Who's running Ubuntu 9 and a legacy ATI graphics card\GPU?

Indy500 · 21 Dec 2009 at 01:58

How good is it stability-wise? Do 3D applications work well with Wine? I'm thinking of dual-booting with Windows and would like some opinions.

freebooter · 21 Dec 2009 at 17:13

I have had problems with my ATI 9800 pro and kubuntu 9.10. Not 3d but just drawing 2d windows. If I grab a window and move it around I can get xorg to reach almost 50% cpu and resizing a window it can reach over 90%.

I don't know whether this is the new open source ati drivers or kwin tbh. There have been reports of other people having problems with old ati cards but some seem to be fixable and others not. None of the fixes worked for me but the system is usable now since I installed openbox and run a kde/openbox session.

It is probably best if you search ubuntu forums for your card and see what comes up.

Indy500 · 21 Dec 2009 at 17:47

Thanks for the reply - I knew the drivers were crap, just wanted to know how crap

I'm using a Radeon X800XL if that makes any odds. I'll have a look on the official Ubuntu forums then.

Hairybudda · 22 Dec 2009 at 08:29

The closed source drivers are pretty good although there is one long standing issue with xorg/ati that neither party is willing to take responsibility for when you resize a window with compositing enabled, lots of readbacks and writes when a window is resized slows the window rendering to a screaming halt. I had the same problem with nVidia when I ran their cards too so I get the impression it's xorg rather than the drivers.

My old agp 3850 worked fine relatively speaking, and my pcie cards haven't really had any issues either.

Bob Wya Jnr · 26 Dec 2009 at 13:23

Hairybudda said:
The closed source drivers are pretty good

There is no closed source support for 9.04 and 9.10 as ATI no longer support card generations prior to the X2900 series. The newer Ubuntu versions use the newer XServer 1.6 and so need the latest ATI drivers (i.e. a catch 22 situation for older cards). :mad:

Been there myself (ati X1950 Pro 512) but I had a nv 8800 GTX which I have upgraded to. :cool:

Bob

Spyhop · 26 Dec 2009 at 14:36

I have a PowerMac G5 with the X800 option and it wouldn't even start without a corrupted display. Probably a pretty obscure setup, though.

Minto · 27 Dec 2009 at 23:37

I've got an old 9600XT and the open source driver works perfectly, marginally slower but also less artifacts and no more weird corruption issues with the output.