The State of ATI Drivers on GNU/Linux

An anonymous reader writes "After 50 days of the Phoronix editor-in-chief exclusively using ATI Radeon hardware in his system, he has issued his final blog post dubbed The State of ATI Linux. Topics covered include the very low frame-rate performance, image quality, overclocking X.Org 7.1 support, Big Desktop/Dual Head, Linux CrossFire, and other relevant items to gamers and Linux enthusiasts. From the article 'While discussing this trial with a colleague that was not familiar with the quality of ATI's Linux drivers he immediately classified ATI Technologies as attempting to fine-tune a hull on a ship while there is a giant hole in the side. However, is this truly the case?'."

Not good

[Data Link Layer]

From my experience not good. I run gentoo and updating to xorg-7.1 has been somewhat of a hassle with a ati card. Ati has yet to offer drivers with xorg-7.1 support and as a result I have had to downgrade and mask many packages to make it so ati drivers will work. Maybe once xorg-7.2 is released we will get suport for 7.1.

Short answer: appalling

[AndyS]

Having had good experiences with my Radeon with the DRI drivers, I decided to purchase a computer with integrated radeon graphics.

And I really really truly regret it.

The main purpose of this computer was TV-Out, a feature only supported by the proprietary firegl drivers. The version I first got (8.16.20) didn't feature any overscan controls, so it sat in the middle of our television. After a couple of releases of this, we got 8.21.something which broke it even more - in fact, now you could only see the top third of any video you were watching with XV. At the same time of course, there was no 3d support at all.

Since then, I got a VGA->RGB Scart cable, and I've been able to switch back to the free drivers. The quality is significantly better - working 3d, a full screen picture and snappier menus. I plan to be very very careful when buying ATI again.

horrible drivers

[xshader]

Yes, my experience is the same... fine tune a ship with a huge hole on its side.

Using dualhead is just unusable because the driver fucks up X and requires a full restart of the system each time I want to change users. Opengl apps crash randomly. It's just sad...

Nvidia all the way guys! Don't fall for the cheap ATI cards!

Gaming?

[DarkSarin]

He completely discounts the gaming aspect. Folks, I can't get the drivers to do jack for 3d acceleration, and that's a deal-breaker in my mind. Short of fixing this, there is nothing that will convince me to buy another ATI-based laptop. I have an AMD 3400+ with 1GB of RAM and an ATI 9700 Mobility Radeon. The thing has amazing performance for windows and gaming, handling the native resolution of 1280x800 for almost every game that I've tried without much trouble (no it doesn't do 180 fps, but it is solid). I can't get more than just a few fps (say 10) under linux (Ubuntu 6.x), and installing the drivers also screwed up my resolution settings. I plan to reinstall in a few weeks, and will, at that time, try out Gentoo to see if I can get any further. Maybe I'll try Fedora as well.

The point is, without solid support for gaming, I don't care much about the drivers as long as I get a good display and reasonable 2d performance. But when I start gaming, I need the performance to just be there. There is no excuse for it not to be really freaking easy!

Re:Not good

[VP]

What part of "Binary drivers are not yet compatible with X.Org 7.1." did you not understand? Nether nVidia, nor ATI drivers work yet, so this is not a fair asssessment of ATI's driver support. Here is the Gentoo X.org update information [gentoo.org].

Re:Not good

[gerddie]

One might also point out that the current NVidia drivers (8xxx) also do not support xorg-7.1; version 9xxx is supposed to fill that gap.

Works pretty well for me

[pyros]

I have an HP nw8240 laptop with a FireGL v5000. I've been running Ubuntu since I got it in November. I can't recall if I started with Breezy or a Dapper beta, but I've been using the fglrx drivers the whole time, and it's been fine for me. The only time I had to download the drivers from ati.com was to get an ACPI related fix that wasn't in the Ubuntu packaged version. Once that was included, I've been using the fglrx from the restricted repo, and that was during the Dapper beta, back in November/December. I was running Xgl during the beta, too, and still am. It did crash at first, but again it took less than a month to get an update pushed out to the repos that fixed it. I don't do any gaming, though.

