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Joe Blow
@cableone.net
| reply to alamarco
Re: Is it time to give ATI another look?
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. | |
alamarco
Rin
join:2003-06-18
Windsor, ON
clubs:
 ·Cogeco Cable
| 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. | |
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 | |
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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