“Dell knows it won’t happen overnight, but along side wanting to ship audio/video codecs, Intel Wireless 80.211n support for Linux, Broadcom Wireless for Linux, and being able to ship notebooks and desktops with Compiz Fusion enabled, Dell would like to see improved ATI Linux drivers.”
Now there’s some big bucks, Dell requesting for better ATI drivers..This should motivate ATI a little
For those who don’t know already, there are some very reliable drivers already out there. They may not be standard ATI drivers (They are modified a little) but they work VERY well, just use an application called Envu. It can be found at http://albertomilone.com/nvidia_scripts1.html
Actually, all Envy does is install the proprietary ATI drivers (not sure what you meant by “standard”).
You don’t need Envy to run the proprietary ATI drivers, either; you can simply follow the steps outlined on the unofficial ATI for Linux Wiki:
http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Main_Page
Yeah, you’re right. But for some people it isn’t as easily fixable bo using Ubuntu’s somewhat shoddy howto. For instance, I had ATI drivers working great. A few weeks later, one of the updates did something ot make those drivers stop working. I followed every howto I could find but to no avail. I used Envy and everything worked perfectly. That is the main reason why I recommended it.
If it was a kernel update, then you have to recompile the the kernel module.
If it was a kernel update, then you have to recompile the the kernel module
This happened to me on Dapper last year. I had an ancient ATI 3D Rage pro card when I installed Dapper I didn’t think it could get hardware 3D running on the card. I just assumed that the one OpenGL app I was using then was running because Dapper had automatically set up MESA software emulation.
It suddenly stopped working. It took a long time to work out that I had hardware acceleration that had been bjorked by a kernel update. I spent quite a bit of time trying to get it to work but gave up in the end. I set up MESA software emulation with the xorg driver and it worked OK for what I wanted (molecular modelling). A bit slow but workable.
When I bought my new system I deliberately bought one with an on board Intel video chipset. Hardware 3D works great with it both for my molecular modeling apps and for lots of eye candy with Compiz.
Edited 2007-07-27 14:13
Sorry to say but I gave up on ATI long ago; AMD had the chance of actually fixing things up; if AMD management isn’t willing fire those who refuse to tow the party line, it speaks volumes for the weak management in place.
Nvidia is the choice for me now, it would require *ALOT* to get my to buy any AMD products – refusal to support ATI properly means that it completely takes all AMD products off my list.
To all those who ATI fanboys who are taking points off legitimate posts – get a bloody life and read the T&C – unless they fall under one of the categoriesthat legitimises points being taken off, you’re in violation of the osnews.com moderation policy.
Edited 2007-07-27 01:19
Sorry to say but I gave up on ATI long ago; AMD had the chance of actually fixing things up; if AMD management isn’t willing fire those who refuse to tow the party line, it speaks volumes for the weak management in place.
I’m still willing to give them a little more time. I never expected AMD to suddenly change everything in ATI overnight, especially given their current problems competing with Intel. Supposedly they’re going to have a redesigned driver out sometime before the end of the year, and I have hope that it will be as good as the NVIDIA drivers. They’re not really that great on Linux either, but I’ve given up on either manufacturer doing better than that.
If the situation is still the same in January, then I’ll be moving to your position and start ignoring all ATI products. Probably still consider their CPU’s, though.
Edited 2007-07-27 01:49
They’ve had well over 6 months to do something about it. Their Windows drivers are horrid, their Linux drivers are even worse, and heck, they’re not even willing to support Solaris – Sun was one of the first businesses willing to give Opteron a shot in the server market.
I mean, I’m sorry, but I tend to operate on a ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ basis. If I was AMD, as payback for the support by Sun, I would in return dedicate resources to developing drivers for Solaris – heck, it might even allow FireGL hardware to become an option on Sun’s own Opteron hardware.
