Official ATI 3.9.0.0 Driver availible
 

www.ati.com

Works for me like a charm on Radeon 9700pro, Mandrake 10.0

Have fun.

Thanks for the heads up--I'm on my way to pick it up (hope it's in Portage already ;) ).

Woo-hoo! This ought to make a lot of people happy...
Interesting... no "Fixed in this driver" link on the driver page. Cool (since 3.7.6 actually worked quite well for me).

Glad to see they're not sitting on their hands over there. Gotta check the GATOS project and see if there's any hope I might get TV-in for my AIW 9800 SE before I die of old age.... :(

Hmm, so ATI came out with 3.9.0, but is it worth it?

Has anyone currently upgraded or installed the 3.9.0 drivers and got any performance increases (mainly on ut2004)? Also, does this driver work with Fedora Core 2?

hmm. maybe this driver will give me more luck

I installed it last night. Works great.
Well... it worked... the games loaded, but I didn't get a chance to test it completely.

However, the graphical ATI Control Panel stopped working.
Something to do with the libpng package. File Not Found. hmmm... :scratch:

Don't get me wrong. At the command line, everything works well.
Maybe I did something wrong. :p

Mathieu ,
did u install it on Drake 10?

I have been unable to get the latest 3.9.0 drivers working even in Mandrake with 2.6.3 kernel and XFree86 4.3.0.1.

The baffling thing is that they install fine, without a single error in fact, and fglrxconfig saves to the right location but when it comes to the restart I am left with Mesa GL drivers still.

Something is very wrong.

Any ideas?

Did you force install the drivers? They're supposed to overwrite the Mesa drivers (at least that's the usual reason they refuse to install without forcing; because the Mesa drivers conflict...obviously ;) ).

wheres my IGP 320M support...:crys:

No, I use SuSE 9.0.

@ Wodeh
could you please send me your /var/log/XFree86.0.log, maybe I can help you out.

Well, I finally managed to boot with new drivers running. No idea what I did though.

Shame there is nothing actually fixed in them. I still get the sporadic freezes which I ONLY get when using fglrx, regardless of what settings I use (I have tried persistantly)

I have some sporadic freezing too, but I assumed that was a conflict with boinc (the new beta test distributed computing client for SETI@Home), but it only lasts a couple of seconds, and I only notice it when I'm playing NWN.

What are the symptoms of your freezing, and what have you tried to do to fix it?

my freezes are abolute, ie: i have to hard reset

I have tried everything to fix the problem. Nearly.

Anyway, I upgraded to 10.0 official and will see how it goes from there.

In the mean time, could someone tell me where to get this "graphical" ATI control panel. Fglrxconfig is lengthy and wants me to respecify EVERYTHING every time I want to change a single setting and can not be bothered to edit x11config manually.

fireglcontrol (in a terminal, works for me as non-root user).

Should have been installed with the drivers.

Doesn't do much except help you change color (RGB balance) and configure dual-head output.

I had the same problem. Enter this into your console as root:

ln -s /usr/lib/libpng12.so /usr/lib/libpng10.so.0


That should sort you out.

Thanks, motub.






----Update----

$ glxgears
16754 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3350.800 FPS
19486 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3897.200 FPS
19480 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3896.000 FPS
19482 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3896.400 FP

$ fgl_glxgears
3384 frames in 5.0 seconds = 676.800 FPS
3535 frames in 5.0 seconds = 707.000 FPS
3498 frames in 5.0 seconds = 699.600 FPS
3467 frames in 5.0 seconds = 693.400 FPS

$ uptime
23:47:49 up 7:35, 0 users, load average: 2.01, 2.96, 3.16

So far, so good. However I did have to restart X as my graphics performance in both glxgears and fgl_glxgears became very choppy (probably due to a runaway process more than anything else)

These FPS results are with a Radeon 9700 Pro (128mb), Pentium 4 3.6 and 512mb DDR.

Using Mandrake 10.0 Official and latest (3.9.0) FGLRX from Ati.com.

It certainly seems to favour:
a) A clean install
b) Mandrake 10.0 Official

But only time will tell.

I have Fedora Core 2 installed and managed to get the ATI 3.9 drivers installed successfully. However when I start X in runlevel 5 I lose signal to my monitor.

