Linux ATI drivers?

freebooter · 7 Nov 2011 at 00:32

How bad are the ATI drivers for linux these days?

I had an ATI card a few years ago and had endless problems. Eventually I gave up and bought nvidia. Since replaced with another nvidia card and have had zero problems with both of them.

I am currently looking at upgrading my gpu and all the best cards at my price level seem to be ATI

I had a quick look on the ubuntu forums and inevitably there were lots of threads by people having problems with ATI drivers but there are always people with problems

I have seen people recommending sticking to the oss drivers but I really want to be able to set colour adjustments through the driver control settings. The nvidia proprietary drivers have a very good control centre.

thanks

Hairybudda · 7 Nov 2011 at 12:41

ATI drivers have been fine on linux for years now, i run ati + linux. They've not been bad since the early 2000s, and the number of people with ati problems are proportionate to intel/nvidia.

cb_linus · 7 Nov 2011 at 19:01

I have an ati card in my Linux box (HD5670) and it seems pretty poor compared to when I had Windows Vista on the same machine for 3d gaming.

craptakular · 7 Nov 2011 at 19:53

ATI drivers are still poor, much improved but still way inferior to nvidia, I would spend a little bit extra to go nvidia for linux.

Dunks · 7 Nov 2011 at 20:44

Definitely go NVidia, I used the ATI proprietary drivers and they gave me around half of the performance as the Windows 7 drivers, made most games unplayable

RickST · 8 Nov 2011 at 19:39

agreed, NVIDIA drivers are much better.

freebooter · 8 Nov 2011 at 19:53

Thanks for the replies. It looks like I will need to stay with nvidia. I am looking for a 2nd hand card of middling performance that only needs one power connector and something like a Radeon 5770 would suit me perfectly and seem to go for a good price and fairly regularly on the For Sale board. The nvidia equivalent is probably a gts450 or gtx550 which don't seem as common and are more expensive

Essexraptor · 8 Nov 2011 at 20:16

freebooter said:
Thanks for the replies. It looks like I will need to stay with nvidia. I am looking for a 2nd hand card of middling performance that only needs one power connector and something like a Radeon 5770 would suit me perfectly and seem to go for a good price and fairly regularly on the For Sale board. The nvidia equivalent is probably a gts450 or gtx550 which don't seem as common and are more expensive

look out for and pick up a GTX 280 !

yes, yes no DX11 yadda yadda but for a desktop Linux OS it runs a dream

EDIT

Ooooops thats 2 power supply connectors .....but you can get molex adapters, cheaply and easily if your short

BigglesPiP · 9 Nov 2011 at 00:30

Both nVidia and ATi's drivers on Linux are unreliable, but much more equally so now. Generally though you'll manage to get them to work without much hassle.

masterluke · 9 Nov 2011 at 08:32

BigglesPiP said:
Both nVidia and ATi's drivers on Linux are unreliable, but much more equally so now. Generally though you'll manage to get them to work without much hassle.

What makes you say that - the nvidia drivers have been rock solid with great performance here. Not tried ATI in a while but was woefully bad last time I did.

George Hincapie · 9 Nov 2011 at 11:05

I have a Radeon 4870 in my PC and have used Linux for the last 4 years at least without any graphics issues. That's on Ubuntu, Debian, Mint and #!CrunchBang.

BigglesPiP · 9 Nov 2011 at 12:59

masterluke said:
What makes you say that - the nvidia drivers have been rock solid with great performance here. Not tried ATI in a while but was woefully bad last time I did.

Half the time when I plug my laptop into a projector the nVdidia driver just bombs. I have never seen AA work.

inSilica · 10 Nov 2011 at 17:45

All I can tell you is that if you know what you are doing ATI drivers are pretty good. Nvidia works well to. I run ATI on my main box and Nvidia on my laptop.

The reason Nvidia sticks in the world of Linux is that when eyecandy (i.e. compiz fud) was initially introduced it was way easier to work the Nvidia setup then the fglrx (ATI)!

I can smell fanboys here! Don't listen to fud! If you are a newbe looking to work the driver GUI in Linux you are likely to run into problems, though less frequently when using the Nvidia.

If you know your way around a distro and know your xorg your unlikely to have much problems unless you have weird setups. i.e. I have 2 x U2410's in portrait and 2 x SDM74 (17" Sony) [setup is bad enough without mentioning these monitors]- I won't lie to you... it was hairy to setup xorg or should I say twin xorg configurations to run simultaneously while sharing the mouse.

EDIT: I should mention this applies to the more recent graphic cards...

craptakular · 11 Nov 2011 at 06:57

I'm no fanboy, I run a single 5870. Nvidia in my experience just works, ATI was a pita.

I just run the OSS ati driver without the bells and whistles but it renders a desktop just fine, saves me buggering about when kernels are updated etc etc.

inSilica · 11 Nov 2011 at 09:30

Oxy said:
I'm no fanboy, I run a single 5870. Nvidia in my experience just works, ATI was a pita.

I just run the OSS ati driver without the bells and whistles but it renders a desktop just fine, saves me buggering about when kernels are updated etc etc.

I run the ATI drivers because I tend to stick to kernel versions for a while before I compile new ones. I agree though, it can be annoying.

What I tend to do is - once I compile the kernel, I immediately link the new kernel source, re-install ATI which will make use of the new kernel header -> therefore after reboot everything will work just fine, i.e. X doesn't crash

Evil-I · 11 Nov 2011 at 12:46

To be honest if you are using the open source ATI drivers on a modern distro then they are fine and work well, as long as you are not too bothered about 3D performance. 3D performance is shocking!

If you try and use the ATI catalyst drivers, you can run into a lot of problems, I tend to use fedora and I've never got the Catalyst drivers working correctly, so just don't try anymore.

I've had Nvidia cards and installed the nvidia drivers they worked really easily, including reasonable 3D opperformance.

SamG · 11 Nov 2011 at 13:35

I've found ATi drivers can still be a pain when using more than one monitor.