How has your experience been with ATI graphics on Slackware/Linux?
 

Me and my brother are going together on a pretty powerful computer.
He'll be running Windows 7 on it and I'll be running Slackware64.

The computer has ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics. I've heard bad things about ATI graphics drivers on Linux in the past, but have also heard that they have improved.

So to all Slackware users with ATI graphics:
How are the drivers working for you?
Would you recommend ATI graphics on Slackware?

EDIT
Also, 3d acceleration isn't that important to me. I'd like maybe KDE desktop effects to work, but I can live without them.

As long as the driver is stable and supports the resolution of my monitor, I'll be happy.

They are working, and video quality is improved, if not hugely faster. I have an obsolete (vintage 2008) r600. It's actually a RS690 in what I thought would be the best place - the Northbridge. Actually it's a lousy idea. They made the R600 obsolete in 2008 or maybe 2009. GE zooming drags; glxgears offers 390 fps @ 99% cpu load with
X claiming 46% cpu (Yes, I know, that's nearly 150%, but it is a twin core). My other box has a highly obsolete NV MX-440 (vintage last millenium) with a whole 64MB of ram on agp; It does 2200 fps in glxgears on nvidia's closed source driver.

I wouldn't recommend ATI. I would tolerate them as long as you're not a gamer. Tests probably available on www.phoronix.com, and windows will probably be better.

With the HD3200, you won't be gaming much anyway.

Using the open source drivers that will load by default in Slackware64-13.1, KDE desktop effects work just fine. I have a system with this video chipset running MythTV at home, and it has no problems displaying at 720p or 1080p resolutions.

Thanks guys.

Yeah, I don't plan on doing any gaming with this computer.
And I could always upgrade the graphics card later if I wanted to.
The rest of the specs are pretty nice: AMD Phenom II X4 810, 6 GB DDR3 RAM, 1TB hard drive...

I'll mostly be using it for building things that would take a long time on my netbook, like KDE4, the Linux kernel, maybe mess around with Gentoo, LFS, etc.

The problems you may have heard about with the ati graphics are not due to any slackware problem. I have the same graphics card as you on a acer aspire laptop that my kids use. They have been playing around with fedora, ubuntu, mandriva etc all the same problem, it was a xorg situation due to xorg not the distro.

I've used slackware 11 and 12.x with a laptop with the ATI Radeon XPress 200M chipset. To get 3d I went with the flgrx driver and after some fiddling with xorg.conf got it working ok, certainly well enough to use google earth smoothly. Never tried it for gaming.

For contrast: my nvidia graphics driven machines all worked fine, though one did need the proprietary driver to work at all. The intel driver on my asus eee pc 1000H worked out the box, but isn't up to the job of letting me run google earth smoothly, though I know the hardware can do it.

So all in all, my (non-gaming) experience has been good with all chipsets, but not without problems.

I can't find an iCore based laptop with an nvidia card. The big laptop makers (thinking mainly Dell and HP here) seem to have ATI cards in all of their laptops. This is the main thing holding me back from pulling the trigger and buying a new laptop.

I bought an HD4670 in October 2008 on the expectation that the open source drivers would be reaching parity with fglrx within a year or so. It's been 18 months, and I've just now been able to get basic 3D with the open source radeon driver. Compositing effects and OpenGL screensavers work fine, but Neverwinter Nights (an 8 year old game) is unplayable. The frame rate is pretty good, but it's full of graphics glitches. I've tried the fglrx (10.5) driver, and it improves games but the desktop is sluggish. Resizing windows is jerky, and compositing effects are constantly stuttering.

I went back to the radeon driver and gave up on games since I wasn't really playing anything anyway. I've noticed a lot of graphics glitches in Qt apps like Konqueror, Okular, and Digikam. When scrolling pages of text, lines or entire paragraphs disappear. In Konqueror (file management), I get these black rectangles that appear when I scroll through the folder tree. Digikam makes a mess of the thumbnails in the main window when I scroll through an album.

