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#1 2010-02-09 08:35:22

Mandor
Member
Registered: 2006-06-06
Posts: 154

Do ATI cards have good drivers support in the moment

I am asking because I am considering buying new PC. There are much more main boards (AM3) with the new AMD chipsets, but I was turned off by the ATI video and I was looking for nvidia chips (like 8200, 8300). This is because I don't want to have problems with drivers.

On the other hand I do not play games so I need performance only for common tasks and the nvidia requirement is limiting my choice quite a lot, moreover that (I imagine) new AMD chipsets are (or may be) designed for optimal work with they own CPUs.

So, what is the state of ATI drivers in the moment. Wiki says so-so, but I'm not sure how recent it is.


If everything else fails, read the manual.

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#2 2010-02-09 08:54:54

flamelab
Member
From: Athens, Hellas (Greece)
Registered: 2007-12-26
Posts: 2,160

Re: Do ATI cards have good drivers support in the moment

Don't buy any ATi card for at least one/one-and-a-half years, if you don't want to be like a lab rat for testing.

Till then, only Nvidia.

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#3 2010-02-09 08:59:49

FarmerF
Member
From: Netherlands
Registered: 2009-06-08
Posts: 76

Re: Do ATI cards have good drivers support in the moment

I don't think there is a simple yes or no answer... For 2D acceleration (good enough for comman tasks including video playback) there is no problem at all. Might have to play a bit to see which driver works best for you. 3D is not quite that good but not needed for most desktop tasks. Do note that that closed drivers for linux seem to support up to the 58XX series and not the newer 59XX. I have a 38XX which works quite ok on the radeonhd driver.

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#4 2010-02-09 09:46:42

Cdh
Member
Registered: 2009-02-03
Posts: 1,098

Re: Do ATI cards have good drivers support in the moment

See http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature for the open source driver.

The driver has two main problems at the moment:
The powersaving is not ready. You should buy a card that is per default not very loud.
Advanced 3d is very slow for now. Simple 3d of older games or newer with few effects run very good (warcraft3 in wine, half life 1 in wine, nexuiz with low details) and of course compiz runs very good.

I would say you can buy an ATI card from the 4xxx series. (I have 4650)


฿ 18PRsqbZCrwPUrVnJe1BZvza7bwSDbpxZz

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#5 2010-02-09 10:45:46

Mandor
Member
Registered: 2006-06-06
Posts: 154

Re: Do ATI cards have good drivers support in the moment

I implied, but not specified that I intend to buy a main board with built-in graphics. So noise should not be really an issue for the gpu. The problem is that most newer boards have 5xxx chips. So I either I buy a bit older one, or go with NVidia (which are not rreally new as well).


If everything else fails, read the manual.

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#6 2010-02-09 11:55:41

FarmerF
Member
From: Netherlands
Registered: 2009-06-08
Posts: 76

Re: Do ATI cards have good drivers support in the moment

If you like graphs about performance: phoronix released the first of a set of ati related tests http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a … a_3d&num=1  with more to come.

Support in the radeonhd drivers includes the 4890 but not higher http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver … ain/README

There is also a way to enable 3D on the newer chips but that is slightly too experimental for my taste http://wiki.x.org/wiki/radeonhd%3Aexperimental_3D

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#7 2010-02-09 11:58:32

flamelab
Member
From: Athens, Hellas (Greece)
Registered: 2007-12-26
Posts: 2,160

Re: Do ATI cards have good drivers support in the moment

It would be better to prefer xf86-video-ati instead of xf86-video-radeonhd, due to more features, maturity and stability.

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#8 2010-02-09 12:47:24

ak-89
Member
From: Finland
Registered: 2008-08-26
Posts: 86
Website

Re: Do ATI cards have good drivers support in the moment

I have Asus m4a785td-v evo MB, which has AMD's 785g/sb710 chipset, meaning that it has integrated HD4200 as gpu. I don't know about drivers in repos, because I use git-versions(xf86-video-ati-git, libdrm-git and mesa-full), but atleast git-version works. I have enabled radeon-experimental-api in libdrm, because I use KMS. 3D works but is not very fast, Urbanterror with highest settings(I'm not sure) and 1920x1080 resolution gives me about 25fps.

Most of the other things works on this MB, fancontrol works only with it87 module and it needs little acpi-related line on kernel commandline, but anything else I have tried works nicely. This MB has q-fan automatic fancontrol setting in bios, so that userspace fancontrol does not matter that much. Audio, video, temp sensors, cpufreq etc works. I haven't tried suspending or hibernating.

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