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ATi Drivers for Linux that Work?

Posted by Cliff on Sat Dec 18, 2004 04:09 AM
from the what-have-you-done-in-this-situation dept.
Graphics Software Hardware Linux
James F. Hitchens asks: "I used to run Red-Hat Enterprise vs.3, just recently I switched to fedora core 3. The reason for my change was because I could not get my ATi Radeon 9600 All in Wonder to work. I hoped that Fedora was a little more advanced in the area of 3D acceleration (so I could play Unreal Tournament 2004 and Tux-racer). Yet again it was not to be, ne worke pas. Can anyone tell me what I need to do to make this work? The drivers that ATi supplies on their website are, in short, crap."
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  • Buy an nvidia card (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jpmkm (160526) on Saturday December 18 2004, @04:15AM (#11123601) Homepage
    That's what I had to do. No amount of distribution switching is going to help. It's all the same stuff underneath. Ati's drivers are worthless, plain and simple. NVidia's drivers are awesome. Hell, an old ti4200 or something will probably perform better than the best ati card simply because of driver differences.

    • Re:Buy an nvidia card (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Curtman (556920) on Saturday December 18 2004, @04:30AM (#11123636)
      For anyone who prefers a free driver, nvidia isn't even an option. The open source ATI driver is very good, and Xorg CVS now has Gatos for ATI All In Wonder cards merged in. ATI should be putting big resources behind Xorg, because its reputation in the Linux/FOSS community hinges on the fate of that driver.

      With the willingness of the Xorg team to finally address some of the issues people have been bitching about all these years, ATI has an opportunity to be the leader in Linux graphics drivers again. We need to point this out to ATI very loudly, and invitingly. These ATI are teh suxxors stories don't help one bit.

      • Re:Buy an nvidia card (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Ibn al-Hazardous (83553) <filip@@@blueturtle...nu> on Saturday December 18 2004, @05:16AM (#11123714) Homepage
        He didn't exactly say "ATI are teh suxxors". He said that performance of the ATI drivers are not up to par. I assume he speaks of 3D performance - 'cause if he does, he's very right. Why can't we say what's obvious? Because you are afraid we'll miff someone with a big ego?

        As for Nvidia drivers not being free, well ATI drivers for cards later than 9200 (IIRC), that have any 3D support, are not free either. And they will never be, because there is intellectual property in them that doesn't belong to ATI (says ATI). So, this guy will use a non-free driver no matter what.

        If he would want both 3D and the AllInWonder features - he will have to alternate between different drivers (ie he will have to restart X). That's ATI's support for you.

        I have recently been shopping for a video card - and I was very tempted by a 9600AiW; but when I got a hang of the problems - it turned out that the MSI5900XT was a much better buy, since I run Linux exclusively.
        • He didn't exactly say "ATI are teh suxxors"

          I was referring to the headline. Pardon me, it said they are crap, not suxxors.

          ATI drivers for cards later than 9200 (IIRC), that have any 3D support, are not free either. And they will never be

          See the R300 driver effort [sourceforge.net] here.

          If he would want both 3D and the AllInWonder features - he will have to alternate between different drivers

          Or he'd buy an older card. Thats what ATI doesn't see, the many of us who just don't upgrade because the driver won'
            • Yes, that is what I want to use...

              No, you don't. You have no ability to help develop the code and that is what is needed right now. I don't see how bashing the hard work of volunteers helps anything. Those who can't, bitch about it on Slashdot I guess.
            • So you said the same thing yourself.

              I'm talking about the free driver. The story is talking about the ATI binary driver.

              Even with this older hardware using OSS drivers, I couldn't come up with how I should be able to have 3D-acceleration (Utah-GLX) and video capture (Gatos)

              Well thats probably because Utah-GLX isn't what you want. DRI [sourceforge.net] is, and its included with Xorg. And you can use Gatos and DRI at the same time.
                • And you claim that there is something about this situation that works?