Latest drivers are a significant improvement

[VP]

I have a Dell Latitude D610, with the ATI R300 chipset. While the older drivers worked, the latest one, together with kernel 2.6.16.x, does provide good performance for a laptop. The frame rate reported by glxgears jumped from less than 200 to about 1000, 3d screensavers look very nice, and hooking up external monitors or projectors is a breeze.

I don't know what the support is for desktop cards, but for laptops ATI is now a viable option to consider.

A lot of the negativity in previous comments seem to be based on past experiences - try the latest driver if you have a chance, you may be pleasantly surprised...

Re:What was the question again?

[xtracto]

Lol no way you are serious.
From the linked link:

  It is a project to produce a PCI graphics card with fully specified programming interfaces. This card will be optimised to be fast for current and next generation GUI environments. This means it is mostly designed for 3D operations, specifically those that are used to render GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces). It will accelerate games to varying degrees, but that is not its primary purpose. It is intended to be a well-documented card that can be easily _and reliably_ supported by open source operating systems.

PCI graphics card? whoa will it be able to render polygons?

Will I be able to play Doom 3 with this hardware?
Nope, but at the time of this writing, there is no graphics card on the market on which you can play Doom 3 well while using open source drivers. Less demanding games are likely to work however.

So, IF it is really created it will be a very very very aged POS which I am sure I wont be able to obtain out of USA.

*How about PCI Express?*

A PCI Express version will exist. PCI and AGP versions will come first though.

Haha, ok so the card will go top notch using AGP versions...

But, lets not go out of the point I was raising. I was asking for a REAL and AVAILABLE graphics card (I even wrote "top notch").

This Open Graphics project sounds very very VERY similar to indrema [wikipedia.org] noh?.

Thanks for the advice try anyways, I will file this in the vapourware cabinet :)

Re:What was the question again?

[Arker]

Sorry, but you are shit outta luck. There is no decent open-source graphics hardware at the moment.

Not true at all. There is no *high performance* graphics hardware for free software at the moment, but 'decent' doesn't imply 'top of the line' but rather 'good enough for general usage' and there are definitely some choices there. The on-board Intel video has great support, the Via is nearly as good I'm told, the Matrox G550 (±$30 retail, and awesome performance for the price) is fully supported with DRI drivers, and so are ATI Radeons up to and including I believe it's the 9200. Any of those offer performance exceeding top-of-the-line from a few years back, and are perfectly sufficient for the vast majority of uses. Any of them will make your xgl desktop fly, and run most games acceptably well. So unless your definition of 'decent' somehow implies 'Doom3 at high frame-rate'... well, in that case, I'd suggest you think of a different word for it.

The open graphics project is a wonderful thing, though, don't get me wrong. I'm strongly in support of it. But I don't think they're aiming at a card that will make the FPS junkies drool either.

ATI on-going POOR support of the Linux community

[Anonymous Coward]

There are people that keep pushing the myth that ATI is pro-open source and the nVidia is not. The truth is that ATI is more like nVidia but ATI's marketing keeps pointing to Gatos. In reality, ATI does almost worse than nothing to support Gatos development.

On of the first attempts by ATI to provide an actual ATI supported package for Linux was the VHA Kit. This was supposed to be a library/SDK made by ATI and Loki Games to allow Linux access to the Rage chipset support for hardware assisted decompression of MPEG2 so that iDCT did not need to be done in software. When I have asked ATI about the VHA kit and if they have any commitment to providing on-going support for hardware assisted iDCT for Linux, they claimed that the kit was never distributed because of lack of interested in the community. This seems really fishy since release of the kit even made it on Slashdot and there where several comments at the time expressing interest. Later, a former developer from Loki stated that do to limitations in the Rage chipset implimentation of moving data back and forth, it was faster just to do iDCT in software.

