# How good does the ATI drivers actually work

## kawsper

I am going to invest in a laptop soon, i have the choice of a nvidia or an ATI (But if i chose ATI i get more hardware for the money, if i choose nvidia i get less). Its an centrino with a ATI Radeon Mobillity 9700 Pro 128MB and a 15" SXGA+ monitor. 

The cpus and other are the same in both versions.

I only have to use the machine in school to make notes and calculate things and stuff, and code java and c++ at home. I dont have to use the 3D stuff, i just need a fast and smooth desktop (I dont want my windows to be lagging when i draw them around, or my movies to lack when i see them), and maybe play and make some random small SDL games.

Is the Ati drivers well supported under linux so i can use it to fit me, or should i find another laptop?

----------

## nazgum

I ended up buying two sager laptops [sagernotebooks.com, the np8790 and the np3790] for me and my gf, thinking at the time I would manage with the ATI card, their drivers would improve, etc.

I love the laptops, but I hate my ATI card.  It is such an aggrevation for me mow I'm debating buying a new very similar laptop but with just a nvidia card.

It depends what you want to do, but I find it depressing to get crazy artifacts in linux when using ATI's drivers with something as simple as opengl screensavers, having wine games not work, composite not work, etc.  ATI is just horrible in linux.

Nvidia supports linux much more so then ATI, so for that reason alone I'd go with Nvidia.  But add in how poor ATI actually functions on linux I'd be very careful about how you plan to use the laptop if you do get it.

Even in Windows, I find the ATI drivers shaky.  Everyone seems to use the unsupported OmegaDrivers, but different drivers seem to break different features and it seems you have to constantly driver jump for different applications.  The ATI drivers which came with my notebook did not work for many things, and ATI refuses to supply drivers which support notebooks.  So you are stuck using what came with your laptop or the Unsupported ones.

I'm probably bias by now, in that I'm very unhappy with my ATI experience, but the most important requirement for my next laptop is that it does not contain an ATI card.

----------

## falcon_za

In my experience too, ATI has a very bad record on drivers, whether for linux or windows.

As nazgum said, even if you don't play 3D games, it is at least nice to have wokring opengl screen savers. which is still not my case. I guess it can probably be fixed some way, but I didn't find it.

Ati has been having problems with drivers as far as I can remember. When a friend of mine bought his first ATI card years ago (rage128 all in wonder, IIRC), the card shipped without any 3D drivers at all. not even for windows. He finaly got the openGL drivers in a PC magazin's CD-ROM when they were released 6 months later. 

My own Ati card in my laptop (i didn't have the choice). regularly crashes under windows too.

As I understand things, the situation is less critical now for non mobile cards, and ati can give quite nice results. (but i didn't try mysel).

For a laptop, I'd definitely go nvidia. There is still one sad thing about it : the driver they provide is not free software driver, nor do they give the info to make one. see if this matters for you.

Byw, while were on laptops, I'd recomand to go either for IBM or Toshiba.

----------

## kawsper

Okay, thanks. I didn't know ATI are so bad, i know that they are bad but not so much.

If i invest in a nvidia i can only get a 14" XGA+ (1024x768) monitor, is that reasonable for a laptop or should i search the market some more? I want to go centrino and i want some smooth drawings on my screen and my budget is around 1300$.

----------

## DrZoidberg

I am not a huge gamer, but I have had no problems with my ATI Radeon 9200. I'm using an (PPC) iBook G4 laptop and ATI's opensource drivers work fine for games like tuxracer and GL-accelerated 2D games like snes9x, xmame, and supertux.

Sleep works, and I am told that VGA-out works but I don't use it.

I am using the open source ATI drivers. As far as I know, there are no binary ATI drivers for PPC.

I don't run fancy screensavers because I'm afraid they will eat up too much battery power.

----------

## ericxx2005

I've found that even though ATI rocks in Windows (now anyways), in linux it just isn't there yet.  They are definitely working on it, but it can months if not years for them to catch up to where nvidia is in linux right now.  You will be better off getting an nvidia card without doubt.  But the extra money you end up spending may be worth it in increased battery life alone, since ATI's drivers are still shaky with suspend/sleep, etc.

One of the things for me that really got to me was that tvout on laptops doesn't work yet.  That really ticked me off, since when I first bought the laptop it was one of my main purposes.  If you're going to dual-boot with Windows though, then an ati card may be okay.

----------

## feven

Hello everybody  :Smile: 

kawsper, I really recommend you to look after a bigger screen ... I'm using right now a Dell i8600c, including an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro Turbo video card on a 15"4 screen (1680x1050). Believe me, that's a real pleasure, I could not come back to 1024 ... definitely not.

Now, my ATI card is really great, I don't have any problem using it, and certainly none using 2D graphics. OpenGL is working great. Now, I never tried big 3D games ... and just looking around on this forum, you will see *a lot* of people asking why their ATI video cards are not working properly ... a lot more than people asking about their NVidia cards. Now, I tell you, office and other 2D applications are working good and there are *also* people who have great experiences with their ATI card, working correctly.

I would be you, I don't really hesitate and buy ATI's one ... or at least a bigger screen resolution.

