I find reliability of anything made by ASUS is best. Benchmarks aside, you get what you pay for. And most of the "discussion" over which is better in reference to ATI and nVidia is pure fanboyism.

  • Both companies have really dropped the ball... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ShinSugoi ( 783392 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @11:22AM (#11528994)
    ... with regards to the availbility of their high-end cards. When was the last time you saw a store (online or otherwise) that had a x800 (of any stripe) or high end 6800 in stock? Probably not in the last 3 or 4 months. I was considering upgrading from my 9800pro, but until better cards become more widely available the costs are going to remain prohibitive.

  • Matrox? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by koi88 ( 640490 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @11:23AM (#11529011)

    How about Matrox? Are they still in business?
    Haven't heard anything from them for ages....

    • Re:Matrox? (Score:2, Informative)

      by madaxe42 ( 690151 )
      Matrox are moving more towards the business end of the market, rather than 3d and games. They produce a variety of multimonitor systems, like this [ebay.co.uk].

      Pretty impressive, IMHO.

    • The lost relevance (Score:5, Informative)

      by Shivetya ( 243324 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @11:33AM (#11529140) Homepage Journal
      When they decided that they would not compete in the "game market" and instead released a card with features an insignificant minority wanted.

      Their failure is that the game oriented graphics business lands the name on storeshelves. Right now most game geeks can only name two suppliers of video card chips, Nvidia and ATI.

      Matrox was great up until the G400 era where they slipped of the path and disappeared into obscurity.

      • Re:The lost relevance (Score:4, Informative)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @11:41AM (#11529222) Journal
        I have a G550, and it's a very nice card for a non-graphics workstation. It supports 2D acceleration under X, and provides a crisper image quality than I've seen on nVidia and ATi cards. If I had a need for a good quality 2D card but didn't need 3D, I'd go with Matrox. Unfortunately for them, I don't have such a need.

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

      by FridayBob ( 619244 )
      I'm still running a G550 on my Debian sid system with XFree86 and KDE, but after some recent upgrades/updates, I'm no longer able to get it to run OpenGL stuff. Obviously, this sucks, so now I'm on the verge of dumping it in favor of something from nVidia.

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

        by runderwo ( 609077 )
        Have you tried upgrading your DRM kernel module to something newer? If you are running a bleeding edge DRI, you are probably going to run into trouble unless you keep your kernel module up to date too.
    • After a few attempts to compete in the generic card business (e.g. home pcs, requiring gaming performance) they've retreated into high-end productivity/business graphics segment. Their 2d rending is phenomenally crisp and they're quite popular with CAD and render farm setups where you want to look at multiple monitors at a time.

      Unfortunately I think they're going to fail, based on economies of scale... you need the volume w/ low margins to maintain respectable manufacturing lines, and without them you're
    • Matrox's last attempt at a gaming card was the triple-headed Parhelia, which managed to get the 3 accelerated screens, but with abysmal performance on even 1 screen. It was going to be rather nice, since you could just glance to the side rather than mouselooking to the side in FPS games because of the huge field of view.

  • The most amazing thing... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Walkiry ( 698192 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @11:24AM (#11529024) Homepage
    Is Intel's 40% market share. Honestly, when I read that the biggest market is for the lower-end cards and the big guns are most for marketing and prestige I didn't imagine it was such a difference.
    • And this is a *really good thing* for Linux, because there are excellent completely open source 3D drivers for Intel's integrated chipsets -- even the newest ones.

      Right now, the performance doesn't even compare to what you get with a dedicated add-in card, but that gap will narrow, and hopefully soon the binary-only-graphics-drivers annoyance will go away.
    • Intel integrates basic graphics functionality into many of their desktop chipsets. The chipset is on the motherboard. Many people have integrated graphics and don't even use it because they have installed an aftermarket graphics card. The extra cost of a chipset with integrated graphics is generally less than $10, so the added income is much less than that of a standalone graphics chip. While Intel ships a lot of graphics capable chips I suspect that both Nvidia and ATI earn more revenue on their graphi
  • I'm glad all the statistical reports of "Top X of 2004" come out several weeks after all the columnists report their own toplists. They're just making that crap up. With a month of writing "2005" under our belts, we can actually look back at the data without the holidays confusing us.

  • I've always wondered... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wolf31o2 ( 778801 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @11:26AM (#11529037)
    I would love to see the market share numbers broken down into separate markets.

