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Linux and ATI

D

drag

Elite Member
I am looking to buy a new vid card and I noticed that the ATI has released a unified driver for Linux. I am curious if anybody here has any experiance with the new drivers?



Those All-in-wonders look pretty cool and I would like have the nicer 2d avaible from ATI, also my poor ol gforce 2 gts-v aint' quite up to the task for ut2003 and I would like to be able to run DOOM3 when Id finally gets around to releasing it.

ATI's press release:
<a target=new class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="http://mirror.ati.com/companyinfo/press/2002/4574.html">Ati
ATI drives graphics performance for Linux users with new unified driver
</a>
 
Originally posted by: drag
I am looking to buy a new vid card and I noticed that the ATI has released a unified driver for Linux. I am curious if anybody here has any experiance with the new drivers?



Those All-in-wonders look pretty cool and I would like have the nicer 2d avaible from ATI, also my poor ol gforce 2 gts-v aint' quite up to the task for ut2003 and I would like to be able to run DOOM3 when Id finally gets around to releasing it.

ATI's press release:
<a target=new class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="http://mirror.ati.com/companyinfo/press/2002/4574.html">Ati
ATI drives graphics performance for Linux users with new unified driver
</a>
Click to expand...


I am contemplating the same thing as well. I am considering buying a ATI 9700 PRO Sapphire card but I am also thinking about holding out untill the GeForce FX ( aka NV30 ) card comes out in about 2-3 months from now. I wonder how well their drivers run under Linux and what problems might there be if any in running something other then a Nvidia card for games like UT2K3, Tribes 2 and Q3.
 
My ATI card rocks in windows, but in linux I had some problems with 3d programs crashing to the desktop every time i played them, like Quake3 and UT2k3. I used a demo of some commercial drivers for my 8500 and those worked great, but the ATI ones just didn't enjoy me it seems, it might just be a system config problem though since I haven't really heard of any other complaints about them.

-Geoff
 
Most pre-8500 ATI cards are automatically found and configured under most versions of Linux.
They're a whole lot easier to setup and use than Nvidia. ATI came out with linux drivers for the 8500 and 9700 a whole bunch faster than NVidia did on the GeForce line.
 
Nvidia's drivers aren't all that difficult to install. Grab a .rpm for most systems, emerge or apt-get will usually work. Worst case scenario is you grab a .tar.gz (which I always do anyhow), untar it, make and make install.

vash
 
I just always compile mine. It's actually the only thing I compile from source on my RH box--I just grab RPM's for everything else.

You're right, though, it's not too hard to install the drivers after doing it the first time. It's just making sure all of the configuration files get properly updated, but once you know what needs to be checked, you're fine.

I still want and will eventually get a 9700 Pro, though 🙂 Way too cool not to have in my rig, haha 😉
 
Originally posted by: Tiger
Most pre-8500 ATI cards are automatically found and configured under most versions of Linux.
They're a whole lot easier to setup and use than Nvidia. ATI came out with linux drivers for the 8500 and 9700 a whole bunch faster than NVidia did on the GeForce line.
Click to expand...
Good GeForce GLX drivers have existed for a very long time. I fail to see how ATI had earlier Linux support for the 9700 or even the 8500 than Nvidia has done with its Unified drivers for years already. By good drivers, I mean drivers that have been independently verified to perform as well as the Windows equivalent under native games. Nvidia drivers are considered to be more flaky than the non 3D-accelerated open-source nv driver but I haven't seen it myself. I will concede that because Nvidia's binary-only drivers are not open source, they require manual installation that is less automatic than it should be. Of course, it's essentially the same situation with Windows drivers for 95% of all hardware on the market (except that you double-click on an .exe installer instead of RPM -Uvh) if you want optimized hardware support.

I'm also pretty curious how ATI's Catalyst drivers are doing with their excellent hardware. I haven't looked into it recently but when Transgaming started shipping WineX, they supported it only on Nvidia display cards. At the time, Linux/ATI 3D gaming performance (based on open source DRI drivers) was not ready for primetime. And I'm fairly sure that Radeon 8500 was already released when WineX 1.0 came out.
 
I have an AIW7500 and Mandrake 9 uses the standard Xfree drivers for it (seen as a regular radeon). I also use a little program called AVview to watch TV in linux. Do a google search for GATOS and you will find it on sourceforge. I'm not able to capture tv yet, but that is because I don't feel like installing the ati.2 drivers from the gatos project. Also when I was installing Mandrake 9 I saw that there were drivers for the 8500 in there. I don't play games like quake or ut in linux, so I am not really sure about how that would work, but the linux games I play, play fine.

For ati stuff you might want to check out Rage3d look in their forums at the linux section. Plus you could do a google groups search for your flavor of linux and the card you decide to get. I do think from reading the rage3d linux forums that ati's drivers have a couple of bugs in them, but they released some the other day if I am not mistaken and they might have solved the problems.

