Calling on yours and Kyle's support

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You are welcome, this is only a compilaton of what has been experienced and reported by many users.
 
emailthatguy said:
Thetargos has replied here. cool :p

unfortunately tho man, i think we got blown off at this thread too. kyle tried here and i really appreaciate that. but i really do believe at this point that ati doesnt care......
Click to expand...
Nope, ATI answered the questions a month ago. I have simply been busy with other things lately......DOOM3, QuakeCon, lawsuits, infrastruction orgainization etc...

Answer coming today.
 
Ah, nice.

(I guess we FreeBSD people only showed up after you selected the questions to forward?)
 
It's nice to see ATI down in the trenches with the users. Thank you Terry and again, thank you Kyle for your support and time.
 
I have posted a link to this review on LinuxHardware.org and I have also included some commentary on ATI and NVIDIA from my standpoint. As the only Linux hardware review site, I a few opinions on what ATI and NVIDIA are doing for the Linux community in relation to what they've provided to myself for LinuxHardware.org. If you're interested, head over and read what I have to say. Here's a direct link for your convenience. Thank you Kyle for bringing some attention to this issue.
 
I'm certainly glad to hear that ATI is actually working on drivers but I am somewhat disappointed by the answers he provided. I think the most important part of it was this link:
http://apps.ati.com/linuxDfeedback/index.asp
I plan on using it to report my gimp tvout on my radeon8500le.
 
amd64 mobile ati drivers, dammit.

ie - ati 9600 mobility in the emachines 68xx


:(
 
I know the answers are a month old, but I hope Terry does a follow up on this thread to possibly address some questions brought up in this post.
 
I have a feeling that for specific issues like many of those presented there, the answer will be "we're working on it" or "file it as a bug (at the address given earlier)".
As Thetargos says, forwarding the entire list to the driver team would probably be more efficient, but what are the chances of that happening. :D


<nag>And I want my FreeBSD drivers, damnit.</nag>
 
Nvidia's support is good but not super.
Didn't have one bit of problems with my nvidia 5600 until running it at 1080i DVI to a HDTV.
Anything at 1080i would hard lock the computer if it tried to run at vsync with the monitor.
That includes xv movie output & opengl running vsync.
Currently only way I can play movies on my HTPC is through opengl non vsync (ugly).

Emailed [email protected] over a month ago. No response.
 
I will say that I do applaud ATi's commitment to driver stability. As for anyone who really needs great ATi (and others like Intel) graphics drivers, I highly recommend the ones from XiGraphics I have used their notebook drivers for years and recently began using an ATi workstation driver from them. No, they aren't free, but if you want to make easy use things such as TV out, support for overlays, 1400x1050 displays, and get decent performance from the integrated graphics on your notebook :), then they are the way to go.

Their customer support has been the best I have ever experienced. Best of all you can download demo versions that run for 30 minutes, then you must restart your Xserver, but they are fully functional, thus allowing you to see if you like them or not. Sure, they cost money, but the tech support you get and the superiour performance and reliability are well worth if you depend on OpenGL working well for your needs. Besides, you got the OS for free ;) I personally figured buying some good graphics drivers would be a good way to use the savings by not having MS * on my system.
 
I don't believe there is a commitment to stability.

I've been using a 9600XT for a little about a year now, and in that time, I've seen no real improvement.

Yes, there has been a bug fix here or there, but when the drivers aren't even OpenGL compliant enough to run Celestia without major artifacting and no modern game gets remotely good performance, I really see don't see how they can be considered as illustrating much of a commitment at all.

From all I can see, I don't really even think ATI has much of a linux driver team at the moment; we've been discussing this at the Rage3D boards for months now, and it just hasn't gotten any better. No major distribution still uses XFree86, and yet that's the only X server that ATI builds their drivers for.

In order to use their latest drivers, I had to patch the sources more or less manually - and this is on a basically stock installation of Fedora Core 2, probably one of the more popular distributions out there.

Essentially, I've had it. The 9600 will stay in my windows box, but they're not getting any future business from me until I see improvement. This happened before with the Rage128 - great hardware, but the drivers were so bad that I didn't touch ATI for years, and now it's happening again. I love my XT and the way it works with Windows. With the really cool stuff that's about to happen on the Linux desktop front - Open GL accelerated graphics with full window compositing - well, all I can say is that it's a shame ATI owners won't be able to fully participate, as by Christmas at the latest Nvidia owners will have desktops that rival OSX in hardware support.
 
I couldnt agree with kerrle more. My friends and people I know around have had many issues with ATI drivers (9500+) for linux. I personally have dual booted debian and 2k/xp on this box for a long time. When it came time to upgrade from my 8500 (runs great with dri drivers) I did a pass on a radeon 9800 pro because of poor linux driver support and sometimes sketchy game support in windows. ATI makes GREAT video card hardware I wish they would invest more in either building solid drivers or opening up source for good drivers to be made. I must give ati credit for doing better on there windows based drivers but there linux support IS HORRIBLE. I would love to see benchmarks on a 8500 series on DRI drivers compared to a 9800pro on ati drivers just to see what type of difference there is...I can promise the difference wouldnt be near what it is in Windows which is pathetic.

Wazer
 
I'll keep myself from being long-winded as I've discussed this with others but the article in general, while not being the most informative of resources, is still a large step in the right direction. By asking these kinds of questions and grilling ATI about it it forces ATI to acknowledge the fact that is has a strong Linux client base that has a desire for quality drivers.

Personally I am a big fan of Slackware, and while I've had no problem actually installing the drivers from ATI's RPM (admittedly it does take some effort, but it is entirely possible and quite easy once one learns how) but their 3D support for any card above the 9500 inclusive is simply (as was stated in the article) non-existant. Upon realizing that ATI have a Linux following, they need to also come to terms with the fact that NVIDIA has Linux driver support that is far superior to that of ATI and that ATI are actually losing business here. Nothing motivates a company to move quite like the look of their bottom line, and ATI needs to be convinced that this is indeed the case.

As everyone knows, competition is good for the end user, and if ATI can be made to see their position, I think we can expect more releases, more features, more performance and more compatibility from their Linux drivers, and like I said, this Q&A is a solid step in the right direction.
 
I wonder if the Ati team knows what they are up against?
Unless they already have, buying a few nVidia cards, installing the drivers in a few different distros[1], and using them for a while might give a good idea of what's expected from them.




[1] And FreeBSD. :D
 
We've got the [H], and Kyle's done a huge amount of goodwill for the linux community. I'm just hoping that the Linux community remembers this and keeps this relationship mutual.
 
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