I'm about to just buy a basic NVidia G210 for $45 and put the ATI in the closet for another year or more. The NVidia doesn't have the same 3D performance (on paper), but for what I'm using it for it would be fine and lower power consumption too. In practice, it would probably have similar or better performance also. I gave ATI a chance because of all the documentation that AMD released, but I've lost my patience with this card and both drivers. Unless you want to get involved with developing or testing the radeon driver, or you have an issue with NVidia's proprietary driver, I'd avoid ATI for now.

I bought an HD4670 in Feburary 2010, not because I had to, but my system of approximately 7 years was having power supply issues and did so as part of an upgrade. I chose the card because I saw that 3D support looked like it achieved stability in the Mesa driver, and it was the cheapest card for the performance out then. At the time, Mesa 7.8 was nearing release, and I am now on 7.9-dev. The frame rates in the games I have, have increased tremendously, and could play some newer GL 2.0 games that I could not before (in Mesa even!). I have not seen any rendering errors.

I use Xfce with compositing on, and the thing just flies. There are no graphical problems. I tried out KDE4 to see how it was handled there, and while the screen rendering correctly, it was a little slow. I think KDE is just slow.

I am about ready to try 2.6.35-rc kernels for the new power management patches for ATI cards. They are getting this now thanks to the AMD developers and the docs that are available. My hope is that my card will run a little cooler. I am watching what the testers are saying.

If you were to buy an r600/r700 class card, you will get 3D in the radeon open source driver that is stable and decent for casual use. 3D support is good with Mesa 7.9 and kernel 2.6.35 both in development except for demanding 3D games. I really don't get the point of even trying fglrx anyhow.

The long term issue is drivers and support. ATI is known to stop updating their linux drivers after 1-2 years. I have an ATI card sitting in my drawer due to this.

What it means for me : I can't install the latest slackware or xorg. This has greater significance than 3d performance or games. Unless they pull up their socks on this issue, I won't use their hardware anymore. Use Nvidia for linux, it's headache-free!

nvidia can hardly be called headache free. Just wait till you start getting NVRM XiD errors, and nvidia's only response is to tell you to use the latest drivers (even though you already are) and the latest computer BIOS (even though you already are). That's assuming they respond at all.

Stumbled upon a PC with a ATI Radeon 9200 Pro yesterday. First attempt to get X (slackware 13.1) working failed. Gave up after doing a Google on ATI + linux. ATI (AMD's) website has a 'driver' dating 2006 which fails and fails and fails to install: First discoverd that although I choose x86, I get directed to a 64bit driver downloadpage, after solving that by hand, I got .rpm's or a installer ( .run ) from which the later says ( logged in as root ) I do not have enough privilages..

Errr. Simply installing Slackware 13.1 and running 'startx' should have gotten you working.

Nope. Startx gave me lots-o errors,. which I do not have at hand here, but anyways: KDE showed up, with the harddisk getting from blur to sharp, and then returning me to the console.
( I remember some lines with 'TV' in them, where I think it might be trying the TV out? )
Then I tried xorgsetup, which looked liked it worked, garbled the screen between colordepth choice and keyboard layout, finished, got an xorg.conf ( without any resolutions mentioned, but with a proper detection of my monitor ) and still, startx give me the same 'shit'.

I did a install of 13.0 ( DVD ), update via slackpkg ( incl the nice libata switchover experience :) ) and then it failed. Will try a fresh and clean 13.1 install if you think this might be a solution.

All I can say is that the 9200 has been supported by the open source drivers for many many years. I don't have a radeon GPU that old to test with, so I guess you could have hit a bug in the driver.

Adam

My guess is a bug. I was using a Radeon 9200 up until I switched, during which I was under slackware 13.0, and 13.1's current. In KDE, it is pretty slow if you have effects turned on, so there could be problems there.

