I'm about to go out and get a 780G, what can I expect?

[elanthis]

This is not the problem from ATI or other Vendors but from OpenGL.

That isn't stated anywhere at all by Carmack, just an assumption made by some forum posters. Simple fact is that Carmack said that the NVIDIA binary driver can probably handle it, and the binary driver is OpenGL, so logically any other device should be able to handle it as well. It may be a question of requiring some NVIDIA extension, but there is nothing in the world that stops ATI or Intel or anyone else from implementing NVIDIA OpenGL extensions, no more than anything is stopping them from implementing full OpenGL 3.1 other than their own development priorities.

That's one of the neat things about OpenGL -- it is technically limitless in what it can do, as it forces neither the driver developers nor the application developers to stick to a fixed feature set.

[Adarion]

Assuming everything goes to plan, in a few hours I'll be replacing my 6-year-old, loud, unstable, power-hungry Pentium 4 frankenstein monster with an AMD64 that's probably just as loud but runs slightly faster...

I've been holding off on this upgrade for a few months, but it looks like the driver side of things is starting to come together. What works and what doesn't right now?

Just on the loudness: I have a 45W (all without display) idle system, 75W max, and besides the PSU and an ultraquiet case fan it is completely passively cooled. So nothing here with loudness.
I don't know about the large Phenoms, most of them will probably require active cooling but e.g. the 4850e can be passively cooled. The newer onboard HD3300 can become quite hot but then the powersaving is not yet implemented in the free drivers (but is to come soon). Most things here work, it is mainly the 3d and powersave functions I'm waiting for. All other parts seem to work, but then some things depend on manufracturer's implementation (sensor & IO chips like ITE, Fintek), Network chips, sound chips and so on, so you'll still have to look at the very motherboard you're going to buy.

[tball]

Wau Kano. You are very very ATI/AMD unfriendly. Do you even have an ATI card?
I think his choice of card is very good. FGLRX is not that bad, and you can patch the driver to run on 2.6.30 and 2.6.31. Yes its not optimal, but something you can live with.

Besides he gets oss drivers sooner or later, and thats a very good thing in the long run! KMS here we come :P

Actually I'm sitting here with a HD3650 card, and I would choose ATI again! :O And I don't consider myself a fanboy even. I just don't got any problems with fglrx, what I am using it for (running native games). Kwin compositing runs quite good too, with a patched version of Xorg (don't know if its a driverfault or xorg).

[Ant P.]

Just on the loudness: I have a 45W (all without display) idle system, 75W max, and besides the PSU and an ultraquiet case fan it is completely passively cooled. So nothing here with loudness.
I don't know about the large Phenoms, most of them will probably require active cooling but e.g. the 4850e can be passively cooled. The newer onboard HD3300 can become quite hot but then the powersaving is not yet implemented in the free drivers (but is to come soon). Most things here work, it is mainly the 3d and powersave functions I'm waiting for. All other parts seem to work, but then some things depend on manufacturer's implementation (sensor & IO chips like ITE, Fintek), Network chips, sound chips and so on, so you'll still have to look at the very motherboard you're going to buy.

Thanks for the info. Yeah, noise was one of the main things I was worried about. I made sure the graphics card was fanless, and I went for a slightly underpowered CPU instead of maxing it out. From what I've seen, CnQ seems to do a decent job of keeping noise down too.

I bought an almost-silent Atom box a few weeks back too, so I can offload all my server stuff to it. Previously that was all running on an old 70W Pentium 3, which wasn't bad, but even that was loud compared to the new one.

I'm not too worried about other drivers; if something critical doesn't work I've got a shelf full of spare PCI cards...

[Kano]

@tball

I got serveral ATI cards from Kanotix users, like 9700, 9800, X700 (Pro) (very short lifetime), and lately a 3450 HD just to optimize my fglrx script and to test the oss drivers.

I know how much work it is to collect patches for fglrx, some i found even myself. I do that since fglrx driver 3.2.8. I patched even the binary part of it to support Xserver 1.4 1 month before ATI provided updated drivers.

