# ATI Drivers for linux, any good? (also about 9700)

## Locke355

I have had nvidia cards for quite some time, and really like their driver set (especially since gentoo has an emerge package for them). I am wondering how the support is for ati cards, and if the 9700 is supported yet. I didn't see an emerge package in the list, and through ati's site, i only see a tar for the 8500.

Anyone on here have experience with the ATI drivers and could tell me if it is worth it to buy the 9700 and try them out? Or should i stick with nvidia.

Thanks,

Locke355

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## pascall

I have an ATI Radeon 8500. One month ago, ATI officially released a driver set for the 8500 on linux that was previously released for the FireGL 8800 (the cards are pretty much the same, the 8800 being targeted towards professional line up - they have the same GPU, the R200).

So People began to use the FireGL driver set for the 8500 card. Seing that, ATI acknoledged it and released the same driver set for the 8500. 

I have to say that IMO, those drivers are pretty good : install went flawlessly if you follow the instructions provided in the tarball, and perfomance on linux is pretty good. Only drawback, they don t support the Xv extensions of XFree86. I experienced only one look up in two months use, so that s anyway so much less that the Bill Gate'$ thing....

As for the 9700 card, there is going to be a FireGL version of this card (X1 I think?), so u could reasonnably hope for a good driver set for linux.

Hope this helps.

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## HeadHolio

I have a Radeon 8500 128mb card and am using the official drivers from ATI.  I get great FPS and everything seems to be working ok.  There is however no support for TV out.  From what I understand, NVidia does have TV out support for their cards.  If ATI had TV out support, I would recommend ATI hands down, however....they don't.  So it would seems as though you would be better off going with NVidia right now.  Besides, if you were to buy a Radeon 9700, you would have to wait a while for XFree drivers because none exist right now.

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## rommel

did ATi add a tar.gz driver to the download page or did you convert the rpm to install?...i am using a gf4 now but have a radeon 8500 just sitting, be nice to get it working in gentoo

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## Panick007

Compared to the Nvidia drivers the ATI drivers are nothing to write home about. They're good enough for general use and give good framerates in most games that are out for Linux but many people also have problems with them, so your mileage may vary. They do have some problems with certain games (Heavy Metal FAKK 2 for one) that have some clipping and texture problems (which aren't new to ATI because the 8500 has suffered the same problems on Windows). Besides that issue the only problem I ever had with them was an inability to exit out of X once I was in it. Trying to drop into a console either by logging out or killing the X server resulted in my system locking up (thank god for XFS). 

Good drivers if you don't have an Nvidia card to play in your Linux box, otherwise I'd stick with Nvidia for Linux purposes.

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## pascall

rommel : I just checked on the ATI website. There are only rpm's for the driver set. But u just got to download the rpms and then 

rpm -Uvh --nodeps --force filename.rpm.

One of the dependency is qt-2.xx for the control panel but u got a static version of this control panel so that s no problem.

Hope this helps.

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## HeadHolio

Re: Panick007,

Funny you should mention that.  I was just thinking to myself how lucky I am to have ATI instead of Nvidia because I was setting up my bro's Nvidia card with Gentoo and everytime he tried to go to a console (either by CTRL+ALT+F?, or by CRTL+ALT+Backspace), it would either restart X or freeze.  There was no way for him to exit X without logging out.  And if he ran XDM, KDM, or GDM then he was screwed.  My system with my Radeon 8500 however has no problem going back and forth from X to command prompt.  Maybe it has nothing to do with the cards and is a setup issue instead?

Re: rommel,

I used the rpm and installed it without dependancies.  I found the control panel pretty useless so I don't even bother with it anymore (however it might be usefull to those with dual displays).  If you already have a working GF4 with gentoo than don't bother with the Radeon (unless you have the spare time or you want to use it in a different setup or something).

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## HeadHolio

Ok, it turns out that once you compile your kernel with "System V IPC" support, the NVidia drivers work great.  If you're big on running with open source drivers, then I would suggest ATI.  However, if you don't care about what you are running and just want performance, then I would suggest NVidia hands down.  (This coming from a huge ATI fan)  ATI is supposedly going to have better linux driver support starting January.  Maybe the tides will change.

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## phelan

Just to mention it: 

The DRI project has started releasing 3D drivers for the Radeon 8500. So there's an OpenSource alternative to the official ATI Drivers.

Although the performance was pretty poor as I get 2500fps in glxgears with the official and only 1600 with the OpenSource drivers. But I didn't try to tweak it so probably it's just my fault  :Wink: 

You can get these drivers http://dri.sourceforge.net/download.phtml

(Look for the r200 package)

Another aspect you should consider is how long you will use this card. NVidia probably won't develop drivers for cards that are 2 or more years old. That could become a problem if the XFree architecture gets significantly changed, as you will end up with no drivers, while OpenSource guarantees your card long-term support. (But: We had to wait nearly a whole year before 3D drivers for the 8500 were available...)

Finally, if you want to buy a card just today, I would recommend you NVidia (Gee, it hurts to say that  :Crying or Very sad: ).

If you can wait for a few months just do it, so things get a bit clearer!

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## Radi

Does the Open Source DRI driver support Xv???

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## HeadHolio

I just picked up an Abit GeForce 4 Ti4200 card from NCIX.com for $210 CDN (be sure to use price match if you purchase from that site).  I hate to give up on ATI like this but I can't take it anymore.  Time to ditch the Radeon 8500. At least now I can play games without crashes,  use my video out to watch movies on my TV, and most importantly....I can play UT2003 with higher frame rates of 2 per second due to the fact that the ATI linux drivers don't have support for texture compression.

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## phelan

As far as I know XV is handled by the normal 2D Xfree drivers, not the DRI drivers.

Radeon 8500 XV support is broken in the stock 4.2.0 release. But it has been fixed in the current CVS: 

http://www.xfree86.org/cvs/changes.html

Does anybody know if 4.2.1 contains the fix  :Question: 

If they don't, GATOS is still the only solution for XV   :Crying or Very sad: 

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