Is any ALUGger successfully using ATI radeon cards with real 3d acceleration these days?
I recall it being a fruitless exercise in the past, but now isn't the past and I wonder if anyone's having any real success with this now.
Buying a graphics card on an almost Dickensian budget, whilst wanting it to be an actual upgrade, I'm considering a low-end Radeon 9600 for 35 quid (after missing out on an nvidia Geforce 6600 for 50).
I'm not convinced of the card's brilliance, but I'm more wondering whether Radeons in general are usable + good yet - it would widen the breadth of choice a little :)
On the leisure side, I'd like to still be able to play a few good fps titles (which I can already do on a much cheaper card, just not in as meaningful a way as I'd like :D ) and will be buying doom 3 soon.
My personal exp. has led me to think of nvidia as the only grown-up option.
Am I wrong yet?
I have a Sony Vaio laptop which has an ATI Radeon 7500 DL (that's what Linux reports it as). It seems to run fine with 3D enabled.
I'm using SuSE 9.2, which detected it automatically (but I had to manually turn on the 3D)
Stuart.
On Tuesday 06 September 2005 13:32, Ten wrote:
Is any ALUGger successfully using ATI radeon cards with real 3d acceleration these days?
I recall it being a fruitless exercise in the past, but now isn't the past and I wonder if anyone's having any real success with this now.
Buying a graphics card on an almost Dickensian budget, whilst wanting it to be an actual upgrade, I'm considering a low-end Radeon 9600 for 35 quid (after missing out on an nvidia Geforce 6600 for 50).
I'm not convinced of the card's brilliance, but I'm more wondering whether Radeons in general are usable + good yet - it would widen the breadth of choice a little :)
On the leisure side, I'd like to still be able to play a few good fps titles (which I can already do on a much cheaper card, just not in as meaningful a way as I'd like :D ) and will be buying doom 3 soon.
My personal exp. has led me to think of nvidia as the only grown-up option.
Am I wrong yet?
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Ten runlevelten@gmail.com wrote:
Is any ALUGger successfully using ATI radeon cards with real 3d acceleration these days?
I was, in my work machine, it's a Radeon 9200... which has nice, working, opensource drivers. The ATI binary drivers tend to be buggy and crashy and evil.
I recall it being a fruitless exercise in the past, but now isn't the past and I wonder if anyone's having any real success with this now.
Well, up to the 9200, it's mostly fine, the newer chipsets however require the binary ATI drivers (see above).
Buying a graphics card on an almost Dickensian budget, whilst wanting it to be an actual upgrade, I'm considering a low-end Radeon 9600 for 35 quid (after missing out on an nvidia Geforce 6600 for 50).
I've got an Nvidea GeForce 5700 Go card in the laptop, the binary drivers appear to work fairly well (they used to suck, and kill things, but they've been well behaved of late). Reasonable ish frame rate.
I'm not convinced of the card's brilliance, but I'm more wondering whether Radeons in general are usable + good yet - it would widen the breadth of choice a little :)
Well, there's someone working on an open source r320 driver, IIRC, which is the chipset used in the 9600 and upwards (fwicr) (all this is pulled out of my head, and may be innacurate, I've not looked recently).
On the leisure side, I'd like to still be able to play a few good fps titles (which I can already do on a much cheaper card, just not in as meaningful a way as I'd like :D ) and will be buying doom 3 soon.
Heh, haven't bought Doom 3 yet. I've got HL2, but I've broken my windows partition ;)
My personal exp. has led me to think of nvidia as the only grown-up option.
If by "grown up", you mean "has working binary drivers that give reasonable performance", then yes.
There are more expensive manufacturers, with nice opensource drivers, but they'd be very out of proce range for most mere mortals.
Cheers, - -- Brett Parker web: http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/ email: iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk
On Tuesday 06 September 2005 13:32, Ten wrote:
Is any ALUGger successfully using ATI radeon cards with real 3d acceleration these days?
IMO you're better off with a NVidia card since at least the drivers are made by NVidia themselves and offer equal performance to their Windows counterparts.
OK, the NVidia drivers are closed-source which may offend some, but they work and work well.
The ATI drivers that are available are a bit hit-or-miss as far as I can tell. They work well with some cards, and not so well with others. You'll need to investigate which cards are supported and which features of those cards are supported as well.
I haven't been able to get acceleration going on my IBM Thinkpad R51 (ATI Mobillity Radeon), yet the NVidia drivers work flawlessly on my desktop system (NVidia GeForce 5900). YMMV
Matt
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Matt Parker matt@mpcontracting.co.uk wrote:
On Tuesday 06 September 2005 13:32, Ten wrote:
Is any ALUGger successfully using ATI radeon cards with real 3d acceleration these days?
IMO you're better off with a NVidia card since at least the drivers are made by NVidia themselves and offer equal performance to their Windows counterparts.