I have a ATI Radeon 9200 SE card. I don't seem to have any errors in Xorg.0.log when I startup. Any ideas?

I'm still having the same random freezes, as I told in a previous topic. The new drivers didn't fix anything.

Two thumbs down for ATI. :(

From the release notes I wasn't even able to understand, if these drivers now support 2.6.x-kernels also? It had no version numbers for supported kernels (just "newer kernels supported") and the FAQ still says 2.4.x-kernel is required.

Make, what distribution are you running? What hardware?

The closest I have come to a "stable" system is my full upgrade and reinstall. Took maybe 10 minutes to install the official version of Mandrake and a day or so to download it.

There *IS* one solution to these problems, just install a 2.4.x kernel alongside your 2.6.x, install fglrx to that kernel and set up lilo with the alternate boot options.

It is a huge compromise on your part but it should get things working.

Going to try upping my AGP mode now. If I never come back then something blew up.

Why is it a huge compromise? I can't say that I've noticed some gigantic leap in functionality over the 2.4 series kernels (but then again, I'm using relatively low-level hardware, as you can see from my sig). It's nice not to have to install ALSA anymore, and it's nice to have ide-cd, and it's really nice that supermount finally works right, and it's good to know that I can upgrade to SATA and have a hope that it will work properly, but seriously... what's the big?

As for the ATI problems that you "guys" are having, I'm really thinking that this is either a hardware problem or a kernel configuration problem, as I have used the ATI drivers from versions 3.2.8 through 3.9.0 (but avoid 3.7.0, they're junk) under both 2.4 series and 2.6 series kernels, under Mandrake (9.2 and 10.0 RC2), Morphix (Debian), Slackware, and Gentoo, and the worst thing that ever happened to me was that X wouldn't start because something was misconfigured. Random freezing such as you describe sounds much more fundamental than a simple driver issue.

I would refer you to the ATI Radeon Linux How-To to confirm that your kernel is properly configured for driver installation, and that the driver itself is properly installed.

I just received my brand new Saphire 9600XT last friday , it will replace my aging ATI 8500LE.
I made a plsin clean install of Fedora Core1 and Slack9.1 then installed the Nforce2 drivers on both distros.
Then I installed ATI 3.9.0 on both distros ( using the external AGPGART )
Results:
1) The drivers work fine with both Fedora and slack " direct rendering: YES
my FPS with glxgears is around 3000

2) problem: after installing teh ATI drivers, my Slack distro lost the onboard sound ( I have a lot of messages about missing nforce2 libraries )

That's the first impression.

I installed the 3.9.0 drivers from ATI, as opposed to my previous 3.7.6 drivers. They are MUCH better. Still, I hear Nvidia is kicking ATI butt when it comes to Linux...

I will test them, I have a 9500Pro@NForce 2 :(
At 3.7.6, my old GeForce brought more performance than the Radeon... much more... :(

motub, given that you probably know more about linux than I ever will, I am following your advice and building a custom 2.6.3 kernel with everything I need neatly compiled in so it has no chance of not loading.

If *THIS* does not stop my random hard-freezes then I will just have to find and compile the intel-agp I am missing from 2.4.23.

It is certainly an issue caused by the fglrx driver, as it simply does not happen unless the driver is enabled and functioning. Good enough reason to blame it on fglrx in my opinion.

Now, how long will this damned thing take to compile?

Wodeh i let mine run overnight. i got tired of waiting.. when i got up the next day it was finally done..
and it still didnt fix my problem.. i still am showing mesa

are you guys using the rpm -i --force fglrx.rpm command?

rpm -i --force
but when i run fglrxinfo
it says mesa.. blah blah blah..

Maybe I should have spent another half an hour unchecking all the redundant modules I will never use.

Looks like I am going to have to leave this going overnight, compiling reams of useless crap...


DAMN

Just as I am speaking it comes up with:

if [ -r System.map ]; then /sbin/depmod -ae -F System.map 2.6.3-7mdkcustom; fi
WARNING: /lib/modules/2.6.3-7mdkcustom/kernel/drivers/video/neofb.ko needs unknown symbol tosh_smm
make: *** [_modinst_post] Error 1

I am guessing this is more useless crap, useless crap which halted my compile no less. Gah!

i think i am gonna try and switch to suse 9.1 pro

That's very odd-- if you were running Gentoo, I would say that you had not done an opengl-update ati... but I don't know what the analagous command would be under Mandrake (and that command would be performed automatically anyway, it being Mandrake).

