It works more or less but has plenty of issues
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| Koriel Jun 21, 2010 12:17 AM EDT |
I recently bought and ATI Radeon HD 5770 card to replace an old Nvidia 6800 which bit the dust after a few years of use, I know Nvidia have been taking a lot of flak recently in the tech press but i will say this their linux drivers although proprietary worked like a dream on linux i can honestly say I never had any problems with them in either their 2d or 3d support. Now back to ATI i bought the 5770 after good reviews on various sites Phoronix, Tom's and Guru3d, It is an awesome performing budget card on Win XP but on linux the drivers im current using Catalyst 10.4 the 2d performance sucks horrendously, 3d is ok but has some issues. Now on linux most of my work is done in 2d, so when you can actually see the window redraw as you drag it you know you are in for trouble i literally spent days trying to get something close to reasonable 2d performance out of this thing and I managed it by turning most of the the fancy stuff off such as redraw window contents on resize and drag just to make my system useable. So i was ecstatic to read that they had implemented their new 2d architecture in 10.6 so i went and installed it and soon as X rebooted i launched dolphin and dragged it across the screen and let out a cheer it was real fast. It seems i was premature in my rejoicing (dont worry im seeing a doctor about it) i booted up firefox and then it happened entire areas of the browser had black artifacts or in some cases the entire browser window i was crestfallen a quick check of the phoronix forums and everyman and his dog are reporting similar issues. Whatever happened to quality control does no one at DAMMIT use the firefox browser on linux as users are reporting these problems on the supposedly officially supported Ubuntu. So to answer the question yes it is fast but to be honest how much cpu power do you need to move a completely black window about! Needless to say i went back to the slow 10.4 drivers which at least i can compensate for, still living in hope that the good money i spent on an ATI card hasnt been all in vain hopefully things will get fixed soon or else I will have little choice but to go back to Nvidia. |
| azerthoth Jun 21, 2010 12:24 PM EDT |
Said it before, and I'll say it again. A(nother) T(errible) I(nvestment). |
| bigg Jun 21, 2010 12:43 PM EDT |
One of my desktops came with ATI. After a couple hours of wasted time, I put my nVidia FX 5200 in it, problem solved. Sounds like there's no reason to give it another try. Edit: Should add that I bought a motherboard with ATI graphics only because ATI is supposedly opening their drivers. Complete fraud, if you ask me. |
| jdixon Jun 21, 2010 1:09 PM EDT |
> I bought a motherboard with ATI graphics only because ATI is supposedly opening their drivers. Complete fraud, if you ask me. If my memory is correct (never a given these days), ATI never promised to open their drivers. AMD, which had just purchased ATI, promised to open their drivers. Obviously, doing so isn't as simple a matter as they expected. |
| jezuch Jun 21, 2010 3:01 PM EDT |
Well, I don't know. What alternatives there are? NVidia still sucks (although I finally managed to start nouveau on my work laptop and it's a bliss - at least in 2D). Intel built the newest chips in different team than before that never heard of Linux and the results are disastrous. Progress on the ATI front seems to have slowed down, but I think it still looks good considering the alternatives. At least the chip in my home computer works fine and has been working for a couple of years now, I think. |
| Sander_Marechal Jun 21, 2010 4:22 PM EDT |
I haven't had any problem with my Radeon HD 4830. No idea what driver version I have though. It works. It's fast. Why go on the driver update treadmill? |
| Koriel Jun 21, 2010 6:54 PM EDT |
One of the major problems is the ATI HD 5xxx series is so new its support is still pretty limited being an entirely new chipset, the only option is to use the DAMMIT drivers as the open source ones do not currently support it. @jezuch If you think Nvidia sucks then you obviously dont occupy the same planet as i do, used Nvidia for 6 years and 3dfx before that all of my previous cards have been Nvidia and all worked flawlessly under Linux using the proprietary drivers. This is my first ATI card and so far i am far from impressed, its my own fault though i probably should of done a lot more research before i purchased it, unfortunately i was swayed by the glowing reviews it wont happen again i can promise you that, ATI is now off my purchasing list. |
| jezuch Jun 22, 2010 2:14 AM EDT |
Quoting:used Nvidia for 6 years and 3dfx before that all of my previous cards have been Nvidia and all worked flawlessly under Linux using the proprietary drivers NVidia's proprietary driver works the same way Windows works: it got bashed to submission with kludges and workarounds. And it's proprietary. That's enough for it to suck. |
| jhansonxi Jun 22, 2010 10:31 AM EDT |
I have an MSI R4770 (ATI HD 4770) card and it works rather well with Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala). I'm running dual-head/non-xinerama and play lots of games (UT2004, Quake4, Doom3) and run VMware Player 3 without problems. It does tend to lock up if I'm running additional X instances from a separate login, especially with an OpenGL application running, but that may be due to an X.org bug. I'm using the standard ATI drivers installed by Jockey. |
| Koriel Jun 22, 2010 3:49 PM EDT |
@jezuch
Ahh your one of those proprietary sucks people, enuf said. Yeh, the 47xx series is quite well supported, by both the proprietary driver and the open source driver. |
| jezuch Jun 23, 2010 2:21 AM EDT |
Quoting:Ahh your one of those proprietary sucks people, enuf said. Ahh you're one of those proprietary sucks sucks people. Believe or not, I'm not an idealist. I just hate it when I can't fix things when they break. |
| tuxchick Jun 23, 2010 12:01 PM EDT |
FWIW, and it drives me nuts when the "it works for me" chorus chimes in, but I have had good experiences with ATI video. If anyone cares I'll look up the exact chipsets. openSUSE, K/Ubuntu, Arch, and Debian all like the ones I have just fine, and I get compositing and other 3D stuff with no hassles. The only hassle is with the poorer-than-ever state of user-configurability of video. How many oldtimers remember the nice Red Hat (versions 9 and older) video configurator? It detected both the card and monitor, let you tweak resolution and modelines, and other useful stuff. When you changed the video card it was auto-detected, and if you had hardware scanning disabled you could run the configurator manually. Maybe Mandriva has something like that, I don't know, but none of the other distros I use do. Configuring video is a bigger PITA than ever, except for the eleventy-nine thousand and ten special compositing effects, and if you change your video card or monitor lots of luck, you better have good command-line fu. |
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