I've heard a lot of bad things about the linux ATI drivers, but they've all been generic. What makes them bad? Because after all the lockups with my nvidia card and no answers out there as to why it's locking up and how I can fix it AND be able to play OpenGL games, I'm almost ready to switch to an ATI card to see if that's any better.

ati does not actively support linux as much as nvidia but with a little work you can get the latest ati drivers for linux setup.
Regards
Sharke

Even with OpenGL and everything?

For ati drivers take a look here http://www.suseforums.net/lofiversio...hp/t16092.html
And for nvidia http://www.suse.de/~sndirsch/nvidia-...ler-HOWTO.html

Regards
Sharke

Hey, before jumping in and buying a new video card (although a 5500 is getting on a bit), lets have a crack at fixing your current issues. I had some problems with my old 5 series Geforce overheating. When it got too hot it'd freeze just like you mentioned, now putting it in another computer would give different results, the other case might have better ventilation or is simply in a cooler location.

Try installing this. Run glxgears for maybe 30 secs to 1 min and then close it and run nvclock -i as root. It'll report some detailed info about your card, including temperature. See what it says. Crack open your BIOS and check your AGP Aperture settings, your motherboard book should give you some info regarding what these should be. Also, run cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep WW to see if it's raising any warnings about your video without you knowing.

There are a million things to try to fix your existing problem, no need to jump onto buying a new card just yet.

I took a guess a while ago and changed the Aperture settings to 128 (the size of my card) and I havn't had any lockups yet. ^^

(Accidental double post. LQ was messing up.)

Thats great hope your lockups are over
Regards
Sharke

I know the saying goes "If it ain't broke don't fix it", but your aperture size should be half the memory of your card. So I'm presuming it's a 128MB card, your aperture size should be 64.

OK, it looks like your problem got resolved, but in case you (or anyone else reading this post) are wondering, the biggest problem with the ATI drivers (as far as I can determine) is this:

They assume your pre-installation settings are the same as theirs.

Having said that, most of the main problems have been identified with working solutions in the readme for the ATI installer. But the biggest problem between this and nVidia, is that nVidia just looks for the necessary pre-installation settings and changes them as necessary. (At least, this is how I understand it. I don't know for sure as I have never had an nVidia card)

There are also a few bugs left with the ATI drivers, but they are much, much better than the beginning of 2005 when they were (I believe) first released. Of course, SOME bugs are to be expected. After all, is there really such thing as flawless code?

Steve

So, do ATI drivers support full OpenGL?? Do they get similar GLXGEARS scores when compaired to their nVidia counterparts?