What I'm thinking is that you have not used the --force switch properly (I'll look it up in a minute, but I have to use Google as I don't have rpm installed :o ). The thing is, if you have Mesa already installed, and you try to install the fglrx RPM normally, it should refuse to install (because the 3D libraries conflict with the Mesa libraries).

Naturally, if you use the --force command to "force" the fglrx libraries to overwrite the Mesa libraries, the Mesa libraries should no longer be there.

So something is clearly going wrong, since you have managed to install the fglrx drivers without overwriting the Mesa libraries, which should not even be possible. So let's look at man rpm:
The only thing I can see here is that perhaps an -i(vh) --force is not actually overwriting/removing Mesa, whereas a -U(vh) --force supposedly would.

Yeah, it's thin, I agree. But it might be worth running the install the same way as you have been, but using -ivh instead of just -i to see what is really going on (verbose output).

I think the best thing to do would be to uninstall the Mesa libraries, then (re-)install the fglrx drivers, but that might turn out to be more problem than solution (if Mesa takes half of X with it when uninstalled). Sorry not to be more help.

motub,
dude i followed ur instructions precisely as for kernel upgrade and it went thru flawlessly. .but there is a million posts with people having issues with that friggen mandrake 10 .. nforce 2 and an ati card..
its a shame.. i like the feel of mandrake.. its friendly.. and easy to do. if i can do firefox.. and plugins for flash. and that crap works.. without help from LQ..
but this driver crap has me stumped..
its an ati problem it has to be..
everything else works fine..
cept no monitor drivers (viewsonic a72f)
ticked me off lol

The only times fglrx fails to load for me is when either agpgart (if using external) and/or intel-agp (or equivilent) fails to load.
In these cases fglrx also fails to load and I am left with mesagl in fglrxinfo.

modprobe agpgart (if using external agp gart module and not compiled into kernal)
and
modprobe intel-agp (or your chipset equivilent, eg: via-agp)


[edit] well f*** me, I removed all unescessary crap from the kernal and it compiled in 5 minutes flat.

[edit] no wait, I was looking at my other terminal window in which I had just done a lsmod. Shows how much I know about linux!

I think so... Just to save you some extra work looking, I've run make menuconfig to find that module.

Device Drivers=>Graphics Support=>NeoMagic Display support is the setting that you want to turn off.

Hope this helps.

how much different is gentoo from mandrake.. i have looked at screen shots.. but for a nub point of view

Thanks for the help, I have unchecked *EVERYTHING* which I "feel" is non essential. Including firewire, scsi, sata, ... You get the point.

Everything...is...running...so..slowly

Damn compile.

Anyway, I will be back most probably tomorrow with a "progress report"

From one point of view, not different at all, because they're both Linux, so screenshots wouldn't tell you much-- what can you take screenies of but the desktop and programs running, and they are going to be the same (KDE and Mozilla are not different under Gentoo than they are under Mandrake).

From what I guess you mean by "a nub point of view", they're very different, because Gentoo doesn't have Control Centers and Wizards and RPMDrake. You need to be comfortable with creating config files by hand during the install, using the command line to perform administrative tasks, have the time to compile (almost) everything by hand from source, and the patience and willingness to read the copious documentation as to how to do this and how to optimize all this compiling for your system.

If you don't know your ls from your cp or your less from your grep, it might be kinda hellish, but if you do (or you're ready to learn by jumping in the deep end), it's a great system that ultimately winds up being easier in many ways than the binary distro way of doing things.

But I cut my teeth on Mandrake, and if I ever went back to a binary distro, it would be the one I would choose, so I'm not knocking MDK at all.

Well, thanks VERY much to motub I am now running my own custom 2.6.3-7mdk kernel with intel-agp and agpgart compiled in so they can not escape.

I booted up (second time lucky after using kernalinstall) with a nice 'classic' black screen (no graphical mandrake boot, sob!) and executed fglrxinfo to find my radeon drivers ready to go.