Again, what I see from AMD’s management is nothing more than clueless arrogance in the face of the titanic – they’re ignoring the fact that they’re declining, they’re refusing to acknowledge that their refusal to support those outside the ‘Windows world’ is harming their relationship with those who make decisions within large organisations; don’t underestimate how personal prejudices can impact on decisions made for large corporations. If the CIO is unhappy with ATI’s support for his Linux laptop, I can assure you that individual isn’t going to be purchase a fleet of computers with AMD components anytime soon.
I say punish the whole damn company – simply fobbing off the responsibility to some other ‘department’ is a technique used by management when they don’t want to take responsibility for decisions made. If these managers don’t want to take responsibility for the decisions they made, then maybe they should hand in their resignation letter declaring they don’t want the responsibility that comes with the job.
They’ve had well over 6 months to do something about it.
I guess I just don’t think 6 months is all that long, given that this is a huge multi million dollar company and they’re bound to be still working on getting integrated into AMD. Especially since AMD is fighting for their lives right now in the CPU sector and I doubt they’re paying nearly as much attention to the GPUs.
Their Windows drivers are horrid
I hear that a lot, but I don’t have any problem with their Windows drivers. In fact I think I prefer them to the competitions. I’m not sure if it is just a matter of being different than NVIDIA or what?
If I was AMD, as payback for the support by Sun, I would in return dedicate resources to developing drivers for Solaris
Since I’m not a Solaris user, I have to honestly say I don’t care that much, although it would be nice. What I really want are some good open source drivers, though. Then they’d work on every OS that had a decent number of users.
Again, what I see from AMD’s management is nothing more than clueless arrogance in the face of the titanic – they’re ignoring the fact that they’re declining, they’re refusing to acknowledge
That’s where we differ, I think. You see them as specifically ignoring the problem, whereas I see them as being too busy fighting for their lives in another sector to really get off their asses and fix this. IOW, lazy and distracted rather than just plain arrogant. Anyway, as I said, my patience isn’t infinite. I’m giving them 12 months, and not a day more.
I say punish the whole damn company – simply fobbing off the responsibility to some other ‘department’ is a technique used by…
Yes, I know, but I like supporting “alternative” companies like AMD is to Intel. So I have some mixed feelings about them…
I had an ati card way back in the day, and had nothing but problems with it. Bizarre artifacts on textures in games, certain games just not working, etc. When I started making real money rather then just minimum wage stuff during school, I bought a mid-range NVidia card that gave me great performance, and allowed me to play the newest games for years, eventually even compensating for a cruddy cpu. After about four years it died, and this time I went for a mid range ATi card, again, nothing but bizarre problems. On that card, I would get this wierd thing happen where the lower left hand corner of my monitor would jiggle up and down for no aparent reason.
Around that time I switched to linux full time. Enemy-Territory is IMHO still one of the greatest FPS games of all time. It took me about a month of serious research and fiddling to get it to do hardware ogl(i ended up having to do a manual compile, and then copy certain .so files to various locations the installer didnt put them). After all that work, I got far worse performance then windows, and significantly less stability. After about a year on that card, I bought another NVidia. The install on linux was incredably easy, and if anything I got better performance on ET and UT2k3 on linux then windows.
Now, thats just my experience. I have a friend who is a computer guy, but not a gamer. He had an aging GeForce 2 in his pc, but he wanted to play ut2k3 with me and another friend. Against my advice to pay the extra few dollars and go NVidia, my friend went out with him and got him a mid range ATi card. The performance jump was astounding between his several year old card and the new one, but he found he was regularily getting BSODs when he never had before, even after a total wipe/reinstall of xp. Since his machine was used primarily for work, not gaming, he ended up putting his ancient GF2 back into his PC, because the regular crashes were too much of an interruption, and the ati card became an expensive paperweight on his desk.
Last story, during my second round with ATi, I was at a friend of a friends house, talking about the major upgrade I had done on my pc. He worked at a local computer shop, and was planning his own upgrade. When he told me the components he was planning on buying, I asked him why not ati, as you get much more bang for your buck. He said that their shop actually has a policy to push NVidia, because they had yet to have a machine come back with an nvidia related problem, but had ati problems all the time.
