Thanks to the ATI driver team

[mirv]

now you're just