I ran fgl_glxgears and got:

3867 frames in 5.0 seconds = 773.400 FPS
4256 frames in 5.0 seconds = 851.200 FPS
3877 frames in 5.0 seconds = 775.400 FPS
3564 frames in 5.0 seconds = 712.800 FPS
3637 frames in 5.0 seconds = 727.400 FPS
3637 frames in 5.0 seconds = 727.400 FPS
3641 frames in 5.0 seconds = 728.200 FPS
3641 frames in 5.0 seconds = 728.200 FPS
3610 frames in 5.0 seconds = 722.000 FPS

That is an extra ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY frames per second on the peak compared to my results posted earlier in this thread.

Now, I have only just booted this minute (or five minutes ish now) so only time will tell whether my freeze problem has gone.

But I must say, to all those linux newcomers (like me, although I have been using linux on and off for a few years now) if you have not compiled a custom kernel yet - try it!

[edit] Has anyone else noticed this, my PS2 optical wheelmouse is INFINATELY smoother and more responsive in kernel 2.6.3 than it was in 2.4.23, and for some reason 2.4.23 detected it as usb? [/edit[

You're very very much welcome, I'm glad that somebody has gotten their drivers correctly installed (have you seen all the threads from Fedora users who are having seemingly unsolveable problems?).

I'm also glad that you've discovered the benefits of customizing your kernel-- it's the second scariest thing on every new user's list (after partitioning), but all it really is is a very long list of multiple-choice questions (with an included cheat sheet in the Help files, which are really great).

By the way, if you want your bootsplash back, it's not hard... you just need to tell LiLO to use it (as long as you did compile framebuffer support into the kernel... who knows what you left out in your ruthless purge ;) ).

The best reference I know is Gentoo Forums :: View topic - The Gentoo Framebuffer, Bootsplash & Grubsplash How-To-- as you see it's for Gentoo, but since what is mostly involved is configuring the kernel and LiLO (or GRUB), you can adapt or ignore the other Gentoo-specific instructions regarding how to install the bootsplash program (which should already be installed if you had a bootsplash before), and just use the ones for how to re-enable the bootsplash.

Have fun with your high FPS! Just don't play UT 2004 or Savage, or you will be cruelly disappointed, from what I hear. Neverwinter Nights, Tux Racer and what Wine games I've played look great though ;) .

I found a way to use the 4.3.0-3.9.0 driver from ATI.

I was getting an error the "count" was not recognized during the sh
make.sh portion of the install.

I went into the files as indicated by the error (one being the
firegl_public.c file) and changed the instance of "count" to "_count".
That did the trick. There was two files that needed this tweak. Both are
in the 2.6.x folder.

i am running FC2 Kernel 2.6.6-1.406 on a Dell Latitude D800 with
modified ATI 9600 from Dell inspiron 8600 laptop.

The only thing that I cannot get working now is fireglcontrol app. It
says the following:
fireglcontrol: error while loading shared libraries: libpng10.so.0:
cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Any ideas there?

I went into /usr/src/ATI and tried to compile the
fglrx_panel_sources.tgz on my own as ATI suggests (using Make) and I get
the following error:
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lqt

Any ideas on that one?

In any case, the fglrx driver is running great and I am using the 3.9.0
driver.

fglrxinfo gives me:
[root@localhost bin]# fglrxinfo
display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: MOBILITY RADEON 9600 Generic
OpenGL version string: 1.3 (X4.3.0-3.9.0)

and glxgears gives me:
11091 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2218.200 FPS
11091 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2218.200 FPS
11092 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2218.400 FPS
11093 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2218.600 FPS

With Fedora Core 1 I use rpm -ivh --force fglrx.... command
With Slackware 9.1 I use rpm -ivh --nodeps fglrx.... command

Install libpng.

Install qt to get the libraries you need. Run ldconfig after the two installs to update your shared libraries.

Hope this helps, and congratulations!

Savage runs absolutely beutifully on linux, the *ONLY* problem I have with it is that every time I attempt to play a bug in the mouse input causes me to start spinning out of control.

I do not *really* care enough about the bootsplash to lift a finger to get it back, black-screen-of-life looks pro' anyway!

I have been unable, so far, to install Neverwinter Nights as I only have the (english) windows discs, not a patched windows install or anything to linuxerize it.