    Who gets the market share in the high-end workstation market?

    Macintosh market?

    Linux market?

  • Matrox, poor Matrox (Score:3, Interesting)

    by FerretFrottage ( 714136 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @11:27AM (#11529060)
    They were in the mix in the late 90's but the lack of proper opengl support killed them as a "gamer's manufacturer". I still have a G200 running in one of my servers. Maybe they finally got out their opengl ICD, but by that time I was on the nvidia bandwagon and waffle between them and Ati depending on my mood.

  • Open Video/Graphics Cards (Score:3, Informative)

    by billybob2 ( 755512 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @11:30AM (#11529103)
    I hope the Open Graphics [opengraphics.org] project will make inroads into the graphics business, and force Nvidia and ATI to make the specs to their cards public. They can have a big market if all computers intended to run FOSS are equipted with one of their cards. And if the majority of computers in Brazil are destined to run FOSS [slashdot.org] for financial reasons, that's a huge market for their hardware.

    Nvidia and ATI are really paranoid about their IP - at one point Nvidia even refused to share the specs for an ethernet card they made. The FOSS comunity doesn't want their schemas for the hardware, just the interface so that quality open source dirvers can be made and Linux/*BSD can have state of the art graphics capailities.
    • Hate to burst your bubble, but that movement would have to be about one million times bigger than it currently is to even register on these guys' radar.

    • nd force Nvidia and ATI to make the specs to their cards public

      It likely won't happen. I believe that the stated reason for them not opening up the specs is that they are using patented technology that they've licensed from other people. One of the terms of their agreement is that they have to keep the specs closed.

      We're lucky enough to have binary only drivers that work reasonably well.

  • Intel at 40%, ATI at 27%, nVidia is "closely behind" with 18%. Where is the remaining 15%? (Almost as much as nVidia). Don't tell they are Matrox's ;) Anyway - either I live in my own reality or the article author smokes something weird.
    • Presumably the remaining 15% is everyone else (S3, Matrox, etc). I am quite surprised Intel is losing out. I recently acquired an old ThinkPad to do some development (porting from OS X to GNUstep) on, and to play the games that don't run on my Mac, and found the performance of the integrated graphics to be quite acceptable (admittedly, I think the most recent thing I'm running on it is Tribes). I imagine that for everyone other than hard-core gamers Intel chips are perfectly acceptable.
    • Via accounts for a lot of volume at the extreme low-end, through their integrated S3 chips.
    • Intel or ATI sells pretty much every server integrated VGA core. They may be based on Rage Pro based generation technologies, but they sell tons of them.

      As for the 'other' categories, VIA sells a lot of integrated platforms. I'm sure there are a lot of marginal market players for niche industries. Just think of TIVO's. Who supplies their gfx units? I don't have a clue, but they account for some of this market.

  • Will this market burn out? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by digitalgimpus ( 468277 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @11:35AM (#11529167) Homepage
    I question how long it will go. I see a few sinareo's:

    1. The more advanced gaming gets, the more complex it gets. Eventually graphics cards will outdo what game developers can program for. Until programming techniques allow them to take advantage of features, that could cause a temporary stall in sales.

    2. Heat? PC's tend to be getting smaller. Small is the trend right now, compared to "I need a mini tower" craze of the 90's. I think that heat barrier is going to become a big issue too. How do you cram that hot processor into a little box, with a quiet fan.... if even a fan? IMHO the thermal barrier is not somehting they can ignore.

    3. Price. After 1,2. How do they keep the price affordable? Especailly with dedicated gaming units like the PS2 and Xbox... how do you keep PC gaming and encourage people to shell out cash. It seems more and more common for a game to be PS2 only, or Xbox only.... and no PC version. This removes the motivation to spend big bucks on GPU's.

    IMHO this isn't going to last. It's a mini dotcom bubble.

    It will burst, it will scale back, and some of it will survive. But I think the over-emphasis on Graphics Cards will be a trend of times past in the next few years.

    Sidenote: And ironically I type this with an ATI ad right on the top of the page!)

    • It will burst, it will scale back, and some of it will survive. But I think the over-emphasis on Graphics Cards will be a trend of times past in the next few years.

