# Current quality of ATI drivers?

## neuron

I'm sitting here with a 8800GTS now, but I've stopped needing 3d acceleration at all, and the 2d performance of the current drivers are absolutely hopeless (see http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=114858 ).  And suspend 2 ram has been less than reliable as well.

Whats the current quality of the ATI linux drivers?  I only need 2d acceleration, although compiz would be nice.  Suspend2ram is pretty much a must aswell, I got an old ATI pci 9200 card laying here somewhere, I figure I can take that and put it in as an extra card, and if I need the 3d I'll just switch some cables around.

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## asturm

Catalyst 8.6 Linux brought much better 2D performance to AMD drivers as well as many other positive changes. They made real progress during the last year with fglrx basically matching the nvidia driver now in terms of performance.

I don't know about suspend though as I'm still with nvidia on my main system, and fglrx support for 9200 (R250 and before I believe) was removed a long time ago. There's superior support for those cards in xf86-radeon-ati though, I'm always using the latest -9999 version on my good old notebook.

You can track the whole process of AMD's new closed and open source advancements at phoronix.

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## 118947

If you don't need 3d just stick to the 'free' ati drivers.

They'll do just fine, and if you do need/want 3d, it is finally happening, due to amd/ati opening up their specs and thus becoming really supportive towards linux.

Or just use their driver, fglrx. Its really quite improved the last couple of months.

Their newest beast, Radeon HD 4850, comes with their fglrx driver bundeld onto the driver cd, and the box features our beloved tux  :Smile: 

Meanwhile, somewhere on the darkside of the moon, nvidia is probalby finally realising that linux-users will drop them, due to their lack of support/contribution towards the community. 

Set an example and switch!!   :Wink: 

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## LilFox

I've purchased Radeon HD 4850 this week and got a lot of todo with it  :Smile: .

Imho ati drivers still have raw state because i got 2 top issues with it and a little bit minor ones.

First one was overheating and idle of cooler which one doesn't want to spin even at 70 deg. It was solved by fixing card's bios.

Second one is low performance. My amdcccle shows me about 300Mhz GPU and Memory Clock with my locale and when I switch to LANG=C it shows  650 and 995Mhz o_O. glxgears shows the same results as my lastest NV7600  :Sad: .

At the last =) I got less usable WH40K Dawn Of War: Soulstorm. It works but cursor has inefficient view  :Sad: .

I believe it will be fixed sometime, but as i said drivers are still raw

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## DirtyHairy

Glxgears is not a benchmark (TM); comparing it across different graphics drivers won't tell you anything in my opinion (at least it never did for me  :Smile:  ), the drawing operations done by the program are trivial and don't stress the hardware in any sense with the result that the FPS are potentially limited by  infrastructure effects which are totally irrelevant in any real live application. I (Thinkpad T60, X1300 mobility) personally never had major problems with fglrx apart from some really borked releases, and performance both in the 2D and in the 3D sector is increased tremendously over the last revisions.  But, as LilFox already mentioned, some users stil have issues with the drivers, but these seem to be ironed out rather quickly. Suspend has been working flawlessly for me since day 1 (two years ago).

On the opensource side, radeon and RadeonHD work for me and give me decent 2D performance, too, but still, afaik, anything accelerated for chips newer that R500 (R600?) has still to arrive yet. However, once the dust has settled a bit and full acceleration is implemented in these drivers thanks to AMDs documentation, they should be a very good alternative to fglrx.

So, if I would be deciding about buying some graphics hardware, I would propable go with ATI/AMD, not so much because of the proprietary drivers (although they have improved tremendously over the last few months) but because of the open-source support backed by AMD.

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## LilFox

2d performace is too at the bottom of my desire  :Sad: .

Especially i got upset when with my 8.7 catalyst drivers. I got unuseable fvwm (EmwhBaseStruts o_O"!) It's for real when i turned back to nvidia card fvwm worked as usual.

Maybe glxgears doesn't show all information about acceleration of the card but i was confused when i saw frequency of Memory Clock and GPU. Both of them was at 300MHZ level. Besides this it's 500 for gpu and 750 for memory or cotrariwise ( i can't remember now ).

But it's nothing  :Smile:  i got one year until Dawn of War2 will come.So then i hope AMD/ATI will fix their proprietry drivers and open specs for RV770 chips to improve their support in opensource ones.

So as for me i'm on the crossroads and i have to choose between ati and amd. I like linux more than games but i like warhammer 40 000  :Smile:  too. So it would be nice to play with comfort in it with ATI. Unfortunatelly for now it's imposible  :Sad: . But i hope it's issues of fresh (raw) drivers

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## asturm

Your problems with ATI hardware appear to be unusual...

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