Tired of being screwed by ATI? Do something!

[platform]

The drivers, of course!

[yoshi314]

i'm not using fglrx and i'm definitely not going to spend more money on nvidia card. that's not the solution for me.

i mean, nvidia is not being too open [specs etc]. in that case ati is a clear winner for me in the long run. i can wait and help radeonhd devs any way i can. in the meantime i have my r300 with opensource driver that *just works*.

all i want from ati is to release all the remaining specs, as i already don't care about their blob.

[aoanla]

What's the problem?

As someone else said; the drivers.

A lot of us (well, certainly me, and I know there are others on this forum) bought ATI cards on the basis that we'd been promised that the linux drivers would improve, become stable and generally that awesome would happen before the end of the year.
We're getting very close to the end of the year, and, for many of us, the "improvements" in the fglrx driver have been decidedly mixed, when they exist at all.
For X1950 users, especially those with the AGP cards, things have been particularly annoying.

It's my birthday this month. If ATI's present for me isn't an 8.43.x fglrx which is stable on my system, then my birthday present to myself will be an nVidia 8800 GT. At least nVidia talk to their clients and keep them informed of what they're doing...

[teroedni]

The drivers have inded improved. Its much better now and easier to install then yust a couple vesion back and the support gets better.

My biggest problem with Fglrx now is bad stability trough wine, but i believe that it will get better.

I surely noticed a boost going from 41 to 42
The quality is still not as good as Nvidia drivers , but they do inded close the gap fast


My card is a hd2600 pro

[aoanla]

The drivers have inded improved. Its much better now and easier to install then yust a couple vesion back and the support gets better.

My biggest problem with Fglrx now is bad stability trough wine, but i believe that it will get better.

Indeed, this is a killer flaw for my use of graphics drivers. They have until the next version to fix this, as far as I'm concerned.

I surely noticed a boost going from 41 to 42
The quality is still not as good as Nvidia drivers , but they do inded close the gap fast


My card is a hd2600 pro

Well, that explains why you're enjoying them - HD owners seem to be getting the best out of the recent drivers...

[teroedni]

Indeed, this is a killer flaw for my use of graphics drivers. They have until the next version to fix this, as far as I'm concerned.

I can understand that. Well lets hope they fix it

Well, that explains why you're enjoying them - HD owners seem to be getting the best out of the recent drivers...

Yup
I was expecting to get alot of problems with this card based on previous ati drivers with bad drivers, but it actually worked much better than what i thought. The main reason i bought this was because i want a propely open source 3d driver with good performance. But fglrx will serve my good until the Radeonhd matures

I hope also that 43 comes with support for the new 55nm hd3850.After all their are just renamed 2xxx series with better thermal and performance

[givemesugarr]

i must not agree with funkyrider who opened the topic and with the people who want to switch from ati to nvidia.
the nvidia 8xxx series is bad, very bad and from what my friends who have them tell me don't have a good 3d driver. these boards seem to have almost the same driver and speed support of the lastest 2 fglrx releases. and more, the 8xxx series don't have xv support (i wanted to buy one of that for a myth-tv multimedia box but then i've desisted and i'll definitely wait to see how the radeon-hd will evolve).
from what i've been seeing the new hd series have the same performance of the 9xxx series and they have the opened specs (for now 2d and it's said that the 3d part will come before the end of the year, maybe on christmass as a present for all amd/ati users). for these reasons i will not buy an nvidia at least until the end of the first quarter of 2008. if by then the fglrx and radeon-hd driver would not have reached out the nvidia blob, then i'll buy one of that boards.
if someone has to buy a new board now, i'll suggest the radeon 2600hd pro (512mb ddr2 or 256 ddr3) as a medium-low board and a 2600hd xt 512 ddr3 as a medium-high. i'd also would suggest the gigabyte brand since that brand has given me only pleasures in the last years and i've never had compatibility problems with linux and since they perform a little better than sapphire or asus (which in my experience tend to break after about 2 years of use) counterparts. these boards seem to perform very well and in a stable way with the last 8.42.3 and it's a pitty to not use a hardware that is getting better and better performance and stability every month.

[LucasG15]

With the exception of the poor linux drivers from ATI, I think that picking either ATI or Nvidia is about like picking grape or strawberry jam. It's all in what you like. My X1950Pro isn't any worse than the past nvidia video cards that I have owned. Although, I like the improved image quality. In any case, I hope that ATI gets these linux drivers right soon. I'm sick of poor X-windows performance and stability, and I'm not in the position to upgrade now anyway. I'm stuck with AGP, right now.

[Extreme Coder]

Even though I know that ATI's drivers may not improve by a whole lot, I went ahead and bought the MoBo for my new PC with an ATI IGP. Why? Because they said they'll release specs, which would make ATI a non-issue on Linux.
But so far, I haven't heard of any specs released, other than the initial batch. If they don't commit their promise, I will be buying a GeForce card sooner than they think, and switch to an Intel+nVIDIA solution for my next PC purchsses ( I got an AMD cpu for this PC)

[givemesugarr]

Extreme Coder, if you've buyed a new igp serie then you might get them soon. but if not, you might have to wait a loooot. you've done a great error in buying an igp. if you want a mobo with igp then buy an intel powered igp or a nvidia 7xxx igp serie and then buy an ati hd when it gets the support you want. these boards are still good and support the am2 quad sockets (gigayte, abit, asrock and tyan boards do on my knowledge) and cost relatively low.
having instead an igp, not of the last r600 (i don't know if there are r600 igps) is very risky, because the amd sanitizing team is made of a small group and it takes a lot of time to remove all the nda stuff of that documentation before releasing it. the proof is what i've read in an article of oct (if i remember well) from phoronix on this matter that stated that the 3d specs could be released towards the end of the year or delayed to next year since the sanitizing operations are slow. i don't remember the article and i don't want to state something that wasn't really told there, so take this as a sentence of what i've understood of that article and take it as that. if you'd like more info on the matter try searching phoronix on this matter and see what you can find in its articles.