Linux ATI drivers?

[bailout]

How bad are the ATI drivers for linux these days?

I had an ATI card a few years ago and had endless problems. Eventually I gave up and bought nvidia. Since replaced with another nvidia card and have had zero problems with both of them.

I am currently looking at upgrading my gpu and all the best cards at my price level seem to be ATI I had a quick look on the ubuntu forums and inevitably there were lots of threads by people having problems with ATI drivers but there are always people with problems

I have seen people recommending sticking to the oss drivers but I really want to be able to set colour adjustments through the driver control settings. The nvidia proprietary drivers have a very good control centre.


thanks

[schnelle]

Re: Linux ATI drivers?

They are getting better and better but they are still no match to nvidia ones.

Catalyst driver doesn't support kwin well (kwin under catalyst works in "legacy" opengl 1 mode instead opengl 2) and scrolling in web browser is not smooth if there are flash ads or videos on the page.

Opensource driver works very good with kde 4.7 (I am using it right now) but it doesn't support dynamic power management so your graphic card can get very hot.

So drivers are almost there, but not there yet 8)

For linux desktop, I would still choose nvidia. For laptop, choice is limited to intel and amd, because nvidia doesn't support optimus under linux.

Edit: To make myself clear, catalyst driver works ok but its performance under kde is not as good as with other drivers. At least I can see the performance (smoothness) difference

[jpenguin]

Re: Linux ATI drivers?

In my laptop, I have Nvidia; because I don't have time to mess with; in my desktop I have an ATI Radeon HD 4890, it works great too; I just have to remember to uninstall he driver before a kernel upgrade

[bobwya]

Re: Linux ATI drivers?

With:
Desktop Machine: Kubuntu 11.10 + Nvidia 8800 GTX + driver 280.13
I can now play S.T.A.L.K.E.R. : SOC (via WINE 1.3.36) with Full Dynamic Lighting (near damn perfect) 8)

With:
Laptop: Kubuntu 11.10 + AMD Radeon HD4650M + Catalyst 11.12
I get a black screen when I try to log in - can't even get a damn console...

Fair comparison - I would argue *YES*. The cards are roughly equivalent in performance on Windows. I seem to spend most of my time trying to fix the Catalyst drivers - rather than doing anything productive. OK 2+ years down the line the FOSS drivers might be up to scratch (they are good - but lack 3D gaming performance still). If you don't have demanding OpenGL needs the FOSS drivers are adequate **today**. The proprietary drivers still suck.

Bob

[larrypg]

Re: Linux ATI drivers?

Well I guess I must be the exception because my 6770 seems to work fine with flgrx.

[SteveRiley]

Re: Linux ATI drivers?

I asked about nVidia vs. ATI a while back in light of the disparity in the number of posts on Phoronix. Given that people generally gripe more than they praise, if the Phoronix numbers mean anything, ATI is about nine times as troublesome as nVidia.

Highly unscientific and probably full of bias, sure...but perhaps it's worthwhile perusing the forums there a bit before you make your purchasing decision.

[silviucc]

Re: Linux ATI drivers?

ATI/AMD cards seem to be causing troubles not only on the Linux OS but also on Mac OS X. The majority of people complaining in the wine/crossover games forums of graphical problems have ATI/AMD cards. I don't know what they're doing but they're doing it wrong

I really want to like AMD, I really want them to make products that have good support no matter what OS I happen to use them with.

[de_koraco]

Re: Linux ATI drivers?

lol @ AMD. Catalyst is still not working reliably with Xserver 1.11 (Oneiric uses 1.10), so Debian Sid'Testing, Arch, Fedora, Gentoo, Frugalware, pretty much all the distros with slightly newer packages are fscked. At least it's a little better, X wouldn't even start until Catalyst 11.11. To illustrate, the Arch Catalyst maintainer has been maintaining a separate package bundling Catalyst 11.9 and Xserver 1.10 until a month ago, Debian Sid and Testing users have largely been apt-pinning or holding X at version 1.10 (from backports), or they've just stopped using Catalyst. Ditto for Fedora. Let's not even mention that Gnome Shell still displays a rainbow colored top bar with Catalyst in some cases, and that's been going on for almost a year. You couldn't get Catalyst to play anything but .avi movies without screen tearing until April 2011...

There's been significant improvement with radeon, but AMD is not releasing the full docs, they're just pretending to, and the devs can't get everything done. Besides, who really wants to run git Mesa builds in order to have reliable 3D compositing. Radeon's downclocking is still rudimentary, so your computer runs as hot as a frying pan...

The only thing where it beats nVidia hands down is switchable graphics, but if you go Intel+AMD on the GPUs, you can't use Catalyst cuz the work is done by the kernel, Xorg and Intel team, not AMD, and who in their right mind would use AMD+AMD GPUs on Linux. Well, at least there's some kind of support, unlike with Optimus.

[dibl]

Re: Linux ATI drivers?

Given that people generally gripe more than they praise, if the Phoronix numbers mean anything, ATI is about nine times as troublesome as nVidia.

9X at least, IMHO.

My first experience with Linux was Kubuntu 6.06 on a desktop PC with an ATI card, vintage 2003 or so. What a strange experience -- Live CD worked flawlessly, installed system booted to a black screen. I must have re-installed it 5 times out of disbelief, just to confirm the "problem". Next stage of my education involved a day of twiddling /etc/X11/xorg.conf, based on dozens of inconsistent forum posts. I would get to a point that X would come up, and I was so thrilled I moved on to running updates. Bad move! Next day I was back to twiddling /etc/X11/xorg.conf to try to recover a GUI desktop. A smarter person than me would have applied his energy to something more productive, but I've always used persistence as a substitute for brains.

Bottom line -- when I bought the parts for my new Linux computer, the list included a nice Nvidia card, and I have stuck with that solution for 5 years, with no regrets.

[sithlord48]

Re: Linux ATI drivers?

if you read the post i made in that thread steve linked to . i have quite a few machines with ati video cards. they have been doing very will for me . no issues with compisiting. the newest ati driver has a package issue on 64-bit if your using the properitary driver v 11.11 or 11.12 it just failed for me horribly. all in all i have had good results with ati cards, on my desktop i now use HDMI to connect my monitor it was as simple as it should have been plug in the cable and profit. the catalist control center is just about the same as the NVidia control panel feature wise. while i would love to use the opensource driver(for the desktop) i find its openGL proformance a tad to slow for some games or emulators. it has been a while since i tried to use it so when percise comes out ill end up doing a fresh install and trying the open driver again.

[dequire]

Re: Linux ATI drivers?

I just built a rig with an AMD X4 955 (3.1Ghz) paired with a ATI 6770 graphics card and this thing flies under Linux. Not one issue to speak of so far. So the TL/DR version is that I guess it depends on your hardware. I use the proprietary driver.

[Pajoe]

Re: Linux ATI drivers?

With:
Laptop: Kubuntu 11.10 + AMD Radeon HD4650M + Catalyst 11.12
I get a black screen when I try to log in - can't even get a damn console...



Bob

Acer Aspire 5560-SB613
AMD A-Series quad-core processor A8-3500M with
AMD Radeon HD 6620G

Ubuntu 11.10 (Ocelot Amd64) with Kubuntu desktop installed after the installation. There was a problem with booting to a blank screen that required adding “nomodeset” option.I learned about that fix here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=11527811

I changed Grub (/etc/default/grub)
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“splash radeon.nomodeset=1”
sudo update-grub


I did use the proprietary graphics driver with the original installation, the post release version did not work. I don't have the laptop handy to check the version numbers