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El Quintron
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join:2008-04-28
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El Quintron

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ATI Linux Catalyst drivers

I've always been under the impression that Nvidia's Linux drivers were superior to ATI's I was looking up an ATI card, and the most recent Catalyst driver was from August 15th... so it seems like ATI does somewhat keep up with this.

What I'm curious about, is as far as proprietary drivers are concerned, is AMD/ATI getting up to speed with Nvidia?

It would be nice...

timcuth
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timcuth

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I have gotten very good service from the ATI Catalyst driver on several distros for the past 15 months or so. That said, I recently switched to a distro that does not support it, so I've had to go with the open source radeon driver.

Tim

El Quintron
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El Quintron

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Good to know, I'm planning on sticking with Ubuntu and derivs in the foreseable future, so I'll assume Catalyst will be availble on most of these.

How would you rate Catalyst versus the priprietary Nvidia driver?

timcuth
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timcuth

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said by El Quintron:

How would you rate Catalyst versus the priprietary Nvidia driver?

I couldn't say. I got a new PC 15 months ago and that switched me from nVidia to ATI. So, I haven't used nVidia since June, '11.

Tim

El Quintron
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El Quintron

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said by timcuth:

said by El Quintron:

How would you rate Catalyst versus the priprietary Nvidia driver?

I couldn't say. I got a new PC 15 months ago and that switched me from nVidia to ATI. So, I haven't used nVidia since June, '11.

Tim

Was it the best card at the time, or were you planning on ditching nvidia for a while?

timcuth
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timcuth

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said by El Quintron:

Was it the best card at the time, or were you planning on ditching nvidia for a while?

Good question. They were offering a free upgrade to a more powerful ATI card in my new PC. Plus, I had been hearing a lot about how nVidia was trying to catch up with ATI in performance, so I decided to try it. The card is an HD6770 with a gig of memory.

Tim

El Quintron
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El Quintron

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said by timcuth:

Good question. They were offering a free upgrade to a more powerful ATI card in my new PC. Plus, I had been hearing a lot about how nVidia was trying to catch up with ATI in performance, so I decided to try it. The card is an HD6770 with a gig of memory.

Tim

Cool, how long ago did you get it? and did you always run Linux on it?

tubbynet
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tubbynet to El Quintron

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to El Quintron
said by El Quintron:

What I'm curious about, is as far as proprietary drivers are concerned, is AMD/ATI getting up to speed with Nvidia?

It would be nice...

i will preface this by saying that i've never used nvidia drivers on linux systems (hard for me to think of the last time i've even had an nvidia card).

that being said -- i am still running mint11 on my ati6470m (1gb ddr3) in my hp laptop and i'm quite happy with the performance. there were a few things i needed to tweak from within compiz config to make sure my rendering was up to snuff (vsynch being one of them and overriding my settings in amdcccle causing atrocious performance).
i currently don't use the card for much -- basic extended display sometimes, running the laptop most of the other time. i use vmware workstation 8 on the box -- and run aero successfully inside of the vm. a few things are a little "slower" (move my mouse in a circle while moving an item on the desktop, etc) -- but nothing that is a show stopper. the only major complaint is that compiz won't let me run it and a fullscreened vm with 3d acceleration enabled (display goes bat-nuts) -- but thats not because of the card.

i'm happy with ati. the only real "complaint" is that switching resolutions/monitors doesn't always happen on the fly -- sometimes a log-out/log-in must happen to restart compiz/gdm. again -- i think thats software and not the card/driver blobs.

q.

El Quintron
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El Quintron

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Thank you for letting me know, I've always used nvidia, and will until this card lives out its useful life, but I was previously under the impression that nvidia was the way to go with Linux, it's nice the know I can get an ATI card next time around and not have to fiddle too much.

timcuth
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timcuth to El Quintron

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to El Quintron
said by El Quintron:

Cool, how long ago did you get it? and did you always run Linux on it?

I've had it about 16 months. Yes, always on Linux.

