ATi Drivers!

VanDan · Guru Joined: 30 Sep 2002 Posts: 586 Location: Australia

If you want to see good drivers for ATI cards under Linux, forget ATI's sorry excuses and join up with the DRI team.

They have recently reversed-engineered Hyper-Z support for the R100, and someone else ported that to the R200. Vladimir ( forgot his last name, but those following DRI development will know who I'm talking about ) has reversed-engineered enough to get basic 3D support for the R300. Honestly, these guys are the future for ATI drivers - not ATI.

If you just want to play games and not have to write your own drivers, then buy an nVidia. ATI owners have bee duped.

Fitzsimmons · Posted: Sat Nov 06, 2004 12:07 am Post subject:

Think in marketspeak. Adding a couple of developers is 'restructuring the team'. Or at least that's what it needs to say for PHB to sign off on it.

herbo · Posted: Sat Nov 06, 2004 3:25 am Post subject:

ATI moved the whole linux development from Germany to Canada last year, so I guess that would be a restructuring,

Alexander Stohr was the main man and he does not work for ATI anymore, ATI's linux drivers have basically done nothing new for about a year now.. (3.2.8 was probably the last decent drivers).

I really hope the r300 dri works eventually, but I still reckon that without ATI's help they can't go too far. I would say the r300+ series are more complex than the r100 & r200 series..

One can only hope with the abuse ATI's cops for its Linux drivers (I can't think of anyone who has a nice thing say to about their Linux drivers) and Nvidia efforts making ATI look pretty darn stupid, they do whatever is need to get the drivers up to par, whether it be pulling of fingers out, assigning of more resources or whatever... it just needs to be done.

R!tman · Posted: Tue Nov 09, 2004 8:10 am Post subject:

VanDan · Guru Joined: 30 Sep 2002 Posts: 586 Location: Australia

R!tman · Posted: Tue Nov 09, 2004 10:48 pm Post subject:

Didn't I say that ati is probably faster in creating drivers for new cards?

Well, R200 is not really a new, is it?

I also support and prefer the open source drivers, but if they simple do not work with the latest cards I use the driver that works best at the moment. And for R300 and later that is the ati binary.

Btw, I haven't tested the others, but I can use xscreensaver and mplayer. mplayer even with the gl2 output plugin.

To get things a litte cleaner. For elder cards, the open source driver is better, no doubt. But not for the latest graphic cards, as those drivers simply do not work at all, when ati's drivers at least function buggy.

VanDan · Guru Joined: 30 Sep 2002 Posts: 586 Location: Australia

stim · Posted: Thu Nov 11, 2004 5:32 am Post subject:

Well, according to this page:

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?s=&threadid=33721373

there are lots of non-ATI components on the video cards and so they would be breaking some laws by releasing the drivers under the GPL, which I know is a slightly different issue, but is related to the amount of help ATI can give the r300 project etc.

VanDan · Guru Joined: 30 Sep 2002 Posts: 586 Location: Australia

I don't think so.

There would be a legal issue if ATI released detailed information on the components - this would obviously be infringing on the manufacturer's IP rights ( and I don't really want to get into a discussion of IP rights over hardware at this point, except to say that I don't like them ).

However there is no legal issue if ATI merely give programmers enough information to write some damned drivers. This information doesn't infringe on anyone's IP rights, as it tells you nothing of how the hardware is designed - merely how to talk to it.

o0the_llama0o · Posted: Sat Nov 20, 2004 2:12 am Post subject:

what about us that have r350's

bennettp · Posted: Sat Nov 20, 2004 8:42 am Post subject:

Admiral LSD · Posted: Sat Nov 20, 2004 1:20 pm Post subject:

meh, until gaming in Linux stops sucking the big one the current ATi Linux drivers are more than adequate.
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PZoned · Posted: Sat Nov 20, 2004 7:23 pm Post subject:

But the only way that linux gaming can stop "Sucking The Big One" is if quality drivers come out.... once all video cards perform as well in linux as they do in windows, then we need to work on sound card drivers (ALSA is on the right track) i mean, i want EAX and surround in all of my games (its sort of possible right now to have EAX but it needs some work) once this is compleate, i think linux gaming will be as volitile as windows gaming.

Chewi · Posted: Sat Nov 20, 2004 8:12 pm Post subject:

As usual, it's catch 22 but I'm gonna get into the games industry and do what I can. I graduate in a few months. Watch out.