Drivers for linux are rubbish

[bwat47]

Okay. I am willing to experiment with a cheap second hand card. How is the 4870 nowadays? For video/2D/3D? Does it work as good as Nvidia 9800GT/GTS 250?

Can I watch a video/divx/dvd without tearing on both ATI drivers?

I'm going to hold off on buying a BRAND NEW recent card for now. I can always sell either card above since there is still some demand for them.

4870 is definitely faster than a gtx 250 and a 9800gt. I use one on my windows desktop and its great, still maxes pretty much every game at 1680x1050. I never tried gaming with linux on it though.

[Panix]

I run compiz + fglrx + totem (with default settings in Ubuntu 10.04) and have no tearing with video at all, with either an HD4200 or a HD5750. The only issue with fglrx I have is slightly slow resizing & maximising on my 5750, but it's supposedly fixable and a fairly minor issue anyway. Overall I am pretty happy with fglrx, I certainly wouldn't say it is rubbish.

Are you sure you just don't notice the tearing?

I've been to the Ubuntu forums and I'd say 90% of the people posting with ATI cards are saying they see tearing even if they try OpenGL output.

This is what I've said here but the ATI fanatics just criticize it but I guess they don't realize the point. There's NO consistency. There's even been some people state that maybe they are not seeing the tearing. I don't understand how the same card would have tearing yet other cards of the same model won't. If you use the same video output, same driver ver. and same or similar x-server???

What the other guy saying that this 'amateurish' and the Nvidia driver doesn't do this is making the point that driver STAYS CONSISTENT. You can get the same result. How come no one can understand this?!?

Yeah, I keep asking because there's no answer that comes up the same each time. You have to have settings A, B, NOT C and then D for crying out loud!!! Some other ATI owners of HD 4xxx cards are asserting there's tearing and yet there's some people that say, there's none. Indeed, the only thing would be to BUY a card myself but if I get tearing, that's at least $100 investment. I'm trying to be a Linux user, here. If I used Windows exclusively, I'd have already bought a card by now. If I didn't care about open source, I would have bought Nvidia long ago.

[adamk]

Have you been to the nvnews.net linux forum and noticed all the complaints about XiD errors, video tearing, lack of xrandr, etc?

Adam

[monraaf]

Are you sure you just don't notice the tearing?

I've been to the Ubuntu forums and I'd say 90% of the people posting with ATI cards are saying they see tearing even if they try OpenGL output.

Ubuntu forums is hardly the place to get reliable information. I'd say in 90% of these cases it's just user error. There are also plenty of threads there with people complaining about tearing with Nvida cards and other NVidia related problems. But I don't hear you about that. It's all ATI bad, NVidia good.

What the other guy saying that this 'amateurish' and the Nvidia driver doesn't do this is making the point that driver STAYS CONSISTENT. You can get the same result. How come no one can understand this?!?

No. It's not, see above. But you seem to be blind to the troubles people do have with NVidia cards, whether self-inflicted or not.

And I would hardly call myself an "ATI fanatic". I've been very critical of ATI myself many times. But I only criticize based on my own experience, not on forum messages by clueless Ubuntu users.

[bwat47]

Competition (nVidia) does not work well with KDE4, and since the drivers for older cards are considered legacy, they likely never will.

I had problems for years, until my laptop died. Don't know how it is today, but Konsole was broken when using compositing, and there were artifacts at different places.

nVidia's binary drivers are better than fglrx, but they are not perfect, regardless of what the fanboys spout. Binary drivers are not a solution for Linux, they are a pain in the ass and a crutch until native drivers are written.

It's a lot like running Office through WINE.

I've actually had a horrible experience with KDE + ati myself. Kwin compositing is incredibly slow.

[allquixotic]

I think things like flicker, tearing, and the like are extremely subjective. Depending on how old you are, the condition of your eyes, the refresh rate and quality of your monitor, your lighting conditions, the quality of the video you're watching, etc. On one side, consider if we had "the perfect environmental conditions": a state of the art, very high-res display playing full HD video, with ideal lighting, and a 21 year old who has 20/20 vision and no eye conditions, sitting an ideal distance from the display, directly in front of it. Under these conditions, probably almost every video driver in existence would have some degree of noticeable flicker, tear, or other motion artifacts when playing video.

Back in the real world, it is entirely possible that someone with degraded environmental conditions might not detect flicker or tearing when it is in fact happening to a degree that the perfect observer would detect it.

An interesting anecdote...

One time I had a very late night at work, and decided to sack out on the couch in an unoccupied corner of the office, rather than bike home at 1 AM. As soon as I woke up, it was the early morning and everyone was starting to come into work. I was sleeping near the GUI applications division of the company, and we were working on a smartphone operating system project. As I came through the hall, my coworkers corraled me in for a quick subjective test they were playing with on the devices. They had two versions of an application on the screens of two smartphones: on one smartphone, GTK2 did not have double buffering on. On the other smartphone, it did. These were engineers who, at the youngest, were about 38 -- ranging into their late 50s. I was 22. They asked me, "Hey, you're a young guy -- can you see a difference between these two?"