Formatting my hard disk was the least scary thing. I splashed out on a brand new one primarily for linux. However when I first played with linux a few years ago I had the heart-thumping scare of Partition Magic.

Oh the days of Corel*COUGH*Linux and Mandrake 8.0


[edit] grrr, everything has broken again now, kernel 2.4.25 is the only one I can currently boot. My compiled kernel fails with some erroneous error right at boot time, I can not remember what it is now though "failed to locate install somethingorother".

Good for you; there's a thread somewhere else on these forums claiming that the framerates are abysmal. Maybe you should tell them how you did it.

That's all you need; register at the Bioware site (if you register your CD key, you can post on the NWN forums as a Game Owner, too) and get the Linux client binaries and patches from them (that's how I did it).

Neverwinter Nights: Neverwinter Nights For Linux

Don't panic. It worked, so it can work again-- and the problem is probably relatively minor, since something must have changed between the time that it worked and the time that it stopped. Whatever that is is what you have to change back--- but the real error message would be good, too :) .

This is sounding a bit like a hardware problem, though... what all do you have in that box, and what is the wattage of your PSU?

Using Xine and new ATI 3.9.0
 

Xine will only play using XShm and not Xv. If I switch to the stock 'radeon' driver, I can play the DVD in Xine using Xv as my output.
Any ideas on how to get Xv output with Xine using the ATI 3.9.0 driver?

Oh and BTW:

Solved ATI fireglcontrol problem.

Created symlink to libpng12.so.0.1.2.2 from libpng10.so.0




If you get a QT error (such as cannot locate -lqt) make a symlink



I got that error when I went to do a "make" on the Makefile from the fglrx_panel_sources.tgz

--After much searching I have found that the ATI drivers do not play nice with xinerama or XV.

--After much searching I have found that the ATI drivers do not play nice with xinerama or XV.

I have reinstall, recompiled (twice) and reinstalled fglrx.
It works, but it always has, the question is will it stay working.

On a side note Unreal 2k4 plays like crap, despite what I have heard of double FPS in linux.

I get more FPS in XP with higher overall detail and 4x anti aliasing + 16x anisotropic than I get in linux with normal everything and no FSAA or AF. Both at 1024*768.

when you recompiled...what settings did you use?
i have recompiled a few times..but always left in agpgart and radeon drivers...just in case.
Also, left in DRM support.

The radeon drivers do not work for cards above the 9200, iirc (it might be the 9000). If your card uses the R350 chipset, there is no point in having the old radeon drivers installed at all, and it might actually be a bad idea, insofar as it may conflict with the driver that actually works.

Kernel agpgart conflicts with the one installed with the driver, but you can leave it if you want to use it (you have to turn off the driver agpgart in the fglrxconfig and also make sure the kernel agpgart loads before the fglrx module if you want it to work).

I believe that DRM (kernel DRI) flatly conflicts with the driver and must be turned off in the kernel for the driver to work for 3D acceleration.

Again, I refer everyone to the ATI Radeon Linux How-To for kernel configuration instructions for all distros and installation instructions by distro.

OK, for everyone who's wondering how to enable OpenGL Overlay, and for those who have installed the fglrx drivers but are still seeing MESA in the fglrxinfo string, I found out how to fix it, because it just happened to me for the first time.

Long story of what happened; I won't bore you with it, but anyway it resulted in me looking at fglrxinfo and seeing the MESA string, and Neverwinter Nights suddenly reporting that it could not initialize the video device (!!!).

The driver was, however, loaded, according to lsmod.

Restarting the X server did not fix it, so I reran fglrxconfig. After going through all the various settings of my mouse and keyboard, etc, I came to "Application Profiles".

The default setting for this is "default"... but if you use the default, OpenGL Overlay will not be enabled (don't ask me; it seems stupid to me as well).

Anyway, when you get to this, you have to choose choice 2, "Individual Configuration of Capabilities". There's only one choice there... to turn on OpenGL Overlay.

Do so, then go ahead and take the defaults for everything else (except set the compatibility mode for Wine/WineX if you use them), unless your configuration needs something else (you use Dual-Head, for example).

Save it (I saved it over the previous file), then reboot.

That restored the ATI string to fglrxinfo, my XF86Config-4 looks like this

and NWN runs again (somewhat better, actually, than it had been doing of late).

Hope this helps somebody.