Eatmeingreek
Gentard
join:2001-06-29
San Francisco, CA
| Is it time to give ATI another look?
I am no fan of ATI's graphics hardware, and have long advocated buying nVidia if you plan to use an open source desktop. I read things about nVidia recently that shake my faith in them, however.
And suddenly it seems ATI is serious about supporting open source:
»www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a···se&num=1
Maybe it's their new stern corporate masters? (AMD)
I got burned badly by them in the past, so I'm still a little hesitant. Looks like the documentation and support won't turn into better drivers for a while yet, though. Maybe this summer it'll be time to sink some hard-earned on ATI hardware again.
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"Be safe be suspicious" |
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jdong
Eat A Beaver, Save A Tree.
Premium
join:2002-07-09
Rochester, MI
clubs:  
| Not right now. I'm the unhappy owner of an x1400 mobility with poor flaky fglrx drivers or poor flaky 2D Radeonhd drivers.
Perhaps in 6 months or a year things will get better, there's definitely promise, but for now nvidia will give you better end-user experience, intel will give you the best experience, and ATI is barely okay if you put enough effort into tweaking the binary driver.
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Ubuntu MOTU Developer and Forums Council |
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joako
Premium
join:2000-09-07
Gainesville, FL
| reply to Eatmeingreek
SuSE 11, Suse 10.3, CentOS 5.
None of these worked with the RAID controller on my SB700-based mainboard. Actually I tried two boards.
And actually the SATA didn't work with anything but CentOS 5 and sorry to say for my daily desktop I much rather have SuSE's KDE than RedHat's
Have yet to even try fglrx.
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09:F9:11:02:9D:74:E3:5B:D8:41:56:C5:63:56:88:C0 |
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Joe Blow
@cableone.net
| reply to Eatmeingreek
I just bought a Radeon HD 3650 with 512 megs of ram and a 750 mhz gpu a couple of weeks ago because I had heard that ATI's Linux drivers had improved. What a joke. My computer literally became so slow as to be unusable. It would take approximately 5 seconds to scroll an 1/8 of an inch in any browser, and almost that slow in any other application too. It was pathetic.
The radeon open source driver gives much better performance, but any time I scroll down a page or drag something around with the mouse I can hear a sound like electrical arcing coming out of the card. I've pulled the card and inspected it but there are no visible signs of damage. It's just a very, very annoying sound and makes me wonder if the card is going to burn up and take out the motherboard, cpu and power supply.
It will be a long, long time before I buy another ATI based card. I've ordered another Nvidia based card to replace it and just hope it gets here before this piece of junk fails. I'll probably just end up giving the ATI card away to someone who runs Windows as it's basically worthless in Linux. What a joke for a $100 video card. |
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alamarco
Rin
join:2003-06-18
Windsor, ON
clubs:
 ·Cogeco Cable
| reply to Eatmeingreek
My experience with older cards and the ATi fglrx have been good. Currently with my laptop and the Radeon Xpress 200M the drivers install painlessly and most options work in xorg.conf.
From the comments here, it seems the drivers are problematic with newer cards. |
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Joe Blow
@cableone.net
| said by alamarco  :My experience with older cards and the ATi fglrx have been good. Currently with my laptop and the Radeon Xpress 200M the drivers install painlessly and most options work in xorg.conf. From the comments here, it seems the drivers are problematic with newer cards. I have a HP Pavilion with a Turion and the 200M card. It's been very problematic. I tried for several iterations of ATI's drivers to try to get them to work and I'd get a black screen and the cpu would go into a race condition. It would lock up the system and overheat the cpu within a minute or so if I didn't hit the power button. Even after they finally--it took them more than a year--got that problem fixed installing the drivers meant I couldn't get to a console. It took ATI more than two years to get their drivers to work from the time I first tried them. Once they at least worked they still consume approximately 3 times the cpu resources the open source drivers do when playing a video.
I've had the laptop 3 years and been playing with the drivers for that entire amount time and I still can't say ATI's drivers for the 200M are worth anything. They are more of a resource hog and won't work with Compiz. I just don't see how that's acceptable performance from a driver. |
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Eatmeingreek
Gentard
join:2001-06-29
San Francisco, CA
| reply to Joe Blow
It looks like it's still too soon, but I still expect things to improve. You should consider donating your card to one of the radeonhd developers if you're just going to give it away.