                  Apparently so, because the complaint here is:

                  • I hoped that Fedora was a little more advanced in the area of 3D acceleration (so I could play Unreal Tournament 2004 and Tux-racer)


                  I can play Tuxracer and UT2004 just fine.
      • I never said Ati sucks; I said their drivers suck. When I said "Ati's drivers", I thought it was pretty clear I was referring to drivers from Ati, hence the apostrophe indicating possession. I wasn't talking about free drivers or anything else. I was only talking about drivers from the companies themselves.
        • ATI cards are horrible. I say it again. It's absolutely trash! I have fried 3 ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB this year due to the fan just dying. That's a record. I run open cased, no overclocking with a 600-watt powersupply. If it wasn't for the RMAs and double warranty, I would have lost $$$. Again, go Nvidia. I had a Geforce2 which lasted 3 years. ATI needs to learn how to NOT bundle a $300 card with a $2 plastic fan.

      • Well, some of us aren't Free freaks or anything like that, we just like to use free (as in beer) software that is stable and not laden with spyware/nagware/etc. For someone who is planning on not using Windows (even for gaming), reading the Hardware HOWTO at tldp.org [tldp.org], checking various discussion [linuxjunior.org] forums [justlinux.com] and other [linuxquestions.org] resources [google.com], and then buying a nVidia card based on the number of questions/problems/complaints from other users would be the smart thing to do.
      • For anyone who actully gives a crap about performance and feature support, free drivers aren't an option and never will be thanks to patent issues.

        For example, the reason UT2K3 only worked with NVidia cards for quite a while (until the binary ATI drivers were released) was because to achieve acceptable quality/performance, UT2K3's developers HAD to use S3 Texture Compression, which is patented and the patent licenses ATi and NV have don't allow them to include S3TC support in open-source drivers. That's j
    • BTW, next time someone asks if Linux is ready for the home user's desktop, I'm pasting a link to this post. "Tough luck, buy another video card," in my opinion, does not constitute "ready for the desktop."
    • If 3D games aren't the center of your entire existance, then ATI nudges ahead for Free Software operating systems, simply because the XFree86/Xorg drivers for ATI it are better than the drivers for NVidia.

      I used to have an NVidia card but I had to give it up precisely because the drivers were proprietary. When your video driver will not let you upgrade your operating system or X11 server, there is something seriously wrong. Under FreeBSD I had precisely this problem. While I do appreciate their support of
  • ATI's drivers have been like this forever, even after they introduced the bi-monthly releases.
    In a couple of recent interviews, however, they said the next drivers, due for release sometime this month, are going to be tagged Catalyst aswell, whatever that means. But I'm expecting somewhat bigger improvements compared to the last couple of drivers we've had, and that's pretty much the last of my hopes.

      • Re:New drivers sometime this month (Score:4, Insightful)

        by AllUsernamesAreGone (688381) on Saturday December 18 2004, @01:32PM (#11125227)
        It needs it. A while ago I bought a 9800 and openGL performance was so poor under linux (after the half a day and two kernel recompiles it took me to get the drivers to work at all) that it was slower than the GF Ti4600 it replaced. It was so bad that the 9800 was sold on and I put the Ti4600 back in. My last upgrade was to a GF 6800GT, I'm not going to touch ATI again until they make using their drivers as simple as NVidia's

        sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-XXXX-pkg1.run

        and I get remotely decent performance from their driver and opengl implementation. Shame really, ATI hardware is good, they just seem to hire muppets to write the software for them :/
  • They're just as good as the drivers for Windows.

    Seriously, I have an ATI AIW 7500, and I have officially given up on it. I've had it for a couple years, put it in a new machine I built this summer, and can't get the TV function to work unless I do a totall uninstall and reinstall of the drivers and catalyst software every time I want to use it.

  • I agree (Score:5, Informative)

    by DarkDust (239124) * <marc@darkdust.net> on Saturday December 18 2004, @05:19AM (#11123717) Homepage
    I've got a PC with Radeon at work, and in the last two years I've tried three times to get the ATi drivers to work with hardware 3D... I've never managed to get it run.

    In contrast, I've never had any problems with nVidia's drivers... not on my TNT2, not on my GeForce 1 and not on the GeForce WhatEver that a friend of mine has. nVidia does a very good job with their drivers, IMHO. I'm not that happy thay they're closed source at least but they Just Work (tm).

