Current State of ATI drivers

baion baion · 2010-05-27 14:53:46

Hello all,
Recently I have been thinking of buying a new ATI graphics card (probably a 5870), however I have always known that ati drivers for linux are poor and offer little in comparison with nvidia drivers. For years I have been using nvidia drivers and I have had no problems at all. So my question is simple, currently, do the ati drivers work reasonably ok? Do they offer 3d support, equivalent to that of nvidia drivers? Do they work ok with KDE 4?

Thank you all in advance.:D

Julius2 · 2010-05-27 15:07:20

The (proprietary) Catalyst drivers have historically given good 3D performance but cause crashes and difficulties with certain kernels. However, the modern Catalyst drivers are slightly more stable (or so I've heard). If you plan to use the open-source drivers there's xf86-video-ati and radeonhd; radeonhd used to be for less stable but more cutting-edge stuff, but is now out of date and is being merged with xf86-video-ati. If you use the (open source) ATI/Radeon drivers and have a newer card, you'll probably see 3D support a few years down the road (it has taken roughly 2-3 years for 3D support to appear for a card series, but they are getting faster at it), but you'll get a very stable set of drivers.

I'd recommend an ATI card if you plan to watch video and use a standard DM or standalone WM. If you're interested in playing 3D games, especially through Wine, and want to use Compiz or something along those lines, you'll probably want to stick with nVidia.

Coacher · 2010-05-27 15:11:10

Check this
http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature
http://www.x.org/wiki/radeonhd%3Afeature
for current situation with opensource ati drivers.

baion baion · 2010-05-27 15:20:59

I don't plan to play games, that's what I keep windows for, but I would like to use kwin 3d effects. So I guess I should stick with nvidia (damn those ati cards are tempting).

From the link posted above it seems that features for the newest cards (codenamed evergreen) are still a WIP.

Last edited by baion baion (2010-05-27 15:23:53)

Cdh · 2010-05-27 16:20:42

Phoronix has some benchmarks and it shows when using compositing the nvidia driver's performance suffers a lot while catalyst's performance does not. Maybe the overall performance is not too good for catalyst but it's good enaugh I'd say.

Playing 3D games does work... I played Half Life 2, Episode 1, Episode 2 and Portal with wine. There were some bugs in graphics but everything except half life 2 itself was extremely stable and the performance was very good on highest settings.
People say with today's catalyst 10.5 many of the graphics bugs have vanished (have yet to reboot ).

Until half a year ago I wouldn't have recommended ATI cards, but now I do. I have a HD 4670 and am satisfied with it so far.

Until the open source driver is ready I see no problem sticking with catalyst.

Julius2 · 2010-05-27 17:23:54

I use the open-source drivers and, for various reasons, not much works well. I can get great performance on 2D games, but HD movies don't work so well. 3D gaming is also pretty much impossible. However, the drivers are rock-solid stable. A good tradeoff for my situation (a laptop that is prone to overheating anyway) but for a high-powered desktop it might be frustrating to let good hardware go to waste (depending on what you wanted to use it for).

jceasless · 2010-06-01 01:20:54

I've had few problems with the open source video drivers. I could see waiting for 5xxx support being a bit of a pain, though I've read that the completion of the 4xxx series driver will put 5xxx on a faster track. I run a 4670 and have never had any complaints (except when I was running Catalyst last year).

I was happy to see VLC playing smoothly a DVD9 quality .iso using the Xvideo renderer earlier tonight.

baion baion · 2010-06-01 17:25:52

I think I am just going to get the GTX 465, even though a 5850 outperforms it at a lower price, just to be sure. If only ATI's drivers were as good as its hardware products.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-05-27 14:53:46

Current State of ATI drivers

#2 2010-05-27 15:07:20

Re: Current State of ATI drivers

#3 2010-05-27 15:11:10

Re: Current State of ATI drivers

#4 2010-05-27 15:20:59

Re: Current State of ATI drivers

#5 2010-05-27 16:20:42

Re: Current State of ATI drivers

#6 2010-05-27 17:23:54

Re: Current State of ATI drivers

#7 2010-06-01 01:20:54

Re: Current State of ATI drivers

#8 2010-06-01 17:25:52

Re: Current State of ATI drivers

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