Published at LXer:

AMD and ATI weren't fibbing. The graphics company, now part of Advanced Micro Devices, has released high-end Catalyst 7.10 graphics drivers for the Linux desktop. ATI, once AMD bought it, promised to be more friendly to Linux desktop users. While this release still contains some proprietary bits, it does offer advanced 3D features for Linux users who are willing to use proprietary drivers.

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Good news, I think(?). I like ATI card's performance more than Nvidia. However, there is one thing that I hate with ATI cards and always will: Catalyst Control Center, or CCC.

It is a system hog, slow and above all else, buggy. Tried right now to install the latest drivers in a XP machine. Took me quite a long time to get it to work. I installed it and everything went ok, apparently. Upon reboot, it crashed itself with a "mom.exe" error. After some reading, it looks like I needed to update my Net framework to 2.0. Did so. Rebooted and guess what? CCC trows another error: "Could not load file or assembly 'CLI.Implementation". I thought the installation of CCC was somewhat broken, so I did a repair on the Windows Control Panel. Didn't help. Went to google for the error and came to this page:

http://www.driverheaven.net/mobility...ching-ccc.html

It worked great. However, this is more work than an average Windows user want to do. I even thought about getting the older driver instead. This is a common problem that ATI users always have had and that AMD FAILED to fix as of yet.

I hope that the "Catalyst Control Center - Linux Edition." will be less buggy and useful at last, but I would not count on it. ATI and its drivers are the wrong horses to bet your money on...

Just install the drivers without the CCC and ATI works pretty good. Yeah many rants and many curses sent to ATI for that .net crap. Everyone I know that plays games has had something bad to say about CCC and ati. The sad thing is that its bringing there rep down as a manufacture even tho they may have better cards the issues with there software could seal there fate as losers in the overall market.


As for Linux drivers I have givin up long ago to try and get there drivers to function properly. Mesa and there drivers get along like 2 siblings locked in a car for more then 6 hours to say the least of it. Intel accelerated graphics drivers do no better. They offer a "sort of" 3d acceleration as most of the driver does not support alot of visuals for some reason. Windows performance vrs Linux performance on Intel drivers is not a contest as they just plain suck in Linux are hard to find and get working properly. Nvidia still shines as being the best performer for Linux drivers even if they are closed source drivers at least they work and I think that is the most important thing. You cannot expect in a competitive market as the graphics cards are to release specs on anything and honestly even tho ati did that has there been any development on making open source drivers anyway ?

Ill stop ranting now