      I think you're absolutely wrong. If anything, the emphasis on GPU performace will increase. Look at the CPUs lately. Little to zero single-thread performance increase in the last 1.5 years. The "moore's law wall" people where talking about has already been hit. CPU performance will keep increasing but much more slowly. The easiest way is to slap

    • 3. Price. After 1,2. How do they keep the price affordable? Especailly with dedicated gaming units like the PS2 and Xbox... how do you keep PC gaming and encourage people to shell out cash. It seems more and more common for a game to be PS2 only, or Xbox only.... and no PC version. This removes the motivation to spend big bucks on GPU's.

      Since they are already supplying the graphics chips to Xbox and possibly PS/2 (I'm not fully familiar with the hardware, as I own neither), I'd say they have the price pr
    • 1. a.) Complexity doesn't necessarily need to increase forever. Limiting factors include many conventional bottlenecks like clock speed, memory size, memory bandwidth, etc. Also, with fast enough processors, programming could be made easier by using different techniques. b.) Who can say how complex things can get before said programmers hit a wall and fail to take advantage. Certainly not you.

      2. Heat is certainly a problem, but not one that is unresolvable. I have a Gefore FX Go in my laptop that blo

    • Everything looks like it's going into parallelization of some sort ... multicore CPUs, Cell suggest a multicore GPU ... all we need now is a multicore audio board and maybe a multicore nuclear poweplant to power all that.

  • Tired of ATI.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by homerito ( 591887 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @11:39AM (#11529204)
    I used before an nvidia MX440 with personal cinema. kind of old but the 3d worked fine in linux. Personal Cinema sucked because there was no linux support for the tv part. Windows was fine.

    I upgrade to a radeon 9600 pro and it has been only headaches since then:
    - Installing 3d acceleration in linux is really hard.
    - I got an additional ati tv card that I installed, after a couple of days any 3d application had really bad texture corruption. I wrote to ATI and they replace my 9800pro card (with no proof of purchase because I lost the recipt.)
    - The tv card was uninstalled for a long time, but I installed again and boooom... really bad 3d screen corruption. I turn off my machine and the 9800 was fine after a restart but I removed the tv card. Now ATI asked me to sent the tv card back. (again without recipt).
    - Even in simple 2D screens I got screen corruptions.
    - I did not do any overclocking to the card.
    - Everytime i search for problem on 9800 it seems that they have the tendency of running too hot and people install additional coolers. But why do I have to expend more money in coolers if I already pay for the 9800 pro???

    It seems to me that ATI is aware that some of their cards are a POS because they keep sending me RMA forms (return forms) at any complain I send.

    I want to go back to nvidia :( but that will require another 200US$ :(

    Altough I think the 9800 ATI card sucks, the support has been OK.

  • The source did not have the year-end figures for 2004 from the report.

    Actually, the article points that ATI is the top "STANDALONE" chip maker. Intel is still very much the top chip maker, but they do not sell standalone graphics chips. ATI 27%, Invidia 18%, Intel most of the rest of total graphics chips. (4th quarter) ATI 55%, Invidia 41% of standalone chipsets.(4th quarter.)

  • ATI bad rep with linux drivers? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tod_miller ( 792541 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @12:04PM (#11529461) Journal
    Where is this founded?

    Here [ati.com] is a d/l for linux drivers, they have for about 20 of thier cards...

    Are the drivers crap? Is this an urban myth? I loved my first ATI card with MPEG on board, and TV in... it was so nice! years ago now...

    Then I had a matrox... damn thing, was a nice card but they supported my motherboard exactly 1 day (YES!! the next day they updated thier website!) after I ditched the card, after 13 months of unhappy marraige.

    Now I just got two free nvidia 5700le's and they are nice enough :-) Well one is a 5200 :-( which is notably slower, even though it has double memory (256).

    Doom3 on 5700le is definately playable on default settings.

    me out.

    • Re:ATI bad rep with linux drivers? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by shadow303 ( 446306 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @12:51PM (#11529985)
      They do release drivers, but they really suck. Performance is supposed to be below Windows performance (I don't know first hand since I don't have windows on a machine with an ATI card). Cards supported seems to be improving, but for a while they totally refused to support any of the mobility chipsets. We had to wait months in order to get a set of drivers for Xorg 6.8 that wouldn't crash when trying to use opengl. I have heard that there are lots of features that are currently not supported, but I haven't actually checked these claims (they aren't features that currently interest me). If my ATI card was in anuthing other than a laptop, I would have ripped it out and replaced it a long time ago (and I am kicking myself for not paying enough attention while ordering my laptop).

    • Are the drivers crap?

      They are soo bad (especially for 3d), that they count more as an insult than a good effort. Its like ATI is saying "ya, we can get our cards to work with Linux. But we don't want to spend the time to make them work well."

      (glares at ATI card in my Ubuntu box).

      Thats why I gave up on this PC gaming crap and just bought me a Gamecube.

  • consider: open source graphics card initiative (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    read this and support the opensource movement

    http://kerneltrap.org/node/4622
    http://kerneltrap.org/node/4622 [kerneltrap.org]

    as it spreads out to new fields of endeavour.

    good luck to all the open and honest initiatives and fair projects, social practices and helpful goodwilling people around the world.

    cooperation and openness help this world better than pure capitalism and monetary systems.

    cheers.

  • FYI (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mercuryresearch ( 680293 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @12:31PM (#11529723) Journal
    Pay attention to context in these stories, ATI's the lead in standalone, swapping places with Nvidia (just slightly). Overall Intel is still on top.

    My company is the source of this data and doesn't release it, but on a regular basis portions get leaked, often to present a particular picture that isn't entirely complete. (Usually the leaks come from someone with a financial interest in driving perceptions on way or the other, and not the graphics companies themselves.)
  • I guess it would be useless to note that the article's title is either missing a word or two, has a word or two misplaced, or perhaps could have been written to actually parse properly?

  • sometimes, life is simple... ;)

  • Nvidia is catching up?! (Score:5, Informative)

    by thehunger ( 549253 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @12:56PM (#11530057)
    As any Linux users will tell you (and there are supposed to be a few among this crowd), it is ATI that is playing catchup. As far as making Linux drivers available for their products, that is.

    Who cares about market share, monthly volumes and top-of-the-line performance when 90% of the features of an ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder card are NOT available on Linux? It's only a couple a weeks ago the first feature-less driver for the X.org / 2.6 kernel came out!

    • Who cares about market share, monthly volumes and top-of-the-line performance when 90% of the features of an ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder card are NOT available on Linux?

      You mean besides the >95% of the video card market that doesn't use Linux?

  • Be more like Intel and AMD (Score:5, Insightful)

    by amightywind ( 691887 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @12:56PM (#11530058) Journal

    ATI's graphics drivers suck. Would it be so hard guys to document your control registers so one of us out here could write a decent driver? Intel and AMD are wide open in this respect. Why aren't you?

  • ATI competition == more vapor for Linux (Score:3, Informative)

    by linux11 ( 449315 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @02:44PM (#11531163)
    pcHDTV [pchdtv.com] recommends using a nVidia video card to view HDTV on Linux. It isn't that ATI's hardware isn't capable of hardware accelrated MPEG decoding (iDCT). It is just that ATI refuses to do anything other than lie to the Linux community about being able to use this hardware feature. Linux users that buy ATI have to pay for the circuits just the same as those that buy nVidia but in the case of ATI, the feature is completely useless on Linux. Hence the recommendation to buy nVidia from pcHDTV.



    ATI's method of competing has been to lie continually about the future of being able to use this feature. For example, back in 2000, ATI announced the VHA SDK [ati.com] to allow Linux users access to the MPEG2 accelerators on their cards. After 5 years of waiting, ATI still has not released this to the general public. Instead, they claimed in a FAQ that the GATOS project is currently working toward hardware assisted IDCT... [archive.org] But the GATOS project had already publically announced "no planned support." [sourceforge.net]



    So, I contacted ATI developer relations via the web in 2003 and waited three months. They never got back to me. So, I contacted them by phone, they confirmed the following:

    • ATI has no plans to ever release the announced VHA SDK to the general public
    • Because of "lack of interest" (I guess on ATI's part, because there is plenty of interest to be found on Linux mailing lists), they feel no obligation to ever honor the press release
    • ATI has never release specs for doing iDCT to the GATOS project and does not expect the GATOS project to be able to support iDCT
    • When ATI's Linux FAQ stated that GATOS would be providing support, ATI already knew they had a policy which required withholding the specifications on how to write drivers to use the iDCT acceleration feature.


    They stated they would get back to me about my interest in assisting in writting a driver for the iDCT support. It has now been OVER A YEAR and they have refused to contact me back.

    Bottom line: ATI lied to the Linux community to maximize sales to those that where interested in this specific feature. ATI will NEVER HONOR their feature announcements to the Linux community.

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