They proceeded to tap on a drop-down box and select an item, in exactly the same way on both devices, and repeated the process two or three times. I hesitated -- I told them I could see a slight difference, and that the double buffered version seemed to hide a frame or two where the dropdown menu was blank, immediately after it was tapped. None of the other engineers could tell the difference. When I later pointed out that the entire screen itself was flickering according to my eyes, they laughed -- I hadn't had enough sleep, so my eyes weren't operating at their native refresh rate

Anyway, I often notice tearing, flickering, and lag in the display these days, sometimes even on visually optimized devices like iPad and Mac Mini running OS X. My eyes are still pretty good, when I'm not exhausted. Display tech isn't to the point where the graphics can proceed completely smoothly in every case, regardless of system load and environmental conditions.

It's getting better, though.

[Hans]

Are you sure you just don't notice the tearing?

I've been to the Ubuntu forums and I'd say 90% of the people posting with ATI cards are saying they see tearing even if they try OpenGL output.

This is what I've said here but the ATI fanatics just criticize it but I guess they don't realize the point. There's NO consistency. There's even been some people state that maybe they are not seeing the tearing. I don't understand how the same card would have tearing yet other cards of the same model won't. If you use the same video output, same driver ver. and same or similar x-server???

What the other guy saying that this 'amateurish' and the Nvidia driver doesn't do this is making the point that driver STAYS CONSISTENT. You can get the same result. How come no one can understand this?!?

Yeah, I keep asking because there's no answer that comes up the same each time. You have to have settings A, B, NOT C and then D for crying out loud!!! Some other ATI owners of HD 4xxx cards are asserting there's tearing and yet there's some people that say, there's none. Indeed, the only thing would be to BUY a card myself but if I get tearing, that's at least $100 investment. I'm trying to be a Linux user, here. If I used Windows exclusively, I'd have already bought a card by now. If I didn't care about open source, I would have bought Nvidia long ago.

Well its typically not that hard differentiate between people writing:
"OMG there is soooooo much tearing with my ATI card?!?! ATI sucks big time! I don't care people tell me about opengl output and mplayer, because I just know it won't work!".

people writing:
"Yeah, if you use fglrx you get tearing. Buy nvidia, thats the only driver which works. Do I own an ATI card myself? NO."

and people writing:
"Fglrx + compiz + mplayer works quite well without tearing. I have tried it with my own card and know what I'm talking about."

Some of us are just trying to help you, without filling you with rumors or fanboi'ism.

[bwat47]

I think things like flicker, tearing, and the like are extremely subjective. Depending on how old you are, the condition of your eyes, the refresh rate and quality of your monitor, your lighting conditions, the quality of the video you're watching, etc. On one side, consider if we had "the perfect environmental conditions": a state of the art, very high-res display playing full HD video, with ideal lighting, and a 21 year old who has 20/20 vision and no eye conditions, sitting an ideal distance from the display, directly in front of it. Under these conditions, probably almost every video driver in existence would have some degree of noticeable flicker, tear, or other motion artifacts when playing video.

That's just not true, if its being vsynced properly NO one will see tearing no matter how amazing their eye sight is.

[bridgman]

Sure, but then you end up with a different set of problems unless (a) the player slows down the frame rate to match the display refresh, (b) the player/driver stack adjusts the display refresh to match the media frame rate, (c) something in the stack resamples to match up the frame rates (which introduces its own artifacts), or (d) something in the stack drops or doubles-up frames periodically.

Different people are sensitive to each of these approachs - personally I don't see tearing but I tend to notice dropped and/or doubled frames.

If you are playing 50hz content on a 60 hz display, or 60 hz content on a 70 hz display, or even 59.97 hz on a 60, there are still errors.

[Panix]

Well its typically not that hard differentiate between people writing:
"OMG there is soooooo much tearing with my ATI card?!?! ATI sucks big time! I don't care people tell me about opengl output and mplayer, because I just know it won't work!".

people writing:
"Yeah, if you use fglrx you get tearing. Buy nvidia, thats the only driver which works. Do I own an ATI card myself? NO."

and people writing:
"Fglrx + compiz + mplayer works quite well without tearing. I have tried it with my own card and know what I'm talking about."

Some of us are just trying to help you, without filling you with rumors or fanboi'ism.

I know and I can't say enough that I APPRECIATE THAT. This is definitely my fav. site to obtain info. I appreciate all the help, suggestions and advice.

I think my best option is to just flip a coin and decide on one or the other. Or be willing to buy two cards and keep one for another system or sell it. I really don't want to commit more than $120 for a card, though, until I have experience with it. Even my recent Nvidia card is a bit old for saying pro things about Nvidia. Although, I suppose cards in the G92/b GT2xx generation are fine now in Linux.