----------

## kawsper

Funny to hear the different experiences. The nvidia laptop i looked on are have a very limited mark on it and i wouldn't be needing the computer the next 1 or 2 months, so if it is still in stock i am going to buy it (If there isn't another laptop that begs me to buy it).

I have looked on the alternatives (If i dont get the one with nvidia), they all have Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 128MB or Intel Extreme Graphics, i dont know if that is positive or negative, and if they are able to draw my screen without lagging (and the other things i specified in the start).

Anyone with experience with the Intel GMA or Extreme?

----------

## micmac

Hi kawsper!

I don't see why you shouldn't buy the ATI laptop when you just want proper 2D. For that you can use the xorg radeon driver. 'man radeon'

 should tell you that your card is supported. When you setup your kernel with radeonfb (not vesafb/vesatng) you'll have a very decent looking framebuffer console in your monitors native resolution, plus smooth 2D in xorg and of course xv hardware accelleration for video playback. In addition to that you'll get a card that supports dynamic power management, which both radeonfb and the xorg driver support ('man radeon' will point you to DynamicClocks).

So the only thing you wouldn't get woule be 3D (yet - seems some OS people are also working on that). And you wouldn't have to worry about video drivers anymore, because they're included in xorg/kernel already.

Cheers

mic

Edit: In case you want a xorg.conf for such a setup (ati 2d only) drop me a pm with your mail address.

----------

## Rad

I do have a Radeon Mobility 9700 64MB and its 2d performance (using the xorg drivers or the framebuffer drivers from the kernel) is nothing to complain about, neither on x86 nor x86_64. No problems with stability or anything the like either so far.

Also, the proprietary ATI 3d driver works, again on both x86 and x86_64.

----------

## Specialized

I got ATI FireGL T2 and it's working pretty well under Linux (with ati-drivers) and under Windows. I would take it again.

----------

## elestedt

I've been struggeling for the past two days to get my ATI Mobility FireGL v5000 to work properly... thumbs down for the ati configuration utility (not the driver since I havn't had a chance to test it properly...)

----------

## DarkMind

if you use linux, ati is a bad choice   :Arrow: 

----------

## elestedt

now you tell me? didn't have much of a choice... its a laptop.

----------

## Specialized

With the new ati-drivers (8.14.13) the Performance has gone down. I get about 100 FPS less.

----------

## hypnotic

nazgum,

The display problem you are experiencing isn't related to the ATI drivers. It's a hardware issue. A number of people, mostly Winblows users have had this issue. I have an 8790 also. My video was fine for a while. Over time the display for OpenGL apps deteriorated until it was totally unusable. Eventually, even Firefox began to display strange artifacts. I finally sent it in for repair. It works fine again, now.

Search www.notebookforums.com for more complete info. It sounds like the fan/heatsink for the card collects too much dust and so the card runs too hot and the graphics go south. I think all the repair guy did for mine was clean the fan.

hypno

----------

## makton3g

I figured I should say something, since I used to have an Nvidia 5700 for my old tower and I now run all ATI. I ran Gentoo Linux on my new laptop first, which is a Dell Inspiron 9100 with the 256MB Radion 9700 Mobility. I had no problems with the setup or crashing from the card. I played UT2004 and Doom 3 with no problem, along with other various linux 3D games.

My old tower had linux on it, running the Geforce 5700. The drivers gave me a little hickup at first but, easy fix with no problems running.

Now my new tower is an AMD64 with an ATI X800, which is duel booted 64Bit Linux and 64 Bit windows Running a raid 0. The only I wish had for my ATI was the composite, but other than that, the card works flawless in both windows and Linux. No OpenGL problem, no screensaver problems, expected games work like normal.

Right now I am doing a report for my technicial writing class on the performance aspect of the 2 64Bit OSes. When I finish my Report, I'll post it up. Then you can see the ATI specs. I am currently only useing the ATI driver and not Omega.

----------

## tuxdaemon

Depends really.

Ati DRI works very well considering Ati doesn't support anything with proprietary drivers before a certain chipset.

As far as the commercial ones go, I tried them on a 9800XT and they worked okay... but not comparable to NVidia's.

I assume many of you have came to find this out with their drivers, even on Windows systems the quality isn't there.

Great cards though...  :Smile: 

----------

## mars-red

I have a Sager 3790 with the Radeon 9700 mobility, and it's just "okay".  Nothing great.  The performance is fine and I never experience "artifacts" of any kind, but other things about it bother me - like no support for the Composite extension while Direct Rendering is turned on (basically making Composite useless), and horrible ACPI functionality (my laptop will not resume from a suspend-to-memory/suspend-to-disk state because of the ATI hardware).

I've been an nvidia guy for several years now, and there is no sign of that changing.  My next laptop will have an nvidia chipset.

----------

## olger901

If you are going linux, go nvidia, ati simply is a pain in the ass in linux with their drivers.

----------

## vampares

The ati support in the kernel and xorg works well (full 2d action), better than that for nvidia (nothing to update after kernel change).  nvidia's binaries are easier to use though which is only an issue if you need the gl.  nvidia's gl isn't exactly trouble free though.

----------

