x800pro : change or wait for ATI to improve their drivers?

[Nevohteeb]

Hello everyone,

I come to you to get an big advice. Here's the situation : after using Linux at work for 4 years now I decided to migrate on Debian Linux (testing) on my home computer a few weeks ago and totally removed Windows from it. Everything work fine excepted...my graphic card which is an "old" x800pro (R420).
The only game I play is World of Warcraft, and this graphic card was perfect for that game while on WIndows. I mean : all graphic options up to max and 45-50 FPS. So I never condidered upgrading my system. Unfortunaly, as you all know, ATI linux drivers are pretty weak and the result now is : all graphic options down to "low" and 10 FPS ...

As far as I know (or read on several articles) improving their drivers for R4xx products and bellow doesn't seem to be an option for AMD/ATI, so I guess there's nothing for me to expect from them. On the other hand, if someone has more informations about that, feel free to post a link.

So here's the question, what should I do?

1. buy a Geforce 7600 GT AGP and hope I'll have same performances I used to get on Windows
2. buy a Radeon X1950 AGP and hope ATI/AMD drivers will work greater with that card than they do with my X800pro
3. do nothing because the two previous options won't work anyway...

Thank you in advance

[bridgman]

Which driver are you running ? With any of the recent drivers (8.41 through 8.43) you should be seeing better performance than that.

We are not shipping upgraded drivers for R2xx and below, but R3xx and R4xx are still supported and were recently moved to the new 3d code base.

[Nevohteeb]

Hi,

I migrated on Debian in October, so I installed drivers 8.40 downloaded from AMD/ATI official website. I used the classical way to install them which is :

• create .deb packages from the official ATI/AMD binary via the "--buildpkg Debian/lenny" commande
• install those .deb packages via the "dpkg -i" command
• use module-assistant to install kernel module
• Configure xorg.conf with "aticonfig --initial"

I noticed the weak performances I mentioned in my first post. So, as soon as 8.42 drivers released I cleanly uninstalled 8.40 and installed 8.42 with the same method. Unfortunaly, xorg never succeed in launching so I came back to 8.40 version.
Then Catalyst 7.11 released so I again uninstalled 8.40 and installed 7.11, but I did not see any preformance improvement, neither on WoW nor glxgear. :-(

So, since either 8.42 and Catalyst 7.11 are not recommanded for distribution packages, and since 8.40 version is officially packaged in Debian repository I installed them again.

[Nevohteeb]

I was thinking about buying a X1950pro but it seems that it's not the solution :

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6112

[Nevohteeb]

Hello,

I had a look at several posts from people who have the same performance problem, and I noticed that almost no one knows, myself included, what options we should put in the "Module" section in xorg.conf.

I use xorg 7.2, ans my own Module section is empty. Should my problem come from that?
If someone knows what I should put on that section, feel free to tell me

Thank you in advance.

[Kano]

If you still use AGP never buy an new ATI card, you will run into problems, that's what you should have learnt when you read this board... But I would always prefer NV in case of gfx cards anyway. I only use ATI cards to find the new errors they added to fix some of em in my install script

[Nevohteeb]

If you still use AGP never buy an new ATI card, you will run into problems, that's what you should have learnt when you read this board...

Yeah, well, that's why I'm considering buying a Geforce 7600 GT, but keeping my current X800pro if possible is my first option, and that's why I'm looking for help

But I would always prefer NV in case of gfx cards anyway. I only use ATI cards to find the new errors they added to fix some of em in my install script

Haha, well good luck then