I'll maybe try a brandnew installation.. I might just throw a nvidia GeForce card at it :) (will try to remember to keep u posted if the brand new installation works)

It's simple. ATI has far better and cheaper (and less power-hungry) hardware right now. They're beating nVidia senseless, and it's to the point that most systems or motherboards aren't even shipping with nVidia anymore. So if you run Windows, get an ATI card, no question. In Linux, it's a different story and it's all about the drivers. As long as you are not using a bleeding edge kernel then the proprietary nVidia drivers are usually perfectly fine...I've had three different nVidia cards (two integrated and one discrete) with no problems at all, whatsoever -- though if you run bleeding edge kernels, you'll encounter issues. Sticking with Slackware stable will probably make life easy for you. For ATI, you can attempt to use the (crappy) proprietary drivers and hope for the best (again, probably can't use a bleeding edge kernel) or you can (*AT THIS POINT IN TIME*) go bleeding-edge kernel, mesa, xorg, the works and try your hand at the open source radeon drivers. For open source drivers, they're fantastic -- but they're not going to 'just work' with 3d acceleration much of the time and you may need to fiddle new versions of software (and it is not for the faint of heart yet). For the future, ATI is looking bright. As of right now, and the past few years, nVidia is just much easier and with better performance on Linux (but certainly not in Windows).

With the notable exception of the nouveau drivers (which are just as bad as [well, worse than] the ATI open source drivers in terms of setting it up properly, and certainly worse in terms of performance), the sheer number and detail of ATI threads on this forum (often with less-than-easy solutions) is frightening, whereas most nVidia problems are related to a bleeding-edge kernel (in -current, for example), trying to use nouveau, or trying to misuse the proprietary drivers.

I know you are heavily interested in ATI and you certainly are knowledgeable adamk75, but the fact remains that right now, nVidia is just better for Linux despite the worse hardware.

That may by your opinion, certainly, but my experience with nvidia and their amazingly unstable drivers differs entirely from what you are saying.

Adam

Thank you everyone for sharing your experiences with ATI on Linux.

I think I will still buy the computer, but I'll be prepared to buy a new video card if there are problems.

My box:
Ati 2600XT 256 DDR3
Atlon X2 5200
2GB DDR2
Slackware64-current, kernel 2.6.35-rc2 #2 SMP PREEMPT
glxgears from 1295 to 1595... in box,
in full screan (Ful HD 1920X1080) from 93-103 FPS...

I my self do not have an ATI video card, but I plan to buy a new laptop, so I am considering the hardware and my attention was drawn by this thread.

Today I by chance entered a computer shop and took a look at the laptops. There were HP, Acer and Dell, many of them with ATI Radeon video cards, shipping with Ubuntu Linux and KDE Desktop. I asked the system admins if there had been any problems with Linux and the ATI video cards. The answer was: "No, with Ubuntu and ATI there are no problems at all".

Regards,

Martin

the windows guy where I work bought some dell optiplex 760 for using as our desktops last year: he added to them an ati 3450 (for visual pleasure?).
after some struggling to make it work with 13.0 (when it came out it got 2.6.29 kernel and ati supported only 2.6.28) and -current I removed it from the pci-e slot and since then I'm using the intel motherboard-integrated chipset: this enforced my beliefs to never buy ati hardware.
on the opposite side I've always had nvidia at home (as I play enemy territory) and never had a problem, also with bleeding edge kernels (always found patches on nvidia forum).

just my 2 cent.

No offense, but the HD3450 worked fine with fglrx in Slackare 13.0 OOTB. Just running the driver installer with '--buildpkg Slackware/All' with the latest drivers available at the time 13.0 was release created slackware packages that could be installed and worked fine (with a HD3450, HD4350, and HD4850 on three separate machines here).

-current did have problems for a month or two.

Adam

Is there a database somewhere which records hardware that works out of the box with slackware or linux in general? Maybe we can setup a sticky poll right here in the forums. The data will be invaluable in future, especially considering many use slackware on older hardware. Hopefully this will alleviate the apprehension many feel during software upgrade or hardware purchase.

My own experience : video cards and wireless are the top grouses when trying to install a new distro.

adam, I tried that at the time (I used it with pain for some months), but I remember well that I had to downgrade the slackware stock kernel: that is a thing that I never had to do before.
then I moved to current using vesa, and after a while I waved ati bye-bye.

glad it worked for you.

Sorry, but if you had to downgrade the kernel, then there was something wrong with your installation. It worked great on Slackware 13.0 on the default kernel for me on three different machines.

