# AMD/ATI Cards Drivers status

## MaximeG

Hi,

I read some while ago that AMD promissed to improve support for their graphic devices.

Anyone knows the status of it, with a bit of experience ?

Is still way behind, or is the support comparable to the nvidia drivers ?

I'm more interested with the proprietary drivers with this question, but if someone has the info regarding open source drivers I don't mind hearing it either  :Very Happy: 

Thanks !

Maxime

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## u238

I'm also interested, the new hd58xx boards are very interresting

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## drescherjm

 *Quote:*   

> I read some while ago that AMD promissed to improve support for their graphic devices.
> 
> Anyone knows the status of it, with a bit of experience ?
> 
> Is still way behind, or is the support comparable to the nvidia drivers ? 

 

From being subscribed to the wine mailing list for years I can say that at least for wine the ATI drivers are improving but still not as good as the nvidia ones.

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## UberElvis

I've just successfully installed the ATI Proprietary Driver on my machine and once I get my cdrom drive working I'm going to test Neverwinter Nights and see how well it works.  I'll come back to this thread and let you know what I find out.  I somehow have a feeling that the driver is working pretty well now, but I don't really have a past experience to compare to, so I might not be of much info.

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## eccerr0r

I've been using the ATI Proprietary (FGLRX) driver on and off as they are made compatible with recent kernels.  The latest one I tried seems to work fairly well, but it was long in the tooth as there were months where I could not run it with the latest kernel.  I'm not even sure if the latest version works with 2.6.31 even.

I'm using fglrx with wine and World of Warcraft.  It generally seems to work well enough, I'm actually doing raids with it.  My RV635 is already showing some slowness but it seems to work quite a bit faster than my old R200 card in Windows.  So that's a good sign.

NVidia seems to have gotten the issues down pat by now, and it tends to work much better.

Now that the RadeonHD/OSS driver seems to be coming into shape, fglrx might simply be a bad memory in the future...

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## DirtyHairy

I'm using a X1300 mobility and am using the the opensource drivers since support for R500 hardware has been droppen from fglrx. While there is tremendous work going into the opensource stack, it's still lightyears behind fglrx as far as 3D performance and OpenGL support are concerned. Powesaving is much worse at well, I was able to run with 16 Watts consumption with fglrx, while the best I can manage with the opensource drivers is 20, and this makes a hell of a difference in battery life. However, the opensource drivers are faster in everyday 2D work, and tend to be more stable for me than fglrx (although I never had big problems with the proprietary drivers either).

So, long story short : fglrx wasn't as bad as people usually claim for me when I was still using it, and the opensource strategy is a point in favor of ATI, but the decision to simply drop support for anything older than R600 from fglrx has really pissed me off, and I am not sure if I can recommend them.

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## i92guboj

If you are going to use the propietary driver *today* (and that doesn't mean "soon", or "in a few months", or "in the near future", but "TODAY" and for a very long time now), buy an nVidia card.

fglrx might work or not, they will probably screw up again in a couple of weeks or whenever the .32 kernel series goes out. And even if not, fglrx has lots of issues about stability (you really play the lottery each time you exit X). It's also slightly more painful to setup if you use more than one monitor.

The ati open source drivers are promising, and once they actually work for any card that's newer than six years old the thing might change. But today they are only ok if you have an r500 card or older (even if you can live with 2d the performance just sucks).

That's my experience, yours might vary and I am not here to argue. Just exposing my experience with the different drivers. As much as I dislike the nvidia policy, it's the best graphics driver, and has been so since 3d came into linux.

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## d2_racing

 *i92guboj wrote:*   

> If you are going to use the propietary driver *today* (and that doesn't mean "soon", or "in a few months", or "in the near future", but "TODAY" and for a very long time now), buy an nVidia card.
> 
> That's my experience, yours might vary and I am not here to argue. Just exposing my experience with the different drivers. As much as I dislike the nvidia policy, it's the best graphics driver, and has been so since 3d came into linux.

 

In fact, I agree on that for sure.

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