All that to say, If ati works great for you, consider yourself lucky. People don’t just bash it because its not nvidia, but because of regularily getting burned by shoddy hardware and drivers.
That explains it: older drivers on Windows (which used to suck) and current drivers on Linux (which still suck).
Anyway, I don’t have anything against NVIDIA. Right now I’ve got an ATI card on my Windows machine and an NVIDIA card on my Linux machine, and I’m pretty happy with both.
Older and current. My brother has a ATI X300 on a PCIe – every release of the driver just goes from bad to worse. Sorry, 2 years of patience is pretty damn good – 2 years of waiting and the driver is trashy in Windows XP and Windows Vista.
I would have gone AMD for my laptop but their wireless chipset that vendors use is Broadcom, they’ve basically told *NIX users to go take a hike. Their graphics cards tend to be ATI which is not compatible with *NIX plus various others draw backs.
Its AMD who block end users like me from using their products – I’d purchase them if I could, but I can’t. I have no loyalty/care about Intel, its the fact that Intel is the only option for me.
I’m still willing to give them a little more time.
Given enough time, Intel will wipe the floor with AMD in mainstream graphics, and they will do it with free software drivers. I used to be quite the AMD fan in the Athlon T-bird era. But they look so inadequate compared to Intel going forward. They’re never going to have another match-up as favorable than K7/K8 vs. NetBurst. Intel is the consummate platform vendor in an era where it’s no longer OK to be just a CPU vendor.
AMD is so screwed on so many levels. Even the process gap is widening from 6 months to a year and beyond. They’re hitched to the IBM process wagon, which is not nearly as sensitive to die size as the desktop and entry server markets. It’s hard to find the bright spot in AMD’s outlook.
Against this backdrop, it’s hard to imagine AMD prioritizing graphics drivers for alternative platforms. This is a company that can’t afford to look forward to a future where free software can empower innovative hardware features where proprietary software is more restrictive. This is a company that’s fighting for its life. They need to focus on their core competencies in semiconductor and platform design.
Maybe this makes them more likely to throw the code over the wall, or at least publish specifications. Dying companies like to try open-source as a last resort. But I don’t think this will happen. I think they’ll move uphill into the midrange server market, in between Xeon and POWER, a commodity alternative to SPARC. Graphics will become more of an HPC vector computing strategy, where proprietary licensing is less of an issue.
heh , you dont have an ati card for long , do you ?
let me translate in true english what they mean with dates and when do they actually release :
now = 3 months
one month = one year
6 months = 2 years and 6-9 months
one year = never
by the way , i now have and intel 945 card on my laptop … damn sweet stuff , in linux makes my ati 9800 run for its money
This is exactly the kind of news I was expecting and hoping for. I am a Linux fanboy and I am hoping/advocating for more momentum in the Open Source/Linux/GNU movement. This momentum could only be initiated by profit. Profit means: some company will have to be installed. I was already thrilled by the fact that Dell has stepped up to sell pre-installed Linux on their machines and I was waiting on this very important news item: Dell, a large player in computer hardware, demanding better driver support for Linux. This can finally mean that hardware vendors will not ignore Linux any more since Dell want Linux drivers. The Linux movement will thrive.
ATI, do the OSS comunity a favor and release ATI graphic drivers for freebsd!
ATI, do the OSS comunity a favor and release ATI graphic drivers for freebsd!
And then call Adobe and ask them to release flash 🙂
ATI, do the OSS community (and yourselves) a favor and ask your papa (AMD) to sell you to Nvidia.
Because less competition is awesome for the market.
Not to mention how it boosts innovation.
Or not.
Dell would like to see improved ATI Linux drivers.
Wouldn’t we all.
ATI drivers aren’t nearly as bad as they used to be.
Fedora 7 is now unofficially supported and X11 crashes less when logging off or returning from standby. I guess thats cool.
ATI needs to bring R600 support to Linux. I highly doubt that would mean HDCP support, though.