Adam

Indeed there is:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/

Third link from the left in the blue bar at the top of every LQ page.
HCL = Hardware Compatibility List

Update on my 'problem': Nothing (really) wrong with slackware,.. only with the DVD disk or drive:

During installation, on slower systems, I tend to leave the installation running unattended: make me some coffee, take a leak etc. During the installation of 13.1 (freshly burned, Iso of md5sum ok), I noticed there was an error on the screen note-ing something like: 'The package is not correctly build'.. and after a pause it went to the next package from the installation. In the end, the installation finished without any comment on any packages not being correctly installed. I think that is an error in the slackware setup program (as I clearly wouldn't have noticed this if I would have returned half an hour later).

Anyways: I tried to make a copy of the disk to the harddrive on the machine, but it failed at the /x/ section.. dah!
I setup a NFS share (with the help of AlienBobs wiki), and selected this NFS as source. Turned out, everything works! ATI card is recognized, KDE works (Slow as hell in default config), XFCE runs like a charm, all in the default 1366x768 resolution of my widescreen monitor.

So yeah: works out of the box :)

on my noteboook with a radeon3650 ati-driver-installer-10-5-x86.x86_64.run builds and loads fine, no patch needed
but running fglrxinfo produces a segfault
dmesg:
fglrxinfo[2242]: segfault at 74ff006a ip b6f514ac sp bfdbabfc error 4 in fglrx_dri.so[b5a78000+1898000]

is this a known problem?

Catalyst 10.5 for Linux
 

Greetings,

Yes, ATI/AMD's proprietary driver for Linux still has problems, especially rendering interlaced video. However, with 3D, Catalyst 10.5's performance on Linux has now approached Windows. In fact, Catalyst 10.5 runs WINE programs so nicely one would swear he was running the program on Windows! Currently, 3D performance on Linux is simply terrific. :)

Yes, ATI/AMD has a way to go with fglrx, but Catalyst 10.5 is LARGE step in the right direction.

However, ATI/AMD has a history of releasing Catalyst drivers for Linux that vary in quality from one release to the next. We'll see if ATI/AMD is really serious at consistently improving the quality of their driver on Linux.

Personally, I think so. Lastly, ATI/AMD's support for their open source driver continues nicely. Even the open source r600 driver for Gallium will soon be functional in addition to the r300 driver for Gallium. Indeed, the immediate future is looking much brighter for users of ATI/AMD's hardware on Linux.

fglrxinfo works fine here with 10.5 on slackware 13.1. Do other opengl applications segfault as well?

Adam

fixed, don't know what I did, just recreating and reinstalling the tgz and problem has gone and now it works.
seems that in this case the error was in front of the keyboard :-)

I'm looking at a laptop with an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5450 in it. I keep reading conflicting reports that the latest Catalyst drivers won't work on Slackware 13.1. Can anyone clarify for me?

Hi :D
I've bought an ASUS Laptop with a Mobility Radeon HD3200 in August 2009
and the opensource driver was terrible but the Catalyst works fine with Slackware 13.0.

Now I'm using Slackware 13.1.
The new radeon opensourcedriver works very fine out of the box (with a little bit configurated xorg.conf from the latest Mandriva One live cd) and using the KDE desktop effects
==> windowresizeing is a little bit faster than with fglrx
but now I switched to the latest Catalyst because my battery lives 30 minutes longer with fglrx than with the os driver.

I don't know if your card would be working fine now but if you wait a few months I'm shure it will work as good as my HD3200.

This is my second ATI card working fine with Linux and my third could be an ATI too.

The only thing I like on NVIDIA is to support newer Xorg, newer Kernels and it maybe faster for gaming but I don't play many games on Linux so I can't say what is the better card for gaming.

I have an HD4670. I must say, out of the box (base Slackware installation), the open source drivers work quite well (KDE desktop effects are near perfect), but as soon as I install the proprietary drivers (I've tried 10.6 yesterday), it causes problems to no end. KDE desktop effects refuse to start off the bat (and sometimes I have to tell them two or three times to start in the desktop to get them working), sometimes the desktop effects window won't even open and crashes on me every time, sometimes the console won't display when I log out of X. It's been a terrible experience for me (especially trying to get compiz to work), but I know it has to work somehow because I can get it to work in Ubuntu. I just don't know enough about X and the drivers to figure it out :(

Radeon HD 3870x2 works only 2D-accelerated, with only one core. No 3D accel and no double-core. Not a problem with slack, though. It is not supported by ATI drivers... I should have bought another ATI board. ATI has better hardware pieces than Nvidia or Intel, but their Linux support is poor.

