Linux & ATI cards

[Washer]

Is the boycott still in effect? I was kinda eyeing the Radeon HD3850, but there's no use getting it if it won't work.

[forrestcupp]

Run away! Run away!

Unless you don't think you will ever be using Compiz or any compositing.

I have an HD 2600 that I decided to get rid of. I was pretty impressed with their latest 8.2 drivers, but they didn't get rid of the problem where opengl stuff flickers if Compiz is turned on. And that includes any opengl screen saver.

I found out that this is a problem that is most likely bigger than they are wanting to take on, and they are probably going to just wait on xorg to fix it. But xorg isn't really looking forward to taking that on.

But nvidia has already optimized glx in their drivers to not have these problems. If you are going to buy something anyway, you're better off going nvidia. If the 8800 isn't good enough, wait for the high end 9xxx to come out.

[Washer]

Right. 8800 it is.

[emshains]

Nop the drivers are still making ATI+ubuntu a bad choice. You should chek this card in google, how good it is on ubuntu and that kind of stuff, so the choice is yours.

Id go for a similar nvidia, if i were you. But im not so its up to you.

[mrsteveman1]

ATI should be forced to read threads like this, they just lost a sale :D

[DrMega]

ATI should be forced to read threads like this, they just lost a sale :D

Email the url to their sales team. It can't hurt. I think I once read on their website that they do keep an eye on the various "community discussions", how true that is is anybody's guess.

I suspect that if every Linux user that had had problems with their hardware was to email them, they might at least take some of it on board.

[CarpKing]

AMD has recently made a commitment to Linux and open-source, and things are progressing rapidly. It might be awhile before they get full support for everything, but it will happen. So no, the boycott is most definitely no longer in effect. If you need high performance right away, nVidia is still probably the way to go. But if you're willing to wait while the developers make use of the documentation AMD is continually releasing, ATI would be a good choice.

[K.Mandla]

AMD has recently made a commitment to Linux and open-source, and things are progressing rapidly. It might be awhile before they get full support for everything, but it will happen. So no, the boycott is most definitely no longer in effect. If you need high performance right away, nVidia is still probably the way to go. But if you're willing to wait while the developers make use of the documentation AMD is continually releasing, ATI would be a good choice.
That's probably good advice. I have a machine with a 128Mb XPress 200m in it, and two years ago when I first tried Linux on it I could barely get a decent X working. Things are better now, but my pudgy little 64Mb Geforce4 440 Go still runs circles around it, performancewise.

If it was me, and I was buying a new machine, I'd only pick Nvidia if I needed games or compositing, otherwise I'd have no qualms with an ATI. Just my $0.02, I guess. ...

[smbtol]

ATI lost another customer a month ago when I bought my video card. I didn't even look at ATI because of their driver problems. So I chose a basic card from Nvidia (8500GT). In another 3 years until my next upgrade maybe they will have better drivers.

[julian67]

I had a really cheap nvidia geforce 6200 (cost £15 new) installed and in a box an old Radeon 9600 Pro. It was a pretty decent card a few years ago, great for 3d games like call of duty and far cry, and I thought I'd swap cards and get some better performance with the Radeon.....blaaagh! The ATI drivers stink (both the Ubuntu packaged ones and the newest and recent ATI drivers). There is slightly improved performance in some games but too many problems with X freezing and some games even got a lot slower. Occasionally I get corruption on the desktop and within games using the Radeon. Luckily I still have the nvidia card and a backup of xorg.conf and I'll be removing the ATI card shortly. It's a shame because I know it's not the hardware, it's the lousy driver. I wish Intel made AGP slot graphics cards, I'd buy one. my laptops have intel integrated graphics with open source drivers and they are stable and considering how little RAM they use they are great performers too.

[el_ricardo]

yep, i didn't bother researching the driver issues before i bought my 2900XT, and now i'm REALLY pissed off lol

one of the things i was looking forward to with a new card was being able to play my games without having to turn compiz off, my flatmate does this no problem with his nvidia 8800 for example, so i was majorly dissapointed to find all opengl apps flicker whenever compiz is open!

with a bit of luck it'll be fixed in the next driver release, which i think is in 3 days, or sometime in march anyhow...

it's great in windows though, call of duty 4 is B.E.A.U.T.I.F.U.L.

[jpittack]

ATI 3870 X2 is currently the fastest under windows. Under linux, only one gpu is used/reconginzed. I don't care for compiz, so I just plan on buying a 3870 for about $200 or less. The 8.2 drivers are working fine for me on my xpress 1150 (hardy). ati driver (open-source) has a big release recently, that makes 2d faster than the fglrx driver, but is buggy on old-old hardware and new hardware (r500), although some fixes came out for the r500. The radeonhd driver is some months away from 3d acceleration. Sounds like everything will be fine for ati here soon. The only thing that might make things shake up is AMD/ATI being bought out, the main prospects being Nvidia and IBM. As far as I'm concerned, if support doesn't disappear, this work give them more intelligent/ more people working on the issues for fglrx.

ATI is not a bad buy at the moment, so long as your not desperate for great games. I prefer to support AMD/ATI because they are the underdog. Intel/Nvidia may be better supported, but I'm not shelling out $1000 for a processor or $800 for a graphics card. I like the prospect of having a quad-core computer with higher level graphics for less then $500 on those two parts.

Visting newegg.com and building a computer, salvaging a hard drive and buying a 24" monitor turns out to cost me $1400. Thats top of the line AMD and next to top of the line ATI. Intel would cost $1300 for the processor top of the line and next to top of the line Nvidia.

Those are my biggest reason for supporting AMD/ATI.

