Choosing the right graphics route.

JHeaton · 2010-08-04 18:07:17

Hey all.

Some time next week, my faithful GeForce 9800GT graphics card will be moving on to another home to help out a friend who can't afford something brand new, but is in desperate need of a working card. So this leaves me in the position of having to get a new one, a position I put myself in on purpose (nice justification for an upgrade >.>), but one that now seems to be causing me a little bit of trouble.

The ATI set of cards seem to offer the better performance, but last time I had one of their cards I had a nightmare of a time getting the proprietary driver to work and the open source drivers didn't seem to be capable of doing what I wanted. So now I come to ask those who are running Arch with an ATI card: what's the score? Are the open source drivers good enough to use for most things? Has the proprietary driver improved to the point where it's usable and stable?

Admittedly, most of my graphics-intensive stuff is now being done in Windows, gaming especially, so I'm not looking for perfection. However, I'd like to be able to play some games (Unreal Tournament 2004, X3 Reunion, Nexuiz, Battle for Wesnoth), watch DVDs, do a bit of compositing etc. if possible. I can get these things easily with the proprietary nvidia driver, but from the benchmarks I'm leaning towards the performance of the ATI cards in my price range. If anyone could tell me how they're finding running an ATI card under Arch at the moment, I'd be grateful. I don't have anything to test with since I got rid of my HD 4870 and I'd like to at least have an idea before I make a purchase that could work out badly.

Kind regards,

Joel.

Inxsible · 2010-08-04 18:31:26

I have a HD 2600 XT Pro with dual monitor support.

I don't game so I just use the open source ati drivers. I do want to use the proprietary drivers, just to see how different the user experience is, but I just haven't had the time. The ati drivers are plenty capable of running your DVDs and movies. I will reserve my judgment about gaming as I haven't played any on this machine.

karol · 2010-08-04 18:48:07

@ JHeaton
Wesnoth should run on whatever you have - that 64 MB onboard card will do - the other games are much more gpu-intensive.

Offtopic: how did you setup UT2k4? Is there any magic involved?

Skripka · 2010-08-04 18:49:58

After many nightmares over the years with ATi, both on Windows and a brief spell on Linux--I swore off ever buying one again. From what I've heard things have gotten better-but ATi has wasted far too much of my time to spend money with them again.

I actually like the Nvidia driver on Linux more than than their Windows driver. The opposite is true of ATi. After AMD bought out ATi, they finally got their act together and started writing a decent driver for Windows.

anonymous_user · 2010-08-04 18:51:56

@karol - UT2k4 includes a installer for linux. iirc you'll need libstdc++5 for it. Also if you have the 6 CD version, you should copy the installer locally and run it from there.

JHeaton · 2010-08-04 19:22:49

Inxsible wrote:

I have a HD 2600 XT Pro with dual monitor support.
I don't game so I just use the open source ati drivers. I do want to use the proprietary drivers, just to see how different the user experience is, but I just haven't had the time. The ati drivers are plenty capable of running your DVDs and movies. I will reserve my judgment about gaming as I haven't played any on this machine.

Thanks for that. I guess that's a good start as the gaming will only be limited, but I definitely will be wanting to do it.

karol wrote:

@ JHeaton
Wesnoth should run on whatever you have - that 64 MB onboard card will do - the other games are much more gpu-intensive.
Offtopic: how did you setup UT2k4? Is there any magic involved?

As anonymous_user said, there's an installer for it with the game. I have the DVD version and it just installs from that, though as pointed out you'll most likely need to install libstdc++5. One thing I found is that it must have the latest patch installed for online play, otherwise the game just crashes every time a new game begins/the map is changed.

I know Wesnoth will run, I was just listing the only games I'd be playing

Skripka wrote:

After many nightmares over the years with ATi, both on Windows and a brief spell on Linux--I swore off ever buying one again. From what I've heard things have gotten better-but ATi has wasted far too much of my time to spend money with them again.
I actually like the Nvidia driver on Linux more than than their Windows driver. The opposite is true of ATi. After AMD bought out ATi, they finally got their act together and started writing a decent driver for Windows.

I haven't really noticed much about the Nvidia driver for either platform. I guess that's because I've never found any bugs that affect my usage, though.

Thank you all for your input so far. Hopefully I'll be able to get enough information to make my choice soon enough.

doorknob60 · 2010-08-05 06:13:15

Mine gives me no problems. It's an integrated 3100, nothing much, but it really works good for an integrated card. It plays all the games I've thrown at it, including FoFiX, Team Fortress 2 (Wine), and Audiosurf (Wine), and some other random games too. I can even record them using GLC with minimal lag (somethign Windows can struggle with a little bit on this card). Also VAAPI seems to work, at least with Mplayer. Also Compiz works perfectly. I haven't tried the open source drivers in like 4 months, since Catalyst has been working perfectly for me the whole time.

mDuo13 · 2010-08-05 06:37:12

I have an ATi Radeon HD5770, and it's constantly the biggest headache in my Arch setup. After upgrading drivers, I inevitably have to spend half an hour just to get Xorg to start again, and there are often strange incompatibilities other other breakages in the "updates". Like how Catalyst 10.6 introduced a new 2d engine, which causes horrible artifacts in Firefox and Thunderbird (stuff rendering as gray boxes where actual styled text should be), and it's still not fixed in Catalyst 10.7. Vsync has been another notoriously unreliable feature, especially when it comes to video playback. I'm not totally sure I've got hardware acceleration of h264 working using the mplayer-mt-git package from aur, but if it's not then my i7 is powerful enough to handle it without breaking a sweat anyway.

I do not know if nVidia is any better under Arch; the nVidia card I was using on my dad's computer was horribly-supported under Ubuntu 64-bit a couple years ago, but I'm not sure to what extent that was Ubuntu's fault and to what extent it was nVidia's. I do not feel like I am getting a whole lot of value out of fglrx on my cutting-edge ATI card, but it's not like I have much choice aside from returning the hardware and getting an nVidia card -- something I'm not anxious to do.

By contrast, I hear that the radeon driver works like a charm on older cards. If you're only doing light gaming anyway, perhaps getting an older-generation card makes sense. Use this page to see what features are supported on what chipsets. (For reference, any Radeon HD 58xx or 57xx is the "Evergreen" chipset, that orange and red column on the far right.)

So I have some hope that things will get better, but at the moment, my firsthand recommendation is not to go with ATI.

Last edited by mDuo13 (2010-08-05 06:38:12)

Arch Linux

#1 2010-08-04 18:07:17

Choosing the right graphics route.

#2 2010-08-04 18:31:26

Re: Choosing the right graphics route.

#3 2010-08-04 18:48:07

Re: Choosing the right graphics route.

#4 2010-08-04 18:49:58

Re: Choosing the right graphics route.

#5 2010-08-04 18:51:56

Re: Choosing the right graphics route.

#6 2010-08-04 19:22:49

Re: Choosing the right graphics route.

#7 2010-08-05 06:13:15

Re: Choosing the right graphics route.

#8 2010-08-05 06:37:12

Re: Choosing the right graphics route.

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