    This is why I won't ever buy a ATi card. They treat Linux users as third class citizens, unfortunately...

    • Re:I agree (Score:3, Informative)

      by turgid (580780)
      The best graphics card I ever bought was my Creative Labs nVidia TNT2 Ultra, almost exactly 5 years ago. It's still running, in my second PC, minus 2 or 3 blades on the cooling fan. It's in a K6-2/500 on a TMC TI5VGF motherboard with 512M RAM and Linux 2.4.x running a fairly recent nVidia binary driver.

      18 months ago I tried a cheap, no-name GeForce MX440 in that machine which had terrible image quality. It was very fast in comparison (CPU usage went to 0% on 3d stuff :-) and Quake III was achieving 3x the f

      • a similar thing happens to me with my nvidia card. I once did a strace on X when it was taking all that CPU and found that it was spewing sigalarm()'s. I would also submit a bug report, except that it would read: Sometimes when doing 3d accelerated stuff, or just any time, something will go wrong, the system will lock up, X will start using all the CPU, and I have to kill it from a remote ssh." Which is about as helpful as "It doesn't work.
        • Which is about as helpful as "It doesn't work.

          Quite. Having open source drivers has something to be said for it.

  • Rage3D (Score:5, Informative)

    by HRbnjR (12398) <chris@hubick.com> on Saturday December 18 2004, @05:53AM (#11123778) Homepage
    The best forum to read/ask this topic is at Rage3D [rage3d.com].

    They have howto's, patches, and some ATI dev's even post there.
  • If you look around at the specifications you'll find that virtually all laptops use ATI video chipsets - and of course we have no option to change them. HP, Compaq, Dell, IBM, all of them carry the ATI curse.

    It's possible to buy an IBM Thinkpad with Linux preinstalled so if anybody who has one of these machines is reading this, what drivers have IBM installed ?

    Ed Almos
    Budapest, Hungary
    • You aren't always stuck. When I bought my Dell Inspiron 8600, there were 3 options for the video card. The cheaper two were nvidia and the high end card was an ATI. Unfortunately, I wasn't paying enough attention and I ordered the ATI card. I have been regretting that ever since. Keep your eyes open and you can avoid this crap from ATI.

  • Buy a matrox card (Score:3, Informative)

    by keesh (202812) on Saturday December 18 2004, @06:10AM (#11123820) Homepage
    Matrox cards (at least, most of them) are actually properly supported under Linux, complete with vendor-supplied open source drivers. Sure, the 3d performance sucks, but they're better than ATI or nVidia offerings for 2d.
  • A 9200 Mobility came in my Acer Aspire 2100 (i think thats the model) and is pretty shit hot. It will even play Doom3, although it is just on the border of reasonable. 9200 was the last version with OSS 3D acceleration.

    Having said all of this I can't actually vouch for the 3D performance in Linux, I run Xinerama and 3D + Dual Screen don't work together (Infact Xinerama, pretty much is a PITA full stop so picky to set up etc), I boot to XP for gaming, which is the only option for faster cards than the 9200

  • Tips on getting ATI drivers to work (Score:4, Informative)

    by manjunaths (83313) on Saturday December 18 2004, @07:38AM (#11123972)

    I got my ATI 9600 radeon pro working with the 2.6.x kernels. Here is a short procedure of how I go about it.
    1. First install the rpm based drivers. Now if you look under /lib/modules, you will see the ATI drivers directory fglrx/. Go to the build_mod/ directory and do a ./make.sh.

    2. Now it should autodetect the existence of 2.6.x drivers and it will do some stuff. cd back to fglrx directory and do your usual ./make_install.

    3. After this cd to your kernel directory where fglrx.ko is installed and delete it.

    4. Then cd to /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x and delete everything except the Makefile.
    I do a
    rm -f *.o *.ko *.GCC3 *.c *.h

    5. Now do a make in the 2.6.x directory.

    6. Copy the fglrx.ko to the kernel directory where fglrx.ko was there.

    7. Now run your fglrxconfig or whatever to create the XF86Config-4.

    8. I have a nforce based chipset, so I enable the nforce motherboard drivers during kernel compilation and set this option on in my XF86Config.

