ATI and Linux compatibility

[dmrauss]

Hi! I've been researching for hardware to buy a new computer. As I only use Linux but never used any ATI graphic card and a friend of mine said a while ago the combination is by any means no good, I wondered if the scenario changed over the years. Searching on internet, found AMD website FAQ, which states that "ATI Proprietary Linux driver currently supports Radeon 8500 and later AGP or PCI Express graphics products" (http://ati.amd.com/products/catalyst/linux.html#2)

You, Linux users, owners of ATI cards, would you please tell if it's possible to do the combination Linux/ATI and still play performance demanding games (on wine and natively)?

I searched but couldn't find useful and **updated** material on internet. Most of material are from past 5 years!!

Thanks in advance,
Rauss.

[PsynoKhi0]

Searching on internet, found AMD website FAQ, which states that "ATI Proprietary Linux driver currently supports Radeon 8500 and later AGP or PCI Express graphics products" (http://ati.amd.com/products/catalyst/linux.html#2)

Whoaaa they need to update that page...

The current fglrx driver doesn't support anything older than the HD 2k-series. The last release that supports Radeon 9250 to the x1k cards is fglrx 9.3, and it won't work on newer kernel/xorg versions. So unless you use something like Debian Lenny (I suppose CentOS and Scientific Linux qualify too) the open-source drivers are the only alternative with the older cards, though judging from feedback on this forum, it's not necessarily a bad thing

Personally I've used fglrx since around 8.12 (x800GTO AGP, now HD4670 PCIe) and never had any show-stopper bug.

[Pfanne]

though the fglrx driver doesnt seem to redirect fullscreen opengl applications, which can lead to annoying behavior, but is easily worked around in most cases

[bridgman]

I forget the details, but apparently a couple of jurisdictions have laws about preserving web contents, and those laws are reflected in our record retention policies, which in turn translates into a lot of old web pages still available at their original URLs even though you can't navigate to them any more.

Lawmakers, meet search engines. Work it out.

[rinthos]

@bridgman,

Sorry sir but that is not the case here.
Go to: www.atitech.com
Support & Downloads
Graphic Cards

In the driver search screen put in a Radeon 5700 series card (happens with others too).
Then click on the Catalyst for x86 / x64 Linux link.
Then on the Catalyst download page (where it shows Catalyst 10.3 but has the link to Catalyst 10.4) at the top right there is a URL:
ATI Proprietary Linux Driver FAQ

It brings you to the outdated page.

So that old FAQ (oh and there are several other outdated links like this) is still an active link.

Nice theory on the legal side though

I forget the details, but apparently a couple of jurisdictions have laws about preserving web contents, and those laws are reflected in our record retention policies, which in turn translates into a lot of old web pages still available at their original URLs even though you can't navigate to them any more.

Lawmakers, meet search engines. Work it out.

[bridgman]

OK, thanks. If you can still navigate to the page then we should be keeping it up to date. Good catch.

[rinthos]

Yessir. Might be a suggestion to the Web team to review the links from the active Linux-driver-related pages.

Also the Linux Catalyst download page shows:
"ATI Catalyst? 10.3 Proprietary Linux x86 Display Driver " but is dated 4/27/2010 and the link points to Catalyst 10.4. (The RSS Feed link also shows 10.3 but the link is to 10.4).
See:

http://feeds.amd.com/catalystlinux/

and

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Pages/radeon_linux.aspx?type=2.4.1&product=2.4.1.3.42&lang=English

Also the Linux FireGL Download Page does not have "install instructions" it just lists the release-notes document twice.

Hopefully this can assist someone with the documentation cleanup efforts.

Back to Sharks hockey now!

OK, thanks. If you can still navigate to the page then we should be keeping it up to date. Good catch.

[Kano]

Well the ati-installer is really not good for distributions with lots of hacks, do NEVER run it on u 10.04! Hopefully the package creation is working with 10-5 again without extra patching - but out of the box kernel .33/.34 support may take even longer... Especially on 64 bit systems the ati-installer does only pure crap.

[FunkyRider]

If you wanna play 3d games in Linux (especially under Wine), stay away from ATI, period.

[storma]

That's not entirely correct. I have no trouble playing Savage 2 and HoN with ATI. I can't comment on gaming with wine though as I don't support windows.