ATI Drivers

Roland0

Roland0

Roland0

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Hello peeps,

Whats the State of ATI Drivers for Linux? :confused:

I know they're fairly new, and I'm buying a new PC fairly soon and im likely to get an ATI 4870 1Gb. I'm not really going to be doing anything graphically intensive on linux (my card will be used in win32 for gaming) but I have noticed my GeForce 7050 (I know!) has been struggling with Compwiz Fusion, but I have a funny feeling that ATIs drivers are so bad they will bring my lovely 4870 down to a similar performance levels!

Somebody please tell me ATIs drivers arent THAT bad and I'm ok getting an ATI card.

Cheers peeps! :)
 
The free ATI drivers are very quickly improving but still far from being a patch on nVidia's. On the flipside, ATI cards are offering the best bang for buck at pretty much all price levels at the moment.

Personally, I'd bite the bullet and snag an nVidia card.

ATI - enemy of your freedom etc.
 
OK, so I take it that ATI are not very well liked by the Linux crowd, but their performance in source (on W32) is really good. Are you just being zealots, or is it really that bad?!!

Cheers guys!
 
My 4850 runs Compiz as well as my Nvidia. As long as your drivers are installed correctly it's fine. The area where Ati fails is accelerated movie decoding. Watching hi-def movies under Ati is pretty bad. Nvidia cards are very good in comparison.
 
yashiro said:
My 4850 runs Compiz as well as my Nvidia. As long as your drivers are installed correctly it's fine.
Click to expand...

Quoted for thruth, emphasis and everything else. My 4850 ran all that mostly fine (albeit at the wrong screen refresh rate)....

yashiro said:
The area where Ati fails is accelerated movie decoding. Watching hi-def movies under Ati is pretty bad. Nvidia cards are very good in comparison.
Click to expand...

....and fell flat on its face here. It isn't just 'not as good' as Nvidia, it's unacceptably bad. Game performance (either natively in Linux or through Wine) is similarly crap - at best you'll just about equal the performance of the closest spec Nvidia card, at worst it just won't work at all. I never had anything like as many problems getting various Nvidia cards working under Linux than I have with this 4850. Between the crap performance, the complete inability to get 1280x1024@75Hz working properly without even 2D performance suffering, and the fact that the card runs a good 15deg hotter in Linux than Windows (maybe a sensor interpretation thing, but alarming all the same)....I finally wiped out the Linux partition in a fit of pique. I'll come back in six months and see if the driver situation has improved then.
 
Stoned_SpaZZZ said:
OK, so I take it that ATI are not very well liked by the Linux crowd, but their performance in source (on W32) is really good. Are you just being zealots, or is it really that bad?!!

Cheers guys!
Click to expand...

IMO they are that bad. We aint in Windows forum so windows performance doesn't mean anything here. :)

my 4870 was so bad in linux I sold it and said I'll never buy an ati again until the drivers are as good as nvidias.
 
Hmm i feel myself going over to the nVidia side, a real shame though, i like the ATIs performance in Source (W32) especially when price is considered. If i did get the Radeon I take it i would be having quite a bit of trouble, esp considering i would like to watch movies on my PC.
 
Stoned_SpaZZZ said:
Hmm i feel myself going over to the nVidia side, a real shame though, i like the ATIs performance in Source (W32) especially when price is considered. If i did get the Radeon I take it i would be having quite a bit of trouble, esp considering i would like to watch movies on my PC.
Click to expand...

you would be up the creak without a paddle.
 
Ati is worse for the most part. However, barring 1080p Blu ray rips my 4850 plays all movies without dropping frames when using XBMC. It uses way more CPU than my Nvidia but it works.
 
yashiro said:
Ati is worse for the most part. However, barring 1080p Blu ray rips my 4850 plays all movies without dropping frames when using XBMC. It uses way more CPU than my Nvidia but it works.
Click to expand...

What about general compatibility, as in stuff like the next set of driver not workin, or having to go into xorg.conf to chaneg things around?

Ps what nVidia card are you comparing the 4850 to ?


Cheers!
 
Hi Op,

The OS version of the ATI drivers is progressing. In Ubuntu 9.04 for example it supports Compiz and glxgears but not much else (no OpenGL/video acceleration I believe - but my flatmate is too half-arsed to check this further :D ). But it is in rapid development - due to the fact that AMD have released the specs. for the ATI cards low level API.

Basically I can't see the open source ATI driver getting video acceleration working stably this year. Any new Nvidia 9xxx(+) card will be able to do with the proprietary drivers. The ATI proprietary driver is going to the dogs...

Linky here about the Linux display driver development.

Bob
 
I have had full success with these nvidia cards - 7600GT, 8800GT, 9800GTX+

My ATI cards - x1950 & 4780 worked ok for desktop use, they found the correct res of my monitor! but video playback was pants & setting up dual monitors, after many hours was an impossible task. I sold my 4870 and vowed never to buy ati again, I was angry lol.

Months on and i still don't like ati, but will buy one (if there better than nvidia) when the linux driver is as feature rich as nvidia's is today.

I maybe giving the impression i'm an nvidia fanboy, this isn't the case. It's just that ati is a non starter for me as linux ati drivers are so bad.
 
If all you're going to be doing is running Compiz I'd still pick up an ATI card. If you were doing other things then I'd say nVidia (games, blender-stuff, anything else..).

Simply because I don't think the extra cost of an nVidia card compared to the bang-for-buck from an ATI card is worth it.
 
I've been (using)/(trying to use) linux for over 10 years now. ATI were a complete pain at the start, along with win95 soft modems, and ATI is basically the only pain I have now.

The number of work and personal hours I have lost solely due to ATI runs into the thousand now.
 
What did you go with in the end?

If I was building knowing that I'd be using Linux a lot I'd have swayed towards a NV GTX260.
There's not a huge difference now though, in drivers.
 
Im interested to know too, I had the ati drivers on a 4870 last year and they wern't all that impressive (infact they struggeled with nice/usable 2d rendering, which is hard to explain but it jsut didnt look too good).

I half assume they have tried to improve them but im not too confident at the moment with them.... (time to wang out linux on my laptop propperly and see how it goes)
 
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