I'm thinking about buying a card to help with testing the improved drivers.
FWIW, 2D performance in the new nVidia cards using the open-source "nv" driver sucks. nVidia developers support the nv driver and they have said that those problems will remain unfixed. The nv driver is written to obfuscate its workings, so it's unlikely anyone else will be able to fix it. This is a really poor showing by nVidia.
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"Be safe be suspicious" |
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Hayward
K A R - 1 2 0 C
Premium
join:2000-07-13
Key West, FL
edit:
May 7th, @12:35AM
| reply to Eatmeingreek
said by Eatmeingreek :I am no fan of ATI's graphics hardware, Well ATI worked qite well with WIN (buddy buddies), maybe another thing with Linux... to lazy to do drivers...
And maybe again just becaise of that... Mac is the 10% of market it always has been but Linux has made BIG inroads on the M$ share.
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»haywardm.com (Hayward's Key West)
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drjim
Premium,MVM
join:2000-06-13
Torrance, CA
clubs: | Lazy? Most of the people who write the Open Source drivers are UN-paid volunteers. That hardly qualifies as "lazy".....
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One man's Magic is another man's Engineering. |
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Hayward
K A R - 1 2 0 C
Premium
join:2000-07-13
Key West, FL
edit:
May 7th, @02:19AM
| No what I meant was no FINACIAL incentive to make sure they work with Linux.... vs WIN they are likely getting kickbacks if not some support from.
Of course that could maybe easily change if Linux folks told ATI love your card on the OS from hell WIN, and would like to support you and buy you product on LINUX... unfortunately my (Dell ground up) Linux PC came with your card and isn't working right... want a future customer after this your self imposed of ignoring hell?... get your act together!!!
With Mac staying the 10% they have always been (for propiatary big buck reasons) But WIN loosing BIG ground to Linux... Used to be 85% plus... now well down into the lower 70's on many counts.
And I have verified this with my own website OS hit counts. (Other.. like there are that many Web TV's, other odd things still out there?)... likely just non browser ID'd linux/unix plus the ones that are... and in excess of the forever static (and historic 8-10%) Mac numbers, and again that GUESS WHO share growing all the time and WIN shrinking all the time, again Mac staying thier dihard 8-10%.... but a very substantial 25-30% AND GROWING out of WIN's share... not just this, but every month other plus id'd Linux gets a little bigger and WIN gets a little smaller.
AND THAT IS THE OTHER INTERESTING THING IT SEEMS TO BE PASSING just THE TECHNO GEEKS like HERE...AND ACTUALY PASSING INTO THE MAINSTREAM now, it has become much less command line and much more Windows GUI like. Ubuntu, etc...
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»haywardm.com (Hayward's Key West)
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alamarco
Rin
join:2003-06-18
Windsor, ON
clubs:
·Cogeco Cable
| reply to Joe Blow
said by Joe Blow :said by alamarco :My experience with older cards and the ATi fglrx have been good. Currently with my laptop and the Radeon Xpress 200M the drivers install painlessly and most options work in xorg.conf. From the comments here, it seems the drivers are problematic with newer cards. I have a HP Pavilion with a Turion and the 200M card. It's been very problematic. I tried for several iterations of ATI's drivers to try to get them to work and I'd get a black screen and the cpu would go into a race condition. It would lock up the system and overheat the cpu within a minute or so if I didn't hit the power button. Even after they finally--it took them more than a year--got that problem fixed installing the drivers meant I couldn't get to a console. It took ATI more than two years to get their drivers to work from the time I first tried them. Once they at least worked they still consume approximately 3 times the cpu resources the open source drivers do when playing a video. I've had the laptop 3 years and been playing with the drivers for that entire amount time and I still can't say ATI's drivers for the 200M are worth anything. They are more of a resource hog and won't work with Compiz. I just don't see how that's acceptable performance from a driver. They do work with Compiz. When I tried Ubuntu they worked perfectly fine with no lag what so ever. The latest drivers even support AIGX (spelling) so there is no need for XGL (unless I'm mistaken).
