I have recently purchased a new video card because my old card broke. I like nVidia cards but there were no nVidia cards in my price range at the time so I purchased an ATI Radeon X1300 (512mb AGP). I can never get ATI drivers to work properly and I was wondering if someone here can help. Im using the ATI proprietary drivers. They installed ok and I ran "aticonfig --initialize". X appears to be running ok however none of the hardware acceleration works properly. Im getting worse performance in OpenGL than I would using the vesa driver. It seems to be fine for simple OpenGL scenes like gears but it wont load textures and on any scenes that have particles the frame rate is less than 2 fps. Also Xv video overlay doesn't work at all. I'm currently running a standard distro of Slackware 11. I have had other ati cards long ago and have never gotten ati drivers to work on any linux distro.

As a owner of an ATI Radeon X1800 (512MB PCI-X) I can happily tell you that ATI is a pain in the a$$. I use gentoo (so the ati drivers are auto-setup), but I had to use X.org >= 7.0 in order for hardware acceleration to work properly. and Xv will not work with any ati X1X00 series card, you will probably have to use openGL video rendering when you get OpenGL working. EDIT: and it is a necessity to use the aticonfig program as you did earlier. It will never work otherwise (just a stern warning of things to come)

personally i had never had any big problems with ATi
i prefer it more than nVidia.
i had slight problems with Radeon 9600, new Ubuntu and newest drivers from ATi but its solved now :P

I've had nothing but trouble with ATI. All the drivers they have released within the last year have been - for me - unusable. They cause hard lockups on two similar computer with oldish Radeons. The earliest proprietary drivers worked ok.

The last time I tried ATI proprietary drivers (a couple of weeks ago) I was not able to get Xv working, as mentioned above. OpenGL video worked fine. The drivers also occasionally locked my computer completely. which is NOT ok.

I'd read the ATI release notes to see if there are some compability problems with any of the software and/or hardware you have and your Radeon model. You could also try to update to the latest software or try installing older versions of the ATI drivers.

Thanks for the reply, so Xv wont work? Is it possible to use the --ovt=OpenGL option to use opengl as an overlay then if I can figure out why opengl wont load textures? Yes ati drivers on linux are a real pain in the a$$ as you said. Even their windows drivers suck. Ati has decent hardware but imho very poor drivers and very poor technical support. I've never had a single problem with any nVidia drivers on any system and their tech support is much nicer. I don't think I will buy an ati card again, but after getting this $135 card I really hope to at least get opengl working properly. If so then I could migrate from my dual boot system to linux entirely. I don't have the exact error but it goes something like "error _glx_texture_allocate() failed" (going off of my memory)

Have a look here for the xv extension - didn't try it myself because I'll get rid of my ati card asap anyway.

http://www.stanchina.net/~flavio/deb...html#configure

Another problem I have with ati: even tho they say that swapping from a virtual console to X11 causing a hard freeze of X11 is "fixed" my computer still exhibits this behaviour and it is very annoying. Guess that is more of the incompatibilities of their drivers with the x1x00 series... sigh.

Dunno - my xserver does all kind of funny things in debian and works fine with gentoo.

Well I have it working for the most part except the OpenGL and Xv. Besides the crappy opengl performance and the Xv not working it seems fairly stable on slackware linux 11. I have a dual head configuration. The only time i encounter locking or freezing is when I try to shut down the X server or switch X sessions. I don't do this that often though so its really no big deal for me but I really wish OpenGL would work.

There was a discussion about the installation and support (I tried to install this on SUSE 10.2 but it is not SUSE specific problem).

I have put there the steps which way I installed the driver - including patch and so on for kernel 2.6.20.

You can download the tar.bz2 file unpack it and rebuild the driver yourself. Let me know if it worked or any help was needed.

https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=257060