I can't speak to the proprietary drivers, but the open source drivers claim to support 2D and 3D acceleration on one GPU. If it doesn't work, it's a bug and should be reported.

Not sure if both GPUs are not supported due to a lack of documentation or (more likely) a lack of time.

Exactly my issue. I just bought a used computer with an HD4670 as well. Do you know how to roll back to the previous drivers?

Lesson learned - open source drivers = better.

It is not advisable to resurrect a thread from so long ago.

If you want to use an older version of the fglrx driver, just download it. Go to the download page for the current drivers and click on the link for "Previous Drivers and Software". Mind you, you won't be able to go too far back if you are using Slackware 13.37.

Adam

A few years ago, ATI Linux drivers were pretty rough. I had (and still have floating around) a P3 with a 9600 pro AGP in it. Installing the drivers for it was cumbersome at best and in most cases require extensive console efforts to get DRI working. There was no simple setup and every system seemed to require different edits to the configuration. <10.x were the worst. In 11.x it was reasonably possible for someone to get it running with less than 10 posts for help. 12.x was easier yet, and 13.x is nearly a no-brainer.

I now have a PDC E6700 with a Radeon HD 5670 and the desktop effects were great instantly. Then with a quick download and single command I installed ATI's driver and the performance is awesome. I've used NVIDIA vanta 2 cards and DRI was a no-brainer even for 10.x, but I like my ATIs.

The ATI drivers and Linux have made huge improvements since those days. So ATI is far from a poor choice.

BTW, I model in FreeCAD (Linux) and stream Netflix in a virtualbox running Xp. It's super smooth and HD.

I won't agree with that.

For an example: glxgears on open drivers and AMD drivers. On open drivers i had around 50FPS and KDE desktop effect were very slow. On AMD drivers glxgears have around 150 FPS and KDE desktop effect are few times faster than on open drivers.


You wanted to know how to roll back to open drivers? You should do:

-remove all serwer X config files (/etc/X11);
-copy default serwer X config files from SlackwareDVD;
-remove mesa package and install it again (slackware/x on DVD).


My experience tells my that fglxr can do a quite mess with opengl libs. If you remove fglrx than these that will remain won't work with the opengl driver. You have to remove mesa and install default mesa package. Standard lib for mesa is mesa 792 - if i remember correctly.

x11-skel-7.4-i486-2.txz is the standard config file for serwer X.

Huge improvements but like with Windows, they make stupid errors. For an exmample: on CAT 11.3 i could watch YT with fullscreen, but with CAT 11.5 i cant. Serwer X crashes when i switch back from full screen to window. That kind of mistakes's been continued for years.

i have a mobility radeon HD 4650 in my laptop. using fglrx. works great for me, gaming works, everything runs nicely. the only issue is you have to reinstall the driver with kernel/xorg upgrades, but its not particularly difficult.

No problems with that for at least the last year with my HD3200.

This is precisely my experience with ATI.

To the OP: you might still be able to get your card going at this point in time. ;)

Just a minor rebuttal to your post... AMD/ATi are still releasing drivers for cards that came out 5 years ago i.e hd2000 series...

In my opinion, if you want good user experience from Linux, you use everything Intel, it just work and do so well and you spend your time working with your computer rather than finding white hair in your head. But as for Ati stuff, there is my struggle with HD4850 You will find some ups and downs for both catalyst and open source drivers (from my point of view). But if you want power graphics i suggest you buy Nvidia (you will have VDPAU too, not only hassle free driver).

Last year? Catalyst 11.5 comes at may 2011...My friend has laptop with Radeon 4xxx and he has the same problem on KDE.

With the last year I meant all versions of the driver that were released in the last year, with every one of them I was able to look Flash videos in fullscreen without any problems.

When you have problems with that, may it be that you have desktop effects enabled and that this is rather an incompatibility between the WM and the Flashplayer than a driver error?