[SOLVED] How has your experience been with ATI graphics on Slackware/Linux?
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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!
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.
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.
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 edited by Totoro-kun; 06-02-2011 at 01:24 PM.
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?
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?
I do not use desktop effect, i have it switched off (AMD 760G - Radeon HD3000, it is within 760G chipset). This is driver erroc cause the same thing happens with xbmc. I did not have it with 11.3.
Of course YMMV. I just find it rather strange that there is a driver error with your HD3000, your friends HD4XXX, but not my HD3200. But who knows what is going on there.
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...
my last company laptop was considered end-of-life by ATI after two years. Hell, nvidia still updates the drivers for all of their hardware since the Riva TNT cards. That's all hardware from up to 13 years ago. with every new kernel release.
my last company laptop was considered end-of-life by ATI after two years. Hell, nvidia still updates the drivers for all of their hardware since the Riva TNT cards. That's all hardware from up to 13 years ago. with every new kernel release.
The 96.xx drivers (and older) will not run on a recent Xserver, so anything older than the FX5 series will not work anymore.
And, to be fair, AMD also pays developers (both on-staff and outside of AMD) to work on the open source radeon driver, which supports every radeon GPU. As compared to nvidia who not only have not released updated drivers for older cards on newer X servers and announced they were going to stop supporting the only open source drivers they ever supported for their cards.
And, to be fair, AMD also pays developers (both on-staff and outside of AMD) to work on the open source radeon driver, which supports every radeon GPU. As compared to nvidia who not only have not released updated drivers for older cards on newer X servers and announced they were going to stop supporting the only open source drivers they ever supported for their cards.
Well, but those open drivers for AMD are very...slow. Have you tried running KDE with desktop effect on open and Catalyst? Very good example of this is glxgears:
-open: 51 FPS (desktop with effect tuner on works very slow)
-CAT: 170 FPS (don't need to mention...how it works)
depending on drivers, desktop can work differently, also web browser with flash player and so on.
The open source drivers have always performed much better at compositing than catalyst. And, frankly, since I don't sit around and watch gears spin all day, those numbers are meaningless.
The 96.xx drivers (and older) will not run on a recent Xserver, so anything older than the FX5 series will not work anymore.
what d'you mean by "recent X server"? I have Slackware 13.37 running with 96.43.19 on two machines. With AIGLX and full KDE desktop effects (although the machines are memory and disk bound, so I prefer XFCE these days).
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ATI support
