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http://blogs.sun.com/gameguy/date/20050327 Sunday March 27, 2005

Short Follow-up to last Blog

Word to the Wise: ATI support for Linux is royally screwed.

I'm struggling right now to get a second box working right with an ATI card.

If you have any option, go NVidia. If you don't, well, I share your pain :(

Posted at 07:01PM Mar 27, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[5]

Comments:

Funny,

ATi are my preferred graphics cards on Linux / Solaris x86 with Xorg server. The Xorg drivers are by *far* the best of drivers available, particularly for the R1xx and R2xx based cards (XRender is accellerated on these chips).

I think possibly you are referring to ATis' proprietary binary Linux drivers. And you possibly should be specific about this in your blog entry. ATi Radeon cards are otherwise an excellent choice (especially for 2D) work and supported very well out of the box (no driver installs needed at all) on both Solaris 10 GA and Linux.

NVidia's are generally supported very poorly on Linux, other than via NVidia's binary only drivers - which generally render your Linux distribution unsupportable in most cases (eg Fedora / RHEL), as would usage of Atis' proprietary drivers instead of the open Xorg drivers. Obviously the NVidia drivers on Solaris are better supported.

Posted by Paul Jakma on March 27, 2005 at 09:29 PM EST #

Paul, So far I have spent a whole day following 3 different websites sugegstions on how to get my ATI 86000 working (really working, which means doing proper accelerated 3D) and have totally failed. On the flip side, all I had to do with my NVidia 6800 was telinit to rl 3, run their driver, and type one command line command they made vey clear and it was up and running. If you have a good site for drivers and HowTo that work for SUSE 9.1 PLEASE point me! JK

Posted by 67.116.60.14 on March 27, 2005 at 11:31 PM EST #

The very best X11 drivers are the ones from XiG, at xig.com . But, although they cost a little bit of money, installation is easy and it works.

Posted by PatrickG on March 28, 2005 at 10:42 AM EST #

Thanks PAtrick,

It has to be cheaper then spedning days fighting with my install :)

I'll go take a look.

Posted by 67.116.60.14 on March 28, 2005 at 06:19 PM EST #

Update

XiG doesnt support my high end Radeon yet :(

seems m,y original conclusio nwas correct and Im gonna have to scrape up the penneis to ditch this ATI card and buy an NVidia for my home linux box.

Posted by 67.116.60.14 on March 29, 2005 at 05:16 PM EST #

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