In some tests run by the mad one^W^Wquinophex, I believe that he actually got *better* performance from the card in linux than windows... And just because a card manufacturer makes the driver doesn't automagically make them "better". I have WiFi cards that work better in linux than they do in windows, and those drivers where mostly fixed by people that *didn't* work for the card manufacturer. (anyways - this is off topic ;)
OK, the NVidia drivers are closed-source which may offend some, but they work and work well.
Offends me quite a lot! Get things like... $ dmesg | grep taint nvidia: module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel. $
tainted kernel :( (on the other hand, it does work ;)
The ATI drivers that are available are a bit hit-or-miss as far as I can tell. They work well with some cards, and not so well with others. You'll need to investigate which cards are supported and which features of those cards are supported as well.
The official ATI linux drivers are made by ATI... there are several open source drivers for various cards, depending on chipset.
I haven't been able to get acceleration going on my IBM Thinkpad R51 (ATI Mobillity Radeon), yet the NVidia drivers work flawlessly on my desktop system (NVidia GeForce 5900). YMMV
Might be worth checking the latest version of x.org, and googling a bit. Also, there's more than one kind of "Mobility Radeon", like GeForce has a model number, so do ATI cards...
Cheers, - -- Brett Parker web: http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/ email: iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk
On Tue, Sep 06, 2005 at 02:08:02PM +0100, Brett Parker wrote:
In some tests run by the mad one^W^Wquinophex, I believe that he actually got *better* performance from the card in linux than windows...
I did get about 10% faster frame rates with Doom III in Linux compared to Windows. (Stock Ubuntu kernel+whichever Nvidia drivers Ubuntu ships with) I didn't spend all day tweaking the machine in either Windows or Linux though as I can't be bothered. Although, Unreal Tournament 2004 was about 15-25% faster in Windows compared to Linux.
The official ATI linux drivers are made by ATI... there are several open source drivers for various cards, depending on chipset.
...and of course ATI seem to suffer from confusing model syndrome. Where having a card with a higher model number than another doesn't mean it is any better. It also means that you can end up with a nasty card slap bang between 2 nice cards in the model range and end up buying the wrong one...
Adam
Hi all,
Just to post a follow-up to this thread...
I plumped for the Radeon 9800 Pro, partly because it's a respectable card that was cheap, partly because a few people have given me good feedback on their experiences with ATI stuff, and almost entirely because about four people told me I couldn't.
On visiting ATI's website, I discovered the ATI drivers were 9-10 times the size of my average nvidia download - I gritted my teeth and pulled down almost 60 megs over dialup, steeling myself for one very long-awaited disappointment.
Twelve years later...
su, init 3, ati-driver-installer-8.16.20.run, fglrxconfig, init 5...wait, what's this? I have 3d acceleration - and I didn't have to pull one hair out or shed one tear of despair...
The ATI drivers are more-or-less on a par with the nvidia drivers now for ease of installation - "more-or-less" because there's the fglrxconfig utility to run afterwards, an extra step.
ATI seem to have merged in FireGL stuff, and whilst I'm not nearly interested enough to delve into the technicalities of this, Doom 3 (yes, I finally bought the 'damned' game) and various other GL bits and bobs run, and run acceptably.
It's not a patch on the equivalent nvidia card in openGL terms of course, and I've got openGL 1.3 not 2.0, but it does the job and should be perfectly good for my forays into OpenGL development.
It also means I can run games with respectable levels of detail and performance if I wish to - especially doom 3 :D .
Stability is excellent - the driver is much more stable on this machine than the nvidia one was - probably to be expected since ATI's package has (they say) one of its feet firmly on the DRI ground of the open-source drivers.
2D performance is a world removed from my previous card (in a good way), although I've not really pushed the envelope with the whole Xcomposite/Xpendulousknackers/Xdamage thang yet.
Basically, it does the functional stuff well, and when I want to use my computer as a toy, it does that quite excellently.
It seems that whilst they don't approach the performance of the nvidia drivers, the new ATI drivers are a "far cry" (yuk yuk) from their previous incarnations, and thank heavens.
Anyway, just thought I'd bore you all with a follow-up, since people took the time to offer their advice on this.
Cheers, Ten.
...
Mr. Cole's Axiom: The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant; the population is growing.
On Tue, 2005-09-06 at 13:32 +0100, Ten wrote:
Is any ALUGger successfully using ATI radeon cards with real 3d acceleration these days?
I have Radeon 9600XT cards in two of my SuSE 9.2 boxes. Both run dual headed and both run 3d acceleration. I've developed some OpenGL code with them.
I recall it being a fruitless exercise in the past, but now isn't the past and I wonder if anyone's having any real success with this now.
Drivers from ATI can be a bit fiddly to install, and sometime need to be reinstalled when SuSE updates kernel version numbers but it's a 30sec job.
Peter
On Tue, Sep 06, 2005 at 01:32:42PM +0100, Ten wrote:
On the leisure side, I'd like to still be able to play a few good fps titles (which I can already do on a much cheaper card, just not in as meaningful a way as I'd like :D ) and will be buying doom 3 soon.