Then the Radeon came out which should have addressed the limitations in the Rage. And nVidea released their closed source drivers with iDCT. While it is possible to do iDCT in software for the 480i resolution of DVDs, for HDTV tuners such as pcHDTV, a nVidea card is almost a requirement to view 720p and 1080i MPEG2 streams. ATI got so many requests for iDCT support that they put online a FAQ on their support site claiming that Gatos was working on the issue. In reality, the Gatos mailing list had posted multiple times that they where not working on iDCT at all. When I contacted ATI requesting to get the Radeon specs needed to support the iDCT support myself, they stated that such information is *NEVER* released outside of ATI. They went to explain that even if the developer signs a NDA, they still will never release the specs to do iDCT support.

Then the All-in-Wonder 8500 which was supported by Gatos was discontinued so I contacted ATI to offer my help to work on Gatos support of the All-in-Wonder 9700. They ask me to be patient and they would be getting back to me. A couple *YEARS* later and they still haven't gotten back to me. According to Gatos, they have gotten around to providing the specs and example hardware to one of the developers. But while Gatos is "open source" in the fact it is GPL, no one else can be much help to the project since the Gatos developers can't legally give the specs to any potental developers. All they can do is tell potental developers to contact ATI which result again with a request to be patient for *YEARS*.

The All-in-Windows 9700 is now discontinued and the new mainstream AIW card is the AIW 2006. Gatos doesn't even claim to have been provided any specs for this newer card. The ATI prioritary drivers provide no support for the tuner at all. And ATI continue to blow off requests from any potental developers except for the ones they already have an established relationship.

And for some reason that eludes me, people still claim that ATI does a better job of supporting the Linux community than nVidia! Does ATI's drivers provide iDCT support for Linux? nVidia's drivers do. If you call ATI right now asking for driver programming specs for any shipping Radeon chipset, do they actually provide it or tell you to just wait (and wait and wait and wait)? nVidia is at least honest about what programming specs they will openly release and what they won't.

Its a two-way street.

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I am for open source drivers. After all, I bought a video card I would like to use that piece of hardware anyway I see fit (not necessarily with Windows or Linux).

But I can't place all the blame on ATI or NVidia for the state of drivers. Some blame lies with the Kernel Developers.

Before you start sending me hate mail, hear me out...

The kernel developers went with ideology rather than reliability when it came to the driver API. They purposely manipulate their API and hope that this will give ATI and NVidia some incentive to open source their drivers. Apparently, the only thing that is being accomplished is the poor end user experience.

Make a stable API that the binary only drivers can link to and remove any excuse these companies have for their poor support of Linux. This way we can have a better user experience in Linux.

I know:

"But this flies in the face of what we want which is OSS... If you don't like it, make your own kernel... You have angered the kernel gods!"

So excuse me for asking the kernel developers to be the "bigger man" and do whatever it takes to help the linux users...

I am experiencing "vendor lock in" since I am stuck with the ATI Radeon 7500 mobility chip that came with my laptop. I can't change out the GPU, but I can change the OS. Why force me to use windows?

In reality, I run Linux on my laptop and have "acceptable" performance mainly because I use windows to play games. But what if I wanted to play games in linux?

I feel that as long as ATI and NVidia refuse to open source their drivers and the kernel developers refuse to "stabilize" their API, the end users will remain stuck in the cross fire and articles complaining about video drivers will continue to exist. BTW, when a non-linux user read articles like above, he/she reads "stay away from linux, windows is hardware friendly"...

Well, I'm unpopular enough....

Re:Not good

[JThundley]

That's not true. My friend told me this too, so I proved him wrong. I'm using Nvidia 8762 and xorg 1:7.0.22 (debian testing). The trick to it is running the Nvidia script like this: sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-8762-pkg1.run --x-module-path=/usr/lib/xorg/modules -n -N

I also compile it with gcc 4, not 4.1 because that's what I built my kernel with and patched it for suspend. The nvidia driver even behaves with hibernating.