Getting a new video card- anybody use an ATi x1800 or x1900?

SteveBallmersChair

I am going to get a new video card to use in Gentoo with a dual-monitor setup (adding another 1600x1200" DVI LCD, need to replace my old single-DVI-out card.) I am also an active folder, and after I heard that Folding@Home can use an ATi x1900-series card to fold with at a very fast rate, it happened to happily coincide with my purchase. I have heard VERY mixed messages about ATi video cards and Linux drivers- they used to suck but now some people have good luck and some have bad luck. NVIDIA's drivers do work and work well, but the cards are not quite as good as ATi's and they also can't fold.

So what I would appreciate is for those of you who run ATi x1k series cards, especially an x1800 or x1900, to weigh in on how the driver works, particularly those who use a dual-monitor setup.
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Unix is user friendly- it is just picky who its friends are.

MacTuitui · n00b Joined: 10 Oct 2003 Posts: 53

I had an ATI, and you can call me bad luck or whatever, it was a Radeon 9500 pro. Not the bleeding edge where I can understand when drivers are not ready, but like 3 years after, when the card cannot run smoothly a small opengl game, you start to wonder why. After weeks of troubleshooting, I quit for a nvidia fanless, a really cheap one, and everything I had trouble with just vanished in a snap. That was two months ago.

If you are not a gamer, if you do not use a lot of 3d apps, that may be fine. If you are a gamer, I would recommend a nvidia card. But then again, I may be one of the "bad luck" guys.

As for dual monitor, I used 2 X screens, and everything went fine. on both nvidia and ati. If you want one screen stretched on the 2 screens, I don't know, it does not fit my setting (lcd monitor + projector).

a16b03 · Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2006 4:19 am Post subject:

I also had ATI Radeon 9550 256MB. I sold it and bought nVidia GeForce 6600Le 256MB.

ATI Drivers jsust s***.

Now I don't have any 3D problem or any problem at all.

yangtse · n00b Joined: 05 May 2006 Posts: 28 Location: China

i have ati X550,not so bad.
neither fglrx or r300_dri.
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God Is Not A Girl!

SteveBallmersChair · Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2006 12:11 pm Post subject:

So you run the x550 just in 2D mode with the radeon driver then?
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Unix is user friendly- it is just picky who its friends are.

a16b03 · Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2006 3:07 pm Post subject:

When I installed drivers provided by ATI I couldn't even watch vdeos.

Wojtek_ · Guru Joined: 28 May 2006 Posts: 397 Location: London

I am currently using Ati Mobility Radeon X1800 and it works perfectly - 2D, 3D, Xgl - whatever you want works fast as lightning. I din't have to do anything special - just followed the wiki.
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Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Xi-1546
Intel Centrino Duo T2600 (2,16GHz)
2x1GB DDR2 RAM
ATi Mobility Radeon X1800 256MB DDR3
2x120GB HDD
Intel High Definition Audio

SteveBallmersChair · Posted: Mon Nov 06, 2006 12:43 am Post subject:

I had gone ahead and gotten the x1900GT I was looking at and the ATi Drivers Howto on the gentoo-wiki worked just great. Like Wojtek_, I can get 2D, 3D, and XGL to work just fine. The only hiccup is that XGL won't work right on dual-head setups, but that's not an ATi issue, but an XGL one.

I'd say that based upon my experiences, an ATi card is no harder to work with than an NVIDIA one and I feel comfortable in recommending either one.
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Unix is user friendly- it is just picky who its friends are.