My personal exp. has led me to think of nvidia as the only grown-up option.
Am I wrong yet?
I don't know tbh, but when Doom III was originally released for Linux it didn't work very well with ATI cards using their non-free driver, Nvidia was most certainly the way to go then. Of course ATI promised that they would release a driver update that would address most of the problems with Doom III on their hardware. I think I would be asking google to find peoples real world experiences, but at the same time I would be thinking of going with Nvidia if you mainly want the card for playing non-free 3D games with Linux.
Adam
An update on this...
I'm not sure whether it's because I'm deranged, but I've just forked out for a Radeon 9800 pro.
After the tip-off that these cards are viable for opengl dev, 3d acceleration can be done, 2d/video performance is good, and that doom3 seems at least runnable, I'm going for the power-to-price ratio of a radeon.
A potential problem was openGL games performance, but since I've found an nvidia 440mx to be absolutely fine with opengl under linux (performance in UT2k3 was stonking gorgeous), my thinking is that the 9800pro should be an improvement on that and I'll be happy.
This could be a sign of my masochistic streak coming through though - my subconscious geek seems to love picking 3-day hardware problems out for me.
Heh, haven't bought Doom 3 yet. I've got HL2, but I've broken my windows partition
Same here, on all 3 counts - I resized the partition sloppily at some point in the past.
Since it was a glorified x-box (install the game in windows, play it under wine) and I almost exclusively use $distro Linux, it's just sat there gathering dust..
..besides which, I really couldn't be bothered spending ages getting all the hardware working and installing software in windows, a situation familiar to anyone who uses any distro with apt and good hardware detection.
I've just revived it, however, in order to install a whole raft of valve's back catalogue, and ready to play hl2 on my new radeon.
Not a huge gamer, mostly need a sensible card for other stuff, but I must admit to glee at the possibility of being able to max out the settings on hl2 :)
If by "grown up", you mean "has working binary drivers that give reasonable performance", then yes.
There are more expensive manufacturers, with nice opensource drivers, but they'd be very out of proce range for most mere mortals.
Preference would have me using very nice hardware with only proper open source drivers - but realistically I don't demand open hardware platforms, so as long as the stuff *works*, I'm happy. For now :)
Budget/other component priorities were such that I happily endured HL2DM on a GF4 440MX for some time and would still be happy with it now if it were not physically kaput...
Anyway, I've decided to brave an ATI card. Here's hoping very sincerely that it turns out more useful than a bat on a lollipop stick.
I started off using ATI cards some years back got bored of the rubbish performance and fiddly XF86Config.
I would seriously consider saving a little extra and getting an Nvidia card. The way I see it is that if a vendor can't even be bothered to pay a few programmers to write some drivers (or release the code/docs) then why should we buy their products?.
Fair play, laptops are expensive with half decent nvidia chipsets, but I use my desktop PC (old GEforce 4200ti) for games/work and my laptop (ATI Mach64) for work(?) stuff.
Although the nvidia drivers have successfully broken on every single Fedora release they soon pop out another revision which I think is pretty cool.
Nvidia are alright by me, ATI are stubborn little gits.
P.S does anybody remember back in 1997/1998 when ATI did not own www.ati.com? It was a site run by Artificial Turd Industries (ATI) and specialised in selling (you guessed it!) plastic piles of poo. It took ATI some time to get the domain name sorted.
Ten wrote:
Is any ALUGger successfully using ATI radeon cards with real 3d acceleration these days?
I recall it being a fruitless exercise in the past, but now isn't the past and I wonder if anyone's having any real success with this now.
Buying a graphics card on an almost Dickensian budget, whilst wanting it to be an actual upgrade, I'm considering a low-end Radeon 9600 for 35 quid (after missing out on an nvidia Geforce 6600 for 50).
I'm not convinced of the card's brilliance, but I'm more wondering whether Radeons in general are usable + good yet - it would widen the breadth of choice a little :)
On the leisure side, I'd like to still be able to play a few good fps titles (which I can already do on a much cheaper card, just not in as meaningful a way as I'd like :D ) and will be buying doom 3 soon.
My personal exp. has led me to think of nvidia as the only grown-up option.
Am I wrong yet?
David Simon Cooper wrote:
P.S does anybody remember back in 1997/1998 when ATI did not own www.ati.com? It was a site run by Artificial Turd Industries (ATI) and specialised in selling (you guessed it!) plastic piles of poo. It took ATI some time to get the domain name sorted.
Unfortunately the "WayBack Machine" archive (www.archive.org) doesn't seem to have anything useful to show on the subject (the pages are there but broken, page titled "rtifical Turd Implementations" is still there but no content, from 1997). Great nostalgia site, though, for anyone who hasn't seen it.
Mark Rogers, More Solutions Ltd
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Adam Bower -
Brett Parker -
David Simon Cooper -
Mark Rogers -
Matt Parker -
Peter Onion -
Stuart Bailey -
Ten