The black screen bug had a solution, so even though ATi didn't fix it promptly I don't call this an important bug. Right now the drivers work near 100% for the Radeon Xpress 200M. The only problem, that which you have mentioned, is with going back to the console. It doesn't crash, as you can still type to startx again, but you can't see anything. If you use a login manager such as KDM or GDM it isn't even an issue as they will restart X themselves. |
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jdong
Eat A Beaver, Save A Tree.
Premium
join:2002-07-09
Rochester, MI
clubs:
| said by alamarco :They do work with Compiz. When I tried Ubuntu they worked perfectly fine with no lag what so ever. The latest drivers even support AIGX (spelling) so there is no need for XGL (unless I'm mistaken). On some cards, with some moon phases. Read the Phoronix or Ubuntu forum problem reports and you'll find still plenty of people who seem to not be able to get it to work reliably no matter what.
For me, everything works EXCEPT windowed accelerated content (xvideo, opengl), flickers like hell... I'll excuse them and let them blame it on DRI1's inferior overlay-compositing abilities, but I am willing to bet it'll take them 5 years to transisition to DRI2 also, given their slow-as-molasses reaction to the 2.6 kernel, Xorg 7, and AIGLX.
quote:
The black screen bug had a solution, so even though ATi didn't fix it promptly I don't call this an important bug. Right now the drivers work near 100% for the Radeon Xpress 200M. The only problem, that which you have mentioned, is with going back to the console. It doesn't crash, as you can still type to startx again, but you can't see anything. If you use a login manager such as KDM or GDM it isn't even an issue as they will restart X themselves.
Untrue. There are several deadlocks that cause the kernel to oops or kernel to hang from console switching. A script on my system that performs 1000 chvt's in a row is guaranteed to lock up my system currently.
Also, switching away from X and doing a /etc/init.d/gdm stop also hangs my display (needs to SSH in to do a proper shutdown, VBE posting or restarting X has no effect)
They've improved, YES, but it's far from an ideal experience.
--
Ubuntu MOTU Developer and Forums Council |
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Joe Blow
@cableone.net
| reply to alamarco
said by alamarco :said by Joe Blow :said by alamarco :My experience with older cards and the ATi fglrx have been good. Currently with my laptop and the Radeon Xpress 200M the drivers install painlessly and most options work in xorg.conf. From the comments here, it seems the drivers are problematic with newer cards. I have a HP Pavilion with a Turion and the 200M card. It's been very problematic. I tried for several iterations of ATI's drivers to try to get them to work and I'd get a black screen and the cpu would go into a race condition. It would lock up the system and overheat the cpu within a minute or so if I didn't hit the power button. Even after they finally--it took them more than a year--got that problem fixed installing the drivers meant I couldn't get to a console. It took ATI more than two years to get their drivers to work from the time I first tried them. Once they at least worked they still consume approximately 3 times the cpu resources the open source drivers do when playing a video. I've had the laptop 3 years and been playing with the drivers for that entire amount time and I still can't say ATI's drivers for the 200M are worth anything. They are more of a resource hog and won't work with Compiz. I just don't see how that's acceptable performance from a driver. They do work with Compiz. When I tried Ubuntu they worked perfectly fine with no lag what so ever. The latest drivers even support AIGX (spelling) so there is no need for XGL (unless I'm mistaken). The black screen bug had a solution, so even though ATi didn't fix it promptly I don't call this an important bug. Right now the drivers work near 100% for the Radeon Xpress 200M. The only problem, that which you have mentioned, is with going back to the console. It doesn't crash, as you can still type to startx again, but you can't see anything. If you use a login manager such as KDM or GDM it isn't even an issue as they will restart X themselves. The 200M only works in some hardware configurations with Compiz. It does not work in mine. I've spent days researching and implementing every fix I could find and I've never gotten it to work.
It's like the BCM43xx module. My laptop has the 4318 Broadcom wireless chip and do you think I can use the open source module? Not a chance. It crashes my wireless router, it gets even worse reception than the card does using ndiswrapper, and I can't use any kind of security with it.