    Option "UseInternalAGPGART" "no"
    I have an AMD so I need to switch off mtrr

    Option "mtrr" "off"

    9. Now try a X, remember you need a dri enabled kernel and you need to have enabled dri in your xf86config.

    If you look in your /var/log/XFree86.0.log, it should say DRI initialization successful. I have used this procedure to get acceleration working at both work (firegl card) and home (radeon 9600). Both on intel and nforce chipsets. But you may need a little more hacking around to get it working.
    And for all those people who say nvidia chips are better. Once you get the ATI drivers working, they are a good competition to nvidia. In fact ATI had things like quad buffer opengl stereo on X, which was why I switched. Also I don't have a vaccum cleaner running inside my box.

    If you (or anybody) get it working please reply to this post, so I can write a feedback report on the ATI website.

    Good luck.
    Hope this helps.
    • If you saw all the dust inside my case, you'd understand why a vacuum cleaner has its own charms.

    • I've tried that already -- it doesn't work on Fedora Core 3, because Core 3 comes with Xorg, not XFree86. The fglrxbuild can't detect the XFree86 version (doesn't exist), so it gives up saying:

      XFree86 drm includes at $drmincludes do not fit this driver.
      This driver is designed to only work with X4.1.0 or higher.
      You can match this by getting Linux kernel 2.4.8 or higher.

      I managed to get the build working by tweaking the make.sh script so that it finds the drm.h headers at their new locations. However, w

  • I wonder if... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by wowbagger (69688) on Saturday December 18 2004, @07:48AM (#11123989) Homepage Journal
    We had a discussion at my place of work that I'd like to let the /. peanut gallery review:

    Currently, there is much discussion about the meaning of the IBM sell-off of its PC division. One of the current conjectures is that IBM might be preparing to release a low-cost PowerPC based machine for home use.

    Now, if that is the case, I could see IBM going to both ATI and nVidia and saying:
    OK, Sparky, here's the deal: we need a good video chip for our systems. That chip needs to have a Free driver for Linux - binary is not acceptable as the system will be PPC.


    Now, our buddies over at Apple also want in on this action, so this chip would have to have accelerated 3D that was worth a damn, as well as other features to make Aqua run well - and we are working on the same sort of things with Xorg.

    So, this can go down one of three ways:
    1. We could spend the millions to design our own GPU, using strained silicon on insulator, low-K dielectrics, and copper interconnects, and blow you out of the water.
    2. You release the specs on your chip, and we will help you remove/replace any IPR you don't own in the drivers. AND, we would offer to fab your chips for you, using SSOI, low-K, and copper. Your chips get a performance boost and power reduction, we get what we want, and everybody is happy.
    3. OR, we could go to your competitors and make them the same offer.

    So, which shall it be?


    Now, the question is, how likely is this?
    • Honestly, it sounds and feels like a wet dream and nothing more.

      Sure IBM is a heavyweight that can basically get its way. Sure I can understand the rationale behind the symbiotic relationship with Linux.

      But what you suggest is either completely out-of-character for IBM or a major revolution.

      If "low-cost" means "value niche," I'd say that you're crazy; IBM doesn't do both low cost and low volume at the same time. And if you really meant "mainstream," then IBM had better understand that they are having to
    • Pronlems with that:
      • If Apple was involved, why would IBM be asking for Linux compatibility?
      • Developing a new 3D chip from scratch would be slow and unprofitable, and the chip would still probably be inferior to AVI/NVidia's.
      • ATI and NVidia have no viable competitors.
      • A Radeon 9200 (with existing open drivers) is more than sufficient to run Aqua or whatever Linux eye candy you'd want.

      • ATI and NVidia have no viable competitors.

        but there used to be, Matrox [matrox.com] used to be the best thing to have ever come down the pipe! I'm still using a G400Max Dual-VGA card [matrox.com]. Everything was done in heardware, it was great, but now you can't dream of touching their current cards.

        A little bit of poking around revealed [yahoo.com] that they are shrinking, -15% Revenue reduction, -30% empolyee reduction. And Revenue of just over $89 Million; it is privatley held and owned by the chairmen and president of the company.

        Now if

  • Playing games at work! Does your boss know about this?