If you want to watch your BluRay or HD-DVD movies, you will first have to break ACSS/BD+ then then dump files onto a large HDD partition. Be sure to have UDF 2.5 support in the kernel or the discs wont appear in the file manager.
Edited 2007-07-27 00:35
This means what.
I hoped that Dell would put *effort* into the Desktop. The advantages a large OEM has with GNU are endless, and them hooking into another Disto is not the choice I would like after Ubuntu has proved that there is a desire for a GNU Desktop.
If Dell used their *purchasing power* on AMD to improve the propriety drivers I would be interested.
If they used their *purchasing power* on AMD to open up some of their hardware specifications at least on 3 year old chipsets I would be happy.
If Dell funded better open-source drivers I would be ecstatic.
…but the reality is I’d rather they focused on GNU on hardware actively supported by those companies.
All I see is that Dell know what most people *here* are aware that AMD drivers are simply not as good as either those for Alternative Hardware, or Alternative platforms. I don’t even get there agenda.
Now if they offered GNU on all desktop machines with $50 off I’d be the happiest man alive.
They already are focusing on hardware that already has good linux support. If you configure an E1505 laptop with linux, you’ll notice that the actual hardware is different than the windows version. For example, you have the choice between intel graphics and nvidia, whereas in the Windows version I believe they only allow ati graphics.
Of course, they’d probably rather sell the same hardware with either windows or linux which seems to be what the article is about (need better ati drivers).
The Linuks colonel is a mess. Bugs are being added faster than they are being fixed. You want to change the screen resolution, you have to recompile the whole damn colonel.
Linuks colonel Patch z745!*numb.23: “This patch fixes the interrupt queue at fork().z requests which gets sent to router b that handles sublayer system t which expects a zero return on the delayed pre-processor for channels 2 and driver layer qw that extracts the temporal handle rtu[]…” – YAWNNNNN!
Majority of Linuks nerds eat pizza, are still virgins, have never seen a naked woman in real life before, always wear black clothes, wear glasses and have no social skills…
Get a life you sad, sad man! The linux kernel is not that messed up, unless you are a moron who doesn’t know what he/she is not doing. I have only been on Linux a month but I have had no problems except for the graphics issue that was easily fixed. Before you start bashing linux, define WHICH VERSION you are talking about. Or do you know which version you are talking about? I personally do not think you do with all of the garbage you spewed out in your post. You are far better off keeping your comments to yourself and looking stupid rather then saying something and removing all doubt.
” unless you are a moron who doesn’t know what he/she is not doing”
If you had looked at my name “Edward Yawn” you would have seen that I am MALE. So you did not have to include the politically correct “he/she” bullshit out of fear for the league of hairy feminists gang-raping you up the ass with their strap-on dildos.
By the way, you double negated your sentence…unless I am a moron who DOESNT know what I am NOT doing. So therefor, I do indeed know what I am doing.
Edited 2007-07-26 21:06
Don’t feed the troll.
almost anyone who has an ATI card knows how slow they are in fixing things, how much work it takes compared to NV to integrate it into the kernel etc.
Why wouold ATI listen to dell and not to the people who jave been bitching ATI for years now ?
We do not use ATI anymore, we’ve had it, with the non-working outputs, the black screens when you switch over to a VC for years, total system crashes etc etc etc….
“Why wouold ATI listen to dell and not to the people who jave been bitching ATI for years now ?”
Money.
Speaking of which, I wont be paying out any money for windows only hardware. I also will continue to recommend (to anyone who asks me) staying away from ati for this very reason.
“Why wouold ATI listen to dell and not to the people who jave been bitching ATI for years now ? ”
Uhmm…because Dell is a huge corporation that buys massive amounts of ATI/AMD gear?
“Money.”
The article only mentions that Dell wants better ATI drivers, but there is no mention of money.
Dell isn’t too desperate to use ATI, there is always nVidia
Yes Dell could always use NVidia, but I am sure ATI would prefer otherwise. The bundled gpu on OEM systems constitutes the bulk of the income from the gpu market if I remember correctly. At the least it constitutes a significant part of ATI/NVidia’s margin.
