ATI Petition for Adequate drivers in GNU/Linux

coltseaver · Post by **coltseaver** » Tue Aug 24, 2004 3:03 pm

hi,

http://www.petitiononline.com/atipet/petition.html

please support us.

cheers

(Edit): i forgot to specify one thing, it is not my petition

dmoc · Post by **dmoc** » Tue Aug 24, 2004 3:52 pm

Done. It's annoying that ATI keep ignoring Linux and/or rely on third parties to provide drivers. Until they have substantial upto-date drivers I'm sticking with Nv (reluctantly).

chimera · Post by **chimera** » Tue Aug 24, 2004 5:27 pm

Done. I have gentoo-linux which is a very speedy linux. I compiled everything myself.. and got stuck by those crappy drivers? no thanks!

IoN_PuLse · Post by **IoN_PuLse** » Tue Aug 24, 2004 6:29 pm

Just buy a nvidia card...that'll show em!

chimera · Post by **chimera** » Tue Aug 24, 2004 11:29 pm

not looking @ the drivers... ati cards rock

I really love my card (radeon 9500 non-pro). I really dont want to start this never ending ati vs. nvidia discussion.

HiNMity · Post by **HiNMity** » Tue Aug 24, 2004 11:35 pm

I thought ATI cards had good support under Linux since its one of the options in API and operating system support. On the website it says

Robust support for Windows® and Linux® environments

http://www.firegl.com/products/fireglx2-256T/index.html

anyone have experience with any of the fireGL cards under linux?

Post by **stiv** » Wed Aug 25, 2004 2:18 am

ATI cards do seem to to be the source of more bug reports than nVidia. ATI is not completely insensitive to their problems, however. They did donate a handful of nice cards to the Blender Foundation so we could deal with some of the 'issues'. You can take that for what it's worth.

Disclaimer: I did not get one of the cards since I already had a decent nVidia board.

IoN_PuLse · Post by **IoN_PuLse** » Wed Aug 25, 2004 5:57 pm

Robust support eh, well I know a few people that were able to produce all sorts of strange problems with a a FireGL board using some simple OpenGL commands (that should have worked) plus they admitted that with the Catalyst driver they had not worked on it for over a year (until Doom3 came out)

VSTM · Post by **VSTM** » Sun Sep 26, 2004 9:01 pm

Worse than ATI's crappy linux drivers is that they have NO support for any other OS, not even for FreeBSD or through sharing of SPECs. While that might be common and forgiveable, I personally have had a whole far too many problems with ATI's Windows drivers. I eventually switched to the DNA drivers which solved most of my problems.

ATI's cards are good, but their drivers leave much to be desired on all platforms. For this reason, and this reason alone, I wish I had bought an NVidia card instead. Nvidia doesn't release it's specs either, but at least they have up to date support for Linux AND FreeBSD. The drivers get better performance in Doom 3 too.

bfvietnam · Post by **bfvietnam** » Mon Sep 27, 2004 1:08 am

VSTM wrote:ATI's cards are good, but their drivers leave much to be desired on all platforms. For this reason, and this reason alone, I wish I had bought an NVidia card instead. Nvidia doesn't release it's specs either, but at least they have up to date support for Linux AND FreeBSD. The drivers get better performance in Doom 3 too.

I played Doom3 the other day on my Radeon 9600se that I purchased from CompUSA for about 90 dollars.. And it handled the Pixel 2.0 shaders pretty well in Windows.. I curently use the driver trick to use blender with my graphics card (put the glx driver in the same directory as blender). The only reason to run Doom3 is to see the cool shaders, like the glass warping shader, the light bending steam effect, volumetric gas effects, blood spurts, etc. That little area outside the airlock was pretty cool. I can't imagine how the NVidia card could be any better. I've heard that the NVidia cards have something like a 16-bit or 24-bit Z buffer, my ATI feels like a 32-bit Z buffer..

The other thing about the ATI's is they are scaleable in design, it seems.. NVidia comes out with a new card that has to have a massive fan on it, and ATI just takes their old design, updates it a bit and replicates the chips across the card, and NVidia has to go back to the drawing board, pull out a new design.. I think ATI has life too easy..

But the lack of drivers would have me cussing at the hardware developers too.. Its really stupid that the card developers are so stingy with simple API's that they should limit access to drivers or even the specs of the card to prevent anyone else from making drivers.. I wonder if they started selling drivers for linux, they would be able to set aside enough funds to develop drivers for linux/bsd.. Makes me wonder if its possible to have a Windows driver API on Linux, to bypass the need altogether.. Unless the drivers are so much inbred with the Windows OS that that can't be done.

JWalton · Post by **JWalton** » Mon Sep 27, 2004 3:22 am

geez just get another cheap pc card, talk with your wallet. nobody listens to on off lusers.