ATi Video Cards - 4870 & 4850

[Bongo5HH]

Are these working well with II?

I'm considering one of ATi's higher end products - MAYBE even the 4870 X2 but I'm familiar with how to get nVidia working and don't want to go back to the days of not having 3D on my Linux setup.

Kev

[3vi1]

Re: ATi Video Cards - 4870 & 4850

ATI's Linux drivers perform notoriously poorly in comparison to their Windows drivers. Truth is, you would get better performance from a mid-range nVidia card than the best ATI board right now.

ATI's Linux support lags far behind that of their Windows drivers (as does nVidia's to some extent - I bought a 7600GT when they were relatively new and had to wait another two months for Linux drivers to be released). ATI has not released any 48xx drivers for Linux as of yet, and the non-proprietary drivers are not going to give you 3D support.

Unless you already own an ATI card, there is currently no reason to give them serious consideration when building a Linux system.

Just so people know that I'm not just ATI bashing, I'd like to say that I had to learn this the hard way. I have an old Radeon 9600 card sitting on a shelf across the room here. I once tried it and an equivalent nVidia card (GF4400 maybe? It's been a few years...) in the same system. I was quite shocked to see that whereas the ATI card was slightly faster in windows, the nVidia card was three to four times faster under Linux in most benchmarks.

If you do just have to have an ATI product, please give ATI as much feedback as you can. The better the competition nVidia gets in the arena of Linux support, the better things will get across the board for owners of both cards.

-Jesse

[krazy]

Re: ATi Video Cards - 4870 & 4850

Okay, while the summary posted above may have been true even just 18 months ago, the ATI/Linux picture has improved considerably since then.

In fact, AMD/ATI have recently opened up their documentation, and the open source radeonHD driver is already seeing some success in running 3d games. Of course, it is not yet perfect, but performs well enough for basic 3d/compositing on a KDE4 desktop and is improving rapidly with documentation and code continuing to be released by AMD.

The closed-source driver is also improving rapidly, with the only bug still worrying me being the tearing video issue. As for the performance, see this recent review.

Just some more info to help your purchase decision. For some good reviews/info see phoronix.com.

Disclaimer: I'm getting a 4850 in the next week or so .

[3vi1]

Re: ATi Video Cards - 4870 & 4850

Not to say ATI's not improving... but the performance of a 4850 is still below what you could get with a nVidia 8800GT with half the memory at half the cost. :\ They're not competitive, yet.

[TFrog]

Re: ATi Video Cards - 4870 & 4850

Not to say ATI's not improving... but the performance of a 4850 is still below what you could get with a nVidia 8800GT with half the memory at half the cost. :\ They're not competitive, yet.

I think someone hasn't been paying attention lately. nVidia had to lower the price of all their cards due to the stiff competition from AMD/ATI. By comparison, the 8800 is still slower than the 4850 and even the new nVidia 260 and 280 boards are having issues competing with the 4870 or 4870X2 boards. Let's not mention the debacle of the 8600 and 8400 series chips in the laptops. I can quote all kinds of links on issues with those chips, but I won't.

As to drivers, the current open source driver on my 200M Express chipset laptop is fairly quick with Kubuntu 8.10. It runs around 1200fps and it's an old chipset. Unfortunately the current proprietary driver does NOT work with the Xorg 7.4. I'm assuming AMD/ATI will soon release a version specifically for that version of Xorg. On Kubuntu 8.04.1 LTS the proprietary driver frequently gives me in excess of 1750fps on glxgears without Compiz and 1250fps on glxgears with Compiz on.

My suggestion to the man who posted the original post is to wait a couple of months till prices drop on the 4850 or 4870. The proprietary drivers will be written for Xorg 7.4 in the mean time as well as support for those boards in Linux. As to video quality while playing DVD, nothing beats an AMD/ATI board in my opinion. That and AMD/ATI has notoriously better support for their products compared to nVidia. Gaming wise it's a toss up at the moment. I'd suggest keeping an eye on Tom's Hardware site as well as Anand for further reports.

[3vi1]

Re: ATi Video Cards - 4870 & 4850

I think someone hasn't been paying attention lately....

By comparison, the 8800 is still slower than the 4850 and even the new nVidia 260 and 280 boards are having issues competing...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...e_8800gt&num=4

[KeithZG]

Re: ATi Video Cards - 4870 & 4850

Honestly, I'm curious if the 4870x2 will work at ALL for 3D in Kubuntu (hopefully full even-if-less-performance-than-it-should-have in Ibex, but even partially and in Hardy if need be), can anyone out there confirm or deny? I have several friends building new computers, and being gamers they're partial to the 4870x2; I'd love to be able to set them up with Kubuntu, and they're definitely eager to dual-boot, but I don't even know if it's possible at all.

[cloister the stupid]

Re: ATi Video Cards - 4870 & 4850

I have had nothing but the absolute worst experiences with support and stability with ATI cards when it comes to Linux. This is with any Linux distro, kernel version, xorg version or ATI driver version. If you have any plans to dual boot or run Kubuntu what so ever, I highly recommend getting a nVidia card.

The slight performance/price differences between ATI and nVidia are not great enough to put up with ATI's non existent Linux support.

[TFrog]

Re: ATi Video Cards - 4870 & 4850

I've had nothing but good luck with ATI video cards/chipsets on Kubuntu. My laptop runs 8.04 with the ATI 8.9 drivers right now and setting everything for performance I get almost 1800 fps out of a measly old 200M chipset in my Compaq. As to running ATI's latest and greatest on Kubuntu 8.10 you'll have to wait till sometime in November for drivers supporting Xorg 7.4. As to Nvidia, there is currently a problem which I've heard a bug report has been submitted on for their drivers for 8.10. The next release of Nvidia drivers should work. Best option, use your own opinion and what you want to spend on a video card. DON'T as for opinions. Everyone has one and they all stink as I'm so foundly told and quote. I still prefer ATI over Nvidia, especially with Nvidia's lastest issue with chip material failure. I've never seen that in an ATI product.

[quarkslot]

Re: ATi Video Cards - 4870 & 4850

I'm running with a 4850 and have the ATI FGLRX graphics driver enabled, everything seems to be working fine.

I noticed that desktop effects are not enabled by default and according to the Kubuntu website "These effects will be on by default if your video card supports them." So am I right to assume that desktop effects are not currently supported on these cards or can I enable them?

The last time I tried to enable them I ended up with a mousepointer on a black screen and nothing else, not the effect I was expecting! But this was before I activiated the ATI drivers, has anyone got the effects working on their system with this card?

[krazy]

Re: ATi Video Cards - 4870 & 4850

I have a 4850. The effects work, with two exceptions - video and windowed 3d.

When using desktop effects, in order to draw video or 3d to the desktop, the direct rendering done by the graphics card needs to be redirected through the windowing manager (eg. compiz or kwin). Because of deficiencies in the current X Server (1.5), this is not possible in the closed-source fglrx driver or the open-source radeon and radeonhd. You can see the problems this causes by opening a video and then rotating the cube or activating expose - the video is drawn 'over' the desktop animations and 'flickers'.

nVidia cards can do the redirected direct rendering because nvidia have implemented parts of what the X-server should be doing into their driver.

The new DRI2 architecture being integrated into the next version of the X Server (1.6) should solve these issues, allowing correct redirected direct rendering for all drivers. Unfortuntely, this software is probably not going to be released until next year.

A bit more info here:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item&px=NjcwMw
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item&px=NjY4Mw

[quarkslot]

Re: ATi Video Cards - 4870 & 4850

Thanks, I'll give it a go, unfortunately for a number of reasons it will have to wait for a few days.