[criskat777]

All i use to by was ATI when i moved to Ubuntu i found out the hard way that ATI and Ubuntu did not get along. Random freezes that no mater what i did would not go away. So i went and got an el CHIPO 6200 Nvidia just to see if what i read on the forums was true. and by by freezes. And for those of you that are thinking it was a bad video card, you are wrong the card is still been used in winBlows for playing games. i was so pleased that i got a new Nvidia 7900gs oc. And all is GOOD

[wesswei]

I still am a faithful ATI user. I've been debating that a lot lately, but as I use AMD cards as well, I figure I might as well wait for better support. You can always disable compiz effects for a movie or video support. My system never flickers with compiz off. Just a simple "metacity --replace" will do the trick.

But as everyone is saying, nVidia has their stuff already compatible for the most part, so if you just want it to work right off, nvidia definitely.

the boycott is off, but development can take forever since they are still proprietary drivers.

[forrestcupp]

AMD has recently made a commitment to Linux and open-source, and things are progressing rapidly. It might be awhile before they get full support for everything, but it will happen. So no, the boycott is most definitely no longer in effect. If you need high performance right away, nVidia is still probably the way to go. But if you're willing to wait while the developers make use of the documentation AMD is continually releasing, ATI would be a good choice.

Their commitment for open source is only for the 2D part of the drivers. According to some of the devs over at Phoronix, it doesn't seem like they are planning on ever giving up the 3D specs. So the 3D part will always have to be reverse engineered. So in my book, the boycott is still on. The 3D in the open source drivers is only guaranteed to work 100% on cards up to about the 9700. The new HD open source drivers are barely good enough for 2D. The proprietary drivers work good unless you want to use Compiz with opengl stuff, then you're screwed. And I don't think they're planning on fixing it.

When I started reading what some of the devs are actually saying, I realized that they are in no way committed to open source.

[3rdalbum]

I had integrated ATI graphics for a while... it was not very good.

But then I put an Nvidia card into my new computer, and got kernel panics with the Restricted Drivers Manager driver, and got green video with the current driver.

So I'm not terribly impressed with Nvidia at the moment. I didn't have this kind of problems with my ATI card.

[igknighted]

I still am a faithful ATI user. I've been debating that a lot lately, but as I use AMD cards as well, I figure I might as well wait for better support. You can always disable compiz effects for a movie or video support. My system never flickers with compiz off. Just a simple "metacity --replace" will do the trick.

But as everyone is saying, nVidia has their stuff already compatible for the most part, so if you just want it to work right off, nvidia definitely.

the boycott is off, but development can take forever since they are still proprietary drivers.

nvidia is having huge issues with 2.6.25 as of right now... so don't be so quick to heap praises on a company that has shown even less effort at being open source.

@forrestcupp: It goes far beyond just the graphics. AMD is opening up the specs to quite a bit of their hardware, and that should be rewarded by the community. Don't forget that AMD most likely doesn't own all the code and specs to their chips, so getting the rights to open source everything is not a trivial matter.

[CarpKing]

Their commitment for open source is only for the 2D part of the drivers. According to some of the devs over at Phoronix, it doesn't seem like they are planning on ever giving up the 3D specs. So the 3D part will always have to be reverse engineered.

They have said from the beginning that they would release the 3D specs once they were ready, and a few days ago, they were apparently ready: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_tcore_release&num=1

[LightB]

My laptop carries X200m, this driver stopped working in this month's release for it. If you use or have used this fglrx driver and found it to be lacking, I don't recommend actively "waiting" for a better version. They've been promising stuff forever and have never fully delivered. But of course it's up to you if you want to buy ati for linux or continue to wait for a driver on what you already have. I personally find it to be a waste of time. I won't be checking newest versions of this driver for that particular machine, maybe several months from now if I'm still using it. As of now, I left it with the old free driver.

[forrestcupp]

@forrestcupp: It goes far beyond just the graphics. AMD is opening up the specs to quite a bit of their hardware, and that should be rewarded by the community. Don't forget that AMD most likely doesn't own all the code and specs to their chips, so getting the rights to open source everything is not a trivial matter.
I see your point. But the other side of it is that Intel has been good about open source for a very long time. And aside from the open source thing, nvidia has been very kind toward the Linux community all along. But I have been an AMD supporter since K6's were top of the line. I just don't necessarily like the ATI division.



They have said from the beginning that they would release the 3D specs once they were ready, and a few days ago, they were apparently ready: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_tcore_release&num=1

Wow! That is good news. I guess even some of the guys that help develop the drivers didn't see this coming. I hope they are quick about getting us the info for the HD series since that is what people are buying now.

It will still likely be quite a while before we see results from this, but at least we know it is on the horizon.

[skippi90]

I have a Raedon 6550 and it seems to work alright. Or at least, I think it does....


I'm running Linux Mint.

[JPorter]

ATI driver development is proceeding at a pretty rapid pace, especially since the release of a huge amount of documentation by AMD/ATI in the last several weeks.

Several ATI developers are directly in contact with the community through the forums at www.phoronix.com, they have been very responsive to feedback and are working hard on both the fglrx drivers and the xorg open source efforts.

The recent commits to xf86-video-ati are very promising (6.8.0+), and fglrx has improved but is still under heavy development on the 3D features.

Sit tight folks, it looks like the "ATI sucks" bandwagon may be headed for the ditch. :)

[CarpKing]

I guess even some of the guys that help develop the drivers didn't see this coming.

Understandable, since ATI apparently has a history of making promises and not delivering. I've been planning to write a thank you email to ATI since I heard about their plans, but for this reason I've waited until the 3D documentation was actually out. But now I do plan to send them one (and would encourage other ATI customers to do the same, just like they were encouraged to write emails asking for the release of documentation).