ATI and Linux compatibility

[Qaridarium]

Well the ati-installer is really not good for distributions with lots of hacks, do NEVER run it on u 10.04! Hopefully the package creation is working with 10-5 again without extra patching - but out of the box kernel .33/.34 support may take even longer... Especially on 64 bit systems the ati-installer does only pure crap.

yes really poor :-(

[FunkyRider]

If you wanna play 3d games in Linux (especially under Wine), stay away from ATI, period.

[storma]

That's not entirely correct. I have no trouble playing Savage 2 and HoN with ATI. I can't comment on gaming with wine though as I don't support windows.

[cutterjohn]

Hi! I've been researching for hardware to buy a new computer. As I only use Linux but never used any ATI graphic card and a friend of mine said a while ago the combination is by any means no good, I wondered if the scenario changed over the years. Searching on internet, found AMD website FAQ, which states that "ATI Proprietary Linux driver currently supports Radeon 8500 and later AGP or PCI Express graphics products" (http://ati.amd.com/products/catalyst/linux.html#2)

You, Linux users, owners of ATI cards, would you please tell if it's possible to do the combination Linux/ATI and still play performance demanding games (on wine and natively)?

I searched but couldn't find useful and **updated** material on internet. Most of material are from past 5 years!!

Thanks in advance,
Rauss.

Stick with nVidia or buy a super cheap ATI card to experiment with before shelling out for something more expensive.

The proprietary drivers are barely passable(hope that you enjoy slow compiz/beryl effects and poor video playback--tearing, broken installation packages, etc.) and the open source drivers probably won't be worth bothering with for at the very least a year, probably longer.

The fact that AMD support OSS is entirely useless unless you're an OSS zealot. nVidia just doesn't support OSS simply because they don't need to do so, while AMD could potentially benefit from a higher quality OSS driver.

Some games/apps even give the ATI drivers/cards fits in Windows as well...

I regret getting a notebook with an ATI GPU. Should've experimented with a desktop and "cheap"/easily replaceable GPU.

[PsynoKhi0]

Video playback works just fine for me with either openGL output, or with Xv output with the new Direct2D accel turned on.

Wine also works just fine for me once the OffscreenRenderingMode registry key is set to "backbuffer".

I have yet to run into a significant problem with the installer in the last 2 years I've used it.

The sheer stupidity of the above comment regarding the OSS drivers doesn't even warrant a reply.

[cutterjohn]

Video playback works just fine for me with either openGL output, or with Xv output with the new Direct2D accel turned on.

Wine also works just fine for me once the OffscreenRenderingMode registry key is set to "backbuffer".

I have yet to run into a significant problem with the installer in the last 2 years I've used it.

The sheer stupidity of the above comment regarding the OSS drivers doesn't even warrant a reply.

Well, unlike you I still have taring although I haven't enabled the alpha/beta quality new 2D acceleration and will not do so until it's in a release state.

As to installation: lulz. Seems like at least, every other install has some sort of problems under linux. And for added fun mix in some regressions every 2-3m and/or plain broken things.

OTOH the Windows(Vista 32b) 10.5 and install was the MOST pleasant experience that I've had with Catalyst to date. The install recovered and restarted the drivers all by itself whereas it used to phail hard at the recover step. Haven't bothered benchmarking anything yet, and this means nothing to linux as the linux Catalyst driver uses different installation methods and video playback in windows was always OK although there were/are some coloration oddities whihc I am still not sure if it's because of the LCD panel or the driver...

OSS: ah, another zealot I see. Nothing stupid about it. It's purely a political play on AMD's part as evidenced in the quote. Further AMD is now VERY quick to drop support for older GPUs while nVidia supports them pretty far back. Granted they may not have all the features of newer cards for obvious reason, but OTOH older AMD GPUs are now dumped to the OSS support or ancient proprietary drivers which likely will not function on more recent linux distros after they're a year or so old.