I guess I know the quality of ATI drivers, of course I own several NVIDIA cards up to 8800 GTS 512 too to compare both.

fglrx has much more rendering problems, completely unsupportet patches for new kernels only, bugs that are in the driver for over 1 year are completely normal. The driver is a piece of shit, i only support it because lots of Kanotix users have got ATI cards.

[energyman]

You gain nothing with dedicated ATI. Those use the same drivers, only a NVIDIA gfx card would be better.

except when it isn't.

[Kano]

You can always get a bad card or the mb/card combination is not optimal. On a standard pc you can fix that relatively easy, on a laptop you lost.

[tball]

@tball

I got serveral ATI cards from Kanotix users, like 9700, 9800, X700 (Pro) (very short lifetime), and lately a 3450 HD just to optimize my fglrx script and to test the oss drivers.

I know how much work it is to collect patches for fglrx, some i found even myself. I do that since fglrx driver 3.2.8. I patched even the binary part of it to support Xserver 1.4 1 month before ATI provided updated drivers.

I guess I know the quality of ATI drivers, of course I own several NVIDIA cards up to 8800 GTS 512 too to compare both.

fglrx has much more rendering problems, completely unsupportet patches for new kernels only, bugs that are in the driver for over 1 year are completely normal. The driver is a piece of shit, i only support it because lots of Kanotix users have got ATI cards.

Fglrx is "only" supportet for the 4 biggest distros. Nothing weird with that. If kanotix isn't supportet by AMD/ATI, don't blame AMD/ATI. Maybe there just isn't enough users for kanotix (I couldn't say how many there is). Ofcourse the distros without their support, will struggle with patches etc. But hey, I run fglrx beautiful well on Arch with kernel 2.6.30 :-)

Maybe supporting "only" 4 distro's isn't ideal for linux, because of all the distro's out there, but thats why it is great they help developing oss drivers :-) The oss driver will, most likely work with the newest kernel / xorg combination, on every distro you try it on. As enduser an oss driver will always be the best in my opinion, because of the 'works out of the box' expirence. An oss driver will always fit better in an opensource world, with the rapid changing kernel than any binary blob.

[Kano]

That has nothing to do with specific distro support. fglrx has to work with every common xorg and kernel release - especially when it is out for serveral month. When you do a little comparison to nv than then have got 190.16 beta and 3 legacy drivers with direct 2.6.31 support. 185.18.14 needs a patch which can be easyly found. The legacy drivers beginning with 96.xx series run with any xorg release. That means every since a geforce 2 mx (not gts/pro) can be fully used even with the latest distro - that is a dx7 card. fglrx only works with dx10 cards for latest distros. Of course you could say the oss support from ati is much better, thats correct, but when ati considers dx9 cards as legacy for Linux, then no update will be made, thats not the case for nv. Then you know that you can buy NEW laptops with onboard ATI which is considered as legacy then ati drivers suck even more. You must expect that support is dropped as soon as there are oss drivers for it and the next gpu generation is available, not really future proof.

[tball]

That has nothing to do with specific distro support. fglrx has to work with every common xorg and kernel release - especially when it is out for serveral month. When you do a little comparison to nv than then have got 190.16 beta and 3 legacy drivers with direct 2.6.31 support. 185.18.14 needs a patch which can be easyly found. The legacy drivers beginning with 96.xx series run with any xorg release. That means every since a geforce 2 mx (not gts/pro) can be fully used even with the latest distro - that is a dx7 card. fglrx only works with dx10 cards for latest distros. Of course you could say the oss support from ati is much better, thats correct, but when ati considers dx9 cards as legacy for Linux, then no update will be made, thats not the case for nv. Then you know that you can buy NEW laptops with onboard ATI which is considered as legacy then ati drivers suck even more. You must expect that support is dropped as soon as there are oss drivers for it and the next gpu generation is available, not really future proof.

Well they are trying to support the legacy cards through the oss driver. No the oss driver aren't finished yet, but when it is, it might end up very good. When the galium3d driver is finished for cards < r500, they will see a performanceboost.

Don't get me wrong, I agree that nvidia is faster with new kernel and xorg support. But they have too, because, they don't have a "backup" driver as amd/ati users have.