Good Luck
 
Originally posted by: vash
Nvidia's drivers aren't all that difficult to install. Grab a .rpm for most systems, emerge or apt-get will usually work. Worst case scenario is you grab a .tar.gz (which I always do anyhow), untar it, make and make install.

vash
Click to expand...

Or grab the source rpm's and then type :

rpm --rebuild --rmsource --rmspec --clean --target athlon *.src.rpm


P.S. Make sure you install your kernel source package or else the Nvidia kernel srpm won't compile. After you are done compiling you can grab you freshly compiled rpms from /usr/src/RPM/RPMS/* if you are using MDK of course. I don't know if other distro's keep their user compiled RPMS in the same spot or not.
 

Thanks for the resonses.

One of the main reasons I would like to try ati over nvidia is the drivers (that and 2d quality). I bought nvidia because I knew that I could get it accelerated on my rig as soon as I installed the card....

I also like the fact that Ati is leaning closer to open source as compared to Nvidia. At least for a time they were financing developers and do release kits and that sort of thing (or am I mistaken)...

And Nvidia's drivers are buggy. Weird 3d increases and decreases in performance and they will randomly (and very rarely) lock up my system after a coupole hours of playing... Dammit if I wanted to have to do a hardshutdown or two every couple weeks (they can completely lock up my system..) I would be using XP instead of my slackware. Hell, my actient (it is a 486 with a overdrive cpu) second-hand proliant 1000 server with a only halfway supported scsi card has been running pretty much nonstop for 6 months now without so much as having a monitor or keyboard attached to it.... 🙂 And my state-of the art (well state of the art about a year a 4 months ago) can barely have a uptime of 5-7 days.. while my last up-time for my proliant was 89 days.... ) (I mistakenly shut her down thinking her nic had gone and it turned out was my laptop causing the problem (and before that it was a power surge or 2 or (or 3.. UPS are so expensive) and before that a kernel upgrade and before that was the debian install)) (If you haven't noticed I am a complete geek and like to use "()"'s alot)

It's not that i am complaining or anything. I understand that modern 3d drivers will atleast for the forseeable future will always be in a state of developement and a home desktop is a completely different beast than a server. I am happy Nvidia is supporting Linux with their drivers, and I will always probably have a at least one computer with nvidia card in it, but I am interested in something different for now. Espeacially if it superior.

to bad Matrox deosn't have decent 3d perfomance otherwise I'd get that.

So does anyone else have a expteriance with gaming ATI and Linux?
How bout WineX do they deserve to get my money too? Or are they just a waste of some good uptime? heh
 
Originally posted by: drag
And Nvidia's drivers are buggy. Weird 3d increases and decreases in performance and they will randomly (and very rarely) lock up my system after a coupole hours of playing... Dammit if I wanted to have to do a hardshutdown or two every couple weeks (they can completely lock up my system..) I would be using XP instead of my slackware.
Click to expand...

Same here, slackware locks up every couple of hours if running the nvidia drivers, though it only seems to happen in X. My theory is either GLX isn't quite installed correctly, or nvidia writes the drivers for RedHat kernels and dosn't test on stock vanilla kernels (most likely the latter).
 
Originally posted by: Bremen
Originally posted by: drag
And Nvidia's drivers are buggy. Weird 3d increases and decreases in performance and they will randomly (and very rarely) lock up my system after a coupole hours of playing... Dammit if I wanted to have to do a hardshutdown or two every couple weeks (they can completely lock up my system..) I would be using XP instead of my slackware.
Click to expand...

Same here, slackware locks up every couple of hours if running the nvidia drivers, though it only seems to happen in X. My theory is either GLX isn't quite installed correctly, or nvidia writes the drivers for RedHat kernels and dosn't test on stock vanilla kernels (most likely the latter).
Click to expand...
Are these poor experiences happening in the course of 3D gaming (or anything OpenGL hardware-accelerated) or just during the course of normal XF86 desktop usage?

I rarely play any Linux games, but the Nvidia proprietary drivers are "rock solid" for me in normal day to day usage (and Linux is my full-time OS). The only instability I would ever get was due to VIA's piss-poor AGP 2x/4x support. But I have an older rig/VIA chipset; supposedly they've improved the situation somewhat although PC enthusiasts still disdain VIA chipsets for the most part.
 
Mostly happens to me running mozilla, but not exclusively. I've taken to just loading the drivers and restarting X to play quake3 (hasn't locked up on my while playing yet). Nvidia mentions in their docs something about replacing the kernel's agpgart with their own agp drivers however I haven't tried it yet.

EDIT: grammar
 
Ya this is only after long time 3d gaming in opengl accelerated games it gets realy bad and that is after a while. A few weird quirks here in their that seem like driver issues during normal X usage, but nothing that would even come close to locking up my machine
 
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