Tim

El Quintron
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El Quintron

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said by timcuth:

I've had it about 16 months. Yes, always on Linux.

Tim

Wicked... I'm kinda glad I'm investigating this...

timcuth
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On Debian sid, which is what I'm running, there is no good way (maybe no way) to install the proprietary fglrx driver. So, I am using the open source radeon driver.

The radeon driver works very well except for power control. fglrx uses dynamic power control, meaning it only goes into the high power mode when called for by the workload. radeon in "default" mode runs at high power all the time, making the card run very hot, about 15-20 C hotter than fglrx. Therefore, I have to set the mode to "low" to keep the temps down, but it cannot switch to higher levels when needed.

There is a "dynamic" setting, but it still always runs on high with that setting. I verified with the developers that "dynamic" does not work. They plan it for "the future".

So, use fglrx if the distro you choose allows it.

Tim

El Quintron
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El Quintron

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Is fglrx the same as Catalyst?

timcuth
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timcuth

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said by El Quintron:

Is fglrx the same as Catalyst?

Yes. fglrx is the module name, Catalyst is like a brand name.

Tim

El Quintron
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said by timcuth:

Yes. fglrx is the module name, Catalyst is like a brand name.

Tim

Cheers,
EQ
yazdzik
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yazdzik to timcuth

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Dear friends,

I am not sure why the driver would be distro dependent - there is a downloadable installer available on the ati website, although god knows the current one is hard to find, as were it a national security issue.

All that having been said, my experience of ten years with ati cards and drivers has always been at least not negative, most of the time positive.

There is one caveat, and that is to check before running the installer that the current driver works with the specific xorg and kernel. Also, the distro binaries are not always carefully matched when people using distros like mint or ubuntu update, so one must always update manually to avoid version conflicts. Caution using "grab everything from upstream" via apt-get is part of life with debian.

Peace,
M

timcuth
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1 edit

timcuth

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I didn't really understand, either. However, I had conversations with the guy in Arch Linux who keeps fglrx working with the kernels and I know for a fact he patches the driver to keep it working. I spoke with the developers of my current distro several times with the question, "If it works in Arch, why can't it work in Siduction?" Their answer was that if the vanilla driver doesn't work with the current kernel, too bad - just use the open source driver.

Also, the Debian Wiki says that fglrx does not currently work with sid.

So, what I gather from all this is that Arch (and Ubuntu and Sabayon) make an effort to make fglrx work with their kernels, while Siduction and Debian do not.

Tim

markofmayhem
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markofmayhem

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It has a lot to do with Xorg server as well.

Nice read: »wiki.archlinux.org/index ··· Catalyst

BUT, the great thing about Arch is how transparent everything is... so how does Arch get the installer to work!?!?

»aur.archlinux.org/packag ··· PKGBUILD

That is the magic.

So we have a download from Arch for an ati_make and a makefile_compat and the driver itself from AM... Ubuntu???

»launchpad.net/ubuntu/qua ··· ubuntu1/

Hmmmm.... So the driver itself is patched/worked/maintained by Canonical. Ubuntu is a Debian distro... this should be able to be broken down and installed on Siduction.

The Arch linux make file was altered:
said by Vi0L0 :
it is ati's code from their make.sh file, modified a bit to fit our arch linux system, used inside PKGBUILD
And Arch linux included makefile_compat patch is simplistic (looks to make 2.6 kernel's available for use):
quote:
--- 10.10/common/lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/Makefile 2010-09-22 09:15:33.000000000 +0200
+++ 10.10/common/lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/Makefile 2010-10-01 17:57:21.057820899 +0200
@@ -66,6 +66,7 @@
-DFGL_GART_RESERVED_SLOT \
-DFGL_LINUX253P1_VMA_API \
-DPAGE_ATTR_FIX=$(PAGE_ATTR_FIX) \
+ -DCOMPAT_ALLOC_USER_SPACE=$(COMPAT_ALLOC_USER_SPACE) \

ifeq ($(KERNELRELEASE),)
# on first call from remote location we get into this path