Hopefully they will support their partner, Sun, by shipping Solaris drivers as well.
Here’s to dreaming…
In other news: People in Hell want ice water.
I have two laptops with ATI videocards, and I have to say that the ATI drivers suck on Windows too. Particularly with OpenGL applications, I see unexplainable artifacts, weird issues with color depth, etc. that I don’t see on my Nvidia machines. Plus I always run the latest release drivers.
Even with Dell leaning on them, I’m starting to believe that ATI is incapable of writing good drivers.
I just received an email from ATI customer support saying “Fedora is not supported”.
I bought a professional class workstation graphics unit in the form of an ATI FireGL V7200 because I thought I would be paying for additional support, more stable drivers (rather than games optimised ones) and better hardware. ATI’s own product spec says Linux is supported, so do the products specs from 3rd party vendors of these cards.
But the reality is different. I did not know of the pain and suffering of ATI Linux users – their drivers are extremely shoddy. They fail, they are brittle and they lose and gain features between releases and will kill your box if you so much as switch to a virtual console. XVideo support – forget it. Full resolution – if you’re lucky. OpenGL – maybe.
I could have bought an ATI card at the tenth of the price and still had the same experience.
ATI’s disregard for customers is legendary. Try to log onto their website and register for professional support and the forms are contrived to tell you the product does not exist. Its a way of not providing support you paid for. A huge FireGL sized sum for.
I tried for over a week intensely trying to get something out of their normal support and i got nothing but automated responses and cut-and-paste replies. Despite me insisting they do not do that.
Well – lesson learnt. I will never buy ATI again. NVIDIA drivers for me are solid, reliable and work across Linux, FreeBSD and OpenSolaris. Heck they even provide a “legacy driver” for medium-old cards. Everything just works – full resolution, xvideo, 3d and good documentation.
I can’t recommend ATI to anyone – and if the use windows I don’t have much faith in their driver development model compared to NVIDIA.
The fact that Dell publicly berated ATI is a sign of how bad things are.
Well its been rumored that ATI has been working on a whole new opengl stack that would benefit all platformsthat use it. this is supposed to be released in mid august. Now is this true I don’t know, but i would make sense considering now would be a great opportunity to rewrite the stack for vista.
Nvidia are engineers and I happen to think that the reason they support so many different platforms is not because they believe people will buy it but because they want to see if it can be done. They wrote their drivers in s way so that it can be used across different platforms without much work on their part. The same driver for windows is the same driver for linux. ATI does the same but they don’t seem to have the drive or technique to get it right.
“Well – lesson learnt. I will never buy ATI again.”
I have learned my lesson earlier in 1999.
ATI stopped supporting their windows based cards after 4 years. and they obsolete their products in 5 years making their working hardware useless on new OSs.
nvidia is natively supported on sun solaris 11 Betas; even the included driver was able to pull my GPU temperature!!
Dell wants to flirt with the cheap to save, but the cheap should come at least stable if not good, which ATI cannot deliver till now.
Dell is desperately trying anything they can to regain their former glory. When it comes to consumer PCs, they are quickly getting the reputation of being the eMachines of the new millennium.
sweet. mabey this will motivate them and i’ll ACTUALLY be able to use my x800 card and not have the system crash every 5 minutes. ati’s drivers are complete crap. and they need to get them working flawlessly with ubuntu.
“sweet. mabey this will motivate them and i’ll ACTUALLY be able to use my x800 card and not have the system crash every 5 minutes. ati’s drivers are complete crap. and they need to get them working flawlessly with ubuntu.”
Then use the Open-source drivers; you *will* take a hit on speed…but not enough that will affect Quake3 gaming at 1600×1200. And you get the bonus of improved support for the 3D desktop, and each release they simply get better. You can run the latest kernel without patches, or installing a 3rd party driver. Even read about the development with back-face colour and be bemused by the whole thing.
Edited 2007-07-27 04:42
ATI cards are like a city buss driver.
Big, and red, and they have terrible drivers.