  • What I did.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by WhatAmIDoingHere (742870) * <sexwithanimals@gmail.com> on Saturday December 18 2004, @08:22AM (#11124045) Homepage
    I was wondering how to get the most out of my 9800 AIW PRO, so I installed Windows and the latest Cats and everything just works.

    Interesting.
    • This is funny, in a way, but it's also extremely true.

      When you've got IP that somebody doesn't want to release, the company will only pay for driver development where they'll have the most use -- in Windows. ATI will suffer very little monetary loss from not supporting Linux, and barring turning over the IP to the OSS community, they may have to spend more than their potential profits to bring their drivers to Linux.

      Free software works better with Linux and other Free systems (c.f. Cygwin's difficulty in
  • No matter how good the OSS drivers get, they will never be up to par with Nvidia or ATI's offering because of the closed source nature of the work they do.

    Is X.org going to make it easier to install the binary drivers for Linux? I used to have an Nvidia card (TNT 2) and after getting a Radeon 9500, I found that while its more work (I grew frustrated and never bothered to install ATI's) they are longer and more arduous of a process than Windows (and prob MAC) binary drivers.

    I'm not a Linux noob but I don't

  • Getting fglrx rpms to work is a little tricky (they DO work, if you try hard enough--and you don't have Xorg 6.8.1). However, getting 64-bit 3d support is impossible.

    I recently switched to gentoo AMD64 and I don't see any reason to go back. Even if the performance benefits for natively compiled applications are minimal, 64-bit is the way to go, in my opinion. I emailed ATI complaining for their lack of 64-bit drivers. NVidia has provided 64bit drivers for a long time. We'll see... Guess my Radeon 9800 Pr

  • FC Drivers (Score:5, Informative)

    by mtippett (110279) on Saturday December 18 2004, @10:20PM (#11127916)
    Okay, I am involved in the Linux Development at ATI. We have drivers which will be released shortly that will support XOrg 6.8, AMD64 and GLSL.

    We have worked with the guys at Livna for drivers for FC2 - and are ready to go with FC3, once the new drivers are released.

    Some links for those who care...

    http://bugzilla.livna.org/show_bug.cgi?id=308
    http://bugzilla.livna.org/show_bug.cgi?id=296

    And through Fedorafaq.org

    http://www.fedorafaq.org/#radeon

    All I can say, is watch this space.

    • Re:Buy NVidia (Score:4, Informative)

      by Odinson (4523) on Saturday December 18 2004, @04:35AM (#11123646) Homepage Journal
      "Currently I don't think it's possible to buy a card with OpenGL that has working DVI on Linux with Free drivers... really sucks."

      Probably the best GPL driven video card is the ATI 8500. Still buggy with occational crashes, but everything (OpenGL etc) works.

      The ATI drivers are excelent for this card also, but core 3 (x.org) is not supported. Supposedly this December there will be new ones.

      • Surely the Ati FireGL 8800/8700 would be better? Hard to find though. Or what about the Radeon 9200? That's surely available clocked higher than the older 8500.

        My 9200's work quite well with FC3 btw.
        • Surely the Ati FireGL 8800/8700 would be better? Hard to find though. Or what about the Radeon 9200? That's surely available clocked higher than the older 8500.

          The 9200s are faster but they only apply a single texture in each op while the 8500 can handle 2 textures. The 9200s do have a better geometry unit and slightly better bandwidth/fill rates. But the 8500 engine edges out the 9200 cards.

    • I agree; Nvidia's drivers are good. In fact, I'm currently using one under FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE and it works like a charm. :)
    • I use an external VCR for a tuner, run the signal into my TV card's video-in port, and the sound into the aux port on my sound card. Maybe you could find a TV tuner package that will function enough to let you view the video-in. Thats what I do.
    • Any capture/TV viewing program with works with WDM drivers (i.e. any reasonably modern program) will with with your card. (I am assuming it is an All-in-Wonder)

      If you want a program for TV viewing/PVR functions, SnapStream or BeyondTV should work for you.

      No, it isn't open-source.. but then again most people don't really need a standalone program to WATCH TV on their computer, since most people are interested in recording it (of which the GPL'd Virtual VCR will do excellently).

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