Hmmmm.... The black screen bug would overheat the cpu and my laptop would shut down the overheat sensors, it made my laptop completely unusable, and it took ATI well over a year to fix it. And you call that an unimportant bug? I'd hate to see your idea of an important bug. If an overheat sensor would have failed it would have turned my laptop into a boat anchor. I call that a pretty major bug. |
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Joe Blow
@cableone.net
| reply to Eatmeingreek
said by Eatmeingreek :It looks like it's still too soon, but I still expect things to improve. You should consider donating your card to one of the radeonhd developers if you're just going to give it away. I'm thinking about buying a card to help with testing the improved drivers. FWIW, 2D performance in the new nVidia cards using the open-source "nv" driver sucks. nVidia developers support the nv driver and they have said that those problems will remain unfixed. The nv driver is written to obfuscate its workings, so it's unlikely anyone else will be able to fix it. This is a really poor showing by nVidia. I may donate the card. I hadn't thought about that option.
I hadn't realized that NVidia was going to just leave the nv problems unfixed. That really sucks. Especially since I can't get Nvidia drivers to compile with the 2.6.24-1-amd64 kernel. Module-assistant fails and so does the NVidia installer. |
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jhboricua
ExMod 2000-01
join:2000-06-06
Minneapolis, MN
clubs:
| reply to joako
said by joako :None of these worked with the RAID controller on my SB700-based mainboard. Actually I tried two boards. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I was under the impression that the built-in RAID controllers in nvidia and ati chipsets are not supported on the linux kernels.
--
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." - Albert Einstein
Jose A. Hernandez * System Admin * MPLS, Minnesota, USA * |
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EUS
Kill cancer
Premium
join:2002-09-10
Montreal, QC
clubs:
| reply to Eatmeingreek
said by Joe Blow :
I may donate the card. I hadn't thought about that option.
I hadn't realized that NVidia was going to just leave the nv problems unfixed. That really sucks. Especially since I can't get Nvidia drivers to compile with the 2.6.24-1-amd64 kernel. Module-assistant fails and so does the NVidia installer.
This is the exact reason I'm not running that kernel. But isn't the next kernel release going to "fix" this issue?
After being burned by ATI three times now, (9800 is the last card purchased from ATI, but current laptop has one, and it still bites), I'm sticking with nvidia until ATI proves themselves in real life, not just through PR.
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~ Project Hope ~ |
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Joe Blow
@cableone.net
| said by EUS :said by Joe Blow :
I may donate the card. I hadn't thought about that option.
I hadn't realized that NVidia was going to just leave the nv problems unfixed. That really sucks. Especially since I can't get Nvidia drivers to compile with the 2.6.24-1-amd64 kernel. Module-assistant fails and so does the NVidia installer.
This is the exact reason I'm not running that kernel. But isn't the next kernel release going to "fix" this issue? After being burned by ATI three times now, (9800 is the last card purchased from ATI, but current laptop has one, and it still bites), I'm sticking with nvidia until ATI proves themselves in real life, not just through PR. I'm pretty much stuck with it. I'm running a dual-core amd cpu and have 8 gigs of ram, which I need for what I'm doing. The 486 only supports 1 gig of ram and I've tried the -686-bigmem kernel and it's way too slow. |
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EUS
Kill cancer
Premium
join:2002-09-10
Montreal, QC
clubs: | The 2.6.22-3-amd64 kernel is what I'm using until something changes in this driver fiasco. |
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Eatmeingreek
Gentard
join:2001-06-29
San Francisco, CA
| reply to EUS
said by EUS :After being burned by ATI three times now, (9800 is the last card purchased from ATI, but current laptop has one, and it still bites), I'm sticking with nvidia until ATI proves themselves in real life, not just through PR. I'm feelin' you, believe me. I listened to their lies before and got burned to the tune of more than $300. I think this time is different 'cause the noise is coming from the open-source developers of the radeonhd driver, and not from ATI's marketing department.
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"Be safe be suspicious" |
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Eatmeingreek
Gentard
join:2001-06-29
San Francisco, CA | reply to Joe Blow
Nvidia drivers work for me on AMD64 using Gentoo's 2.6.24-gentoo-r7 kernel. Driver version 169.09-r1.
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"Be safe be suspicious" |
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