I know this subject has been discussed TONS of times, but after quickly checking the installation instructions on ATI's website for their drivers, it seems they are quite easy to install - almost as easy as NVIDIA.

So, what is the catch?

And why does everyone think ATI (as of now) are so bad?

Anyway, I want to know if buying an ATI Radeon X1600 Pro, is a good idea. Can I easily install the drivers on Slackware 10.2 (or maybe 11.0).

Thanks,

Kourosh

I here Linux support has gotten better for ATI but is still not up to par with NVIDIA. Better to support the company that's been with us since the beginning in my opinion.

regards,
...aaron

ATi's support isn't as good as nVidia's. That's the true.

You got mainstream, common ATi hardware, an ATI Radeon X1600 Pro card. But try to get working old ATi cards or a laptop ATi card. That's a real pain in the a**.

I wouldn't recommend an ATi card for linux use, not at the current time nor in the future.

You must be new here. *GRIN*

Seriously though, ATI is notorious for delivering buggy drivers, and dropping support discontinued-yet-still-on-store-shelves chipsets, and the older-deprecated-but-not-yet-dropped chipsets which ATI purports to support, you might get 2D support but no 3D. Also, I have yet to see GOOD composite performance in KDE with any ATI card. Also, with some ATI chipsets, the open source driver actually provides significantly better performance than their proprietary driver.

The installer stinks.

The installer does not deal with multiple ATI cards in one box very well.
The installer does not deal well with multi-port video cards, whereas will NVidia's driver not only detect two connected monitors, but will guide you through configuring them as you please.

But this is to be expected. NVidia is essentially SGI's former graphics engineering team, where as much of ATI is the old Diamond Multimedia video card team. Diamond SUCKED when it came to Linux support, and ATI is not much better.

Also: NONE of ATI's drivers for Linux support their tuner cards, including the All in Wonder cards.

i had an ATI 1600 ( Sapphire 512 MB).
tried to install the drivers on my -current setup.
the installer worked, but the driver itself didn't work.

then i made a fresh Slack-10.2 install on an empty partition.
same story.

luckily, my neighbour was looking for a new graph. card for his windos machine.
so...he's got the ati, and i bought an nvidia6800 ( asus 512MB).

now both cards are working nice and everybody's happy.
(needless to say: the nvidia was working ok the first time i tried...)

egag

That's why when i choose a laptop, i always look on the VGA card first. As long it's NVidia-based, it's OK for me
Since i will not have problems installing the NVidia driver rather than ATI's driver

Check out my DRI thread in my sig....

What I want you to look at is the steps involved with Nvidia vs. ATI.

Then you can come to your own conclusion.

it's not only the steps involved.
the ati driver is just no good on some hardware.

---------------
Then you can come to your own conclusion.
---------------

i did

egag

for me, I love my ATI works awesome in winxp and slackware, and the drivers go in on slack kernels 2.4.31 and it's testing kernel. There is only 5 steps (or 6) to get it to work.

for me, I like that ATI builds it's own cards, they will send you a new one. they pick up the phone if questions. nvidia to me, has been a nightmare in the past. manufacturer's doing weird things to cards.

I'd rather pay $10 more and get the manufacturer to build it for me to be honest. And I'm really impressed that they are coming around to supporting gnu/linux.

Altho it is truly a shame that they have code in their drivers that they cannot get a blessing from the original writer's such that they can gpl their driver / code to the gnu/linux community.

Hopefully that will change.

I truly believe if they did we'd get insane performance out of our ATI card's like we do in the windows world using drivers from omega, dna, etc.

No one mentioned this but if you are not looking for bleeding edge performance older Radeon cards are easy to get 3D.

One difference between ATI and Nvidia is that ATI accelerated drivers do filter their way into Xorg. Unfortunately the drivers for the latest cards typically take 1 or two 2 X-windows releases to show up. For Xorg 6.8 Radeon cards upto 9250 had 3d acceleration.
Just uncomment the dri sections in xorg.conf and presto 1300 fps(my Radeon 9250 with 256DDR ram). I do not know the exact version that Xorg 6.9/7.0 supports but I believe that it now supports up to Radeon 9600. NVidea does not provide their 3d driver to the xorg/xfree developers ever.

So, if your were wondering what is the easiest card to get 3d acclerated graphics on it would be an older ATI card that is supported by the version of xorg that you are using.

I have two ATI's w/slack10.2's default xorg. I don't run slack current.

Radeon AIW 9700 and Radeon 9600XT both get DRI as of ATI driver 8.19 series on slackware's stock xorg server.

Presently the 9600xt is sitting with kernel 2.6.17.4 and latest ATI driver 8.26

All fine here, and I'm owning these newbies in UT really good

Oh also my cards are built by ATI, they're not 3rd party cards.

ATI drivers install easily as long as you have the kernel sources prepared to build modules.

However, I've always had problems with my ati radeon 9200. When I first installed the ati drivers, I couldn't run any 3D game because the driver didn't support powersave and my PSU was too weak to provide enough power to the GPU.
When ati fixed that, I wanted to run some games with cedega. What I noticed in the cedega man page was that cedega works with nvidia out of the box, while ati needs some extra digging in the configuration and command line parameters, not to mention that many games don't work with cedega+ati while they do work with cedega+nvidia. Finally none of the games I tried worked. (with driver 8.24.xx I managed to run BF1942 but nothing else)
Then I wanted to turn on Xorg composite extensions and guess what; ati didn't support 3D+composite at the same time making composite extensions too slow to use.
Now, ati's current drivers (8.26.xx) have a serious opengl bug when used with radeon 9100,9200,9250 but the working drivers (8.24.xx) don't install with my brand new kernel (suse 10.1, linux 2.6.16.13) so I currently don't have 3D acceleration.

I've had enough. Now, I am seriously thinking of buying an nvidia card in the very near future (especially if this opengl bug isn't fixed until the next driver release).

In conclusion, DON'T BUY AN ATI CARD FOR USE WITH LINUX because ati linux driver is still very immature.

EDIT: I forgot to mention their lack of support. In the release notes of driver 8.26.18, in the known issues area it says:
(This is the opengl bug I mentioned before). However, I've searched many times in their knowledge base and there is no topic discussing that and doing a search by topic number returns this:
which is completely irrelevant as I don't have SELinux.
I also have to mention that one day after the driver was released, this topic number didn't exist. I found this topic today.

don't forget to mention the complete lack of bsd support

That's true as hell. It happened to me with an ATI Radeon RV100 QY [Radeon 7000/VE]. I just hate that card. I could get around 350 FPS in glxgears with the VESA driver, but less than 200 FPS with the "superb" ATI driver (which was a real pain to get working).

Now I have an EVGA e-GeForce 6600GT ~ 128 Mb GDDR3 RAM, which delivers more than 7800 FPS in glxgears. Not the proper benchmark tool I know, but I can play Doom3, Quake4, UT and UT2004 without issues (check this link for linux installers)

Oooh boy.. I need to set up my internet connection again at home I miss those nights online