I hear a lot of people slagging off ATI cards on Linux which winds me up a bit. I thought at one stage that Nvidia must be paying people to do this
Especially when most posts with video card problems seem to be with the Nvidia offering.
I find the Catalyst suite kindly given by ATI to be spot on and usually it’s the distro that needs to sort itself out.
I just did some surfing about this Nvidia myth, which is what it appears to be and saw many posts which seem to turn this line of thought on it’s head.
Now, I don’t want to argue about the opensource side of things, that’s another issue, but when ATI give out a driver for Linux it bloody works and does not break that often, at least I have never had a problem.
There, that should ruffle a few feathers Lay off ATI! lol!
+1
My ATI Radeon 9600 works with openSUSE 11.0 out of the box (with compiz running), and with 10.3, the fglrx driver has been sufficient. I’m sticking with ATI for the foreseeable future…
Didn’t AMD / ATI recently release a bunch of driver resources to the OSS community?
I don’t know if there’s been enough time to make a set of drivers but I thought the resources were out there.
I found this news article with a quick search. GPUs are more powerful than CPUs? No wonder the HPC community wants to include them as compute nodes in clusters.
The main problem with ATi drivers in linux is their performance, it is no where near the same level as windows whereas with nvidia, their drivers are about the same on both windows and linux.
As a result of this, a less powerful nvidia card can outperform a more powerful ati gfx card in linux. For example a 7600GT compared with an x1950 Pro.
On Tue, 2008-06-17 at 16:46 +0000, Neophyte42 wrote:
> Didn’t AMD / ATI recently release a bunch of driver resources to the OSS
> community?
NO… AMD release some documentation… and only some… then some
more, and I think even more isn’t ready.
>
> I don’t know if there’s been enough time to make a set of drivers but I
> thought the resources were out there.
Some resources are out there… enough to do some work. Oddly enough,
I think Novell got tasked with this (?).
>
> I found this ‘news article’ (http://www.linux.com/feature/119049) with
> a quick search. GPUs are more powerful than CPUs? No wonder the HPC
> community wants to include them as compute nodes in clusters.
>
>
GPU’s are more powerful than CPU’s in doing SOME calculations. While
AMD/ATI are working on a closer tie between CPU/GPU (even one chip), you
don’t see them (for example) ditching the CPU really.
> I’ve also noticed that almost every fglrx update has improved
> performance greatly (altough that may be the placebo effect?).
I wish I could see that myself - but every time I upgrade from 8.40.4, my
system refuses to start X at all. 8.40.4 is the last version that
actually works on my system (Thinkpad T42p laptop). When I reported
the problem to ATI, they told me to talk to IBM.
Quite frustrated that they weren’t interested in fixing the driver they
wrote - they seemed completely uninterested in the feedback I provided
for the driver because I’m using an IBM laptop.
Given the choice, I will not buy an ATI video card.
AMD has released a decent amount of specs so far, which are available here [x.org]. Quite monotonious reading unless you’re a driver developer I quess…
The reason AMD hasn’t dumped it all out at once is because they apparently need to do quite a bit of cleaning to the documents before publishing. This is because they don’t have the rights to publish all the material related to the 3d parts.
They have, the result is the ‘radeonhd’ driver. I’ve been using it for a couple of months and it has been working fine. No 3d acceleration yet, but that’s a work in progress. For more details on the driver you can check these articles [phoronix.com].
I think the problem with Ati drivers is that they won’t work properly. Atleast with 3D acceleration. I haven’t got any driver to work as good as nvidia’s. There is all the time something wrong with opengl or rendering parts.
If you guys have been able to get drivers work somehow it seams to be by tinkering some configs but compared to nvidia never had any issues like this.
Just install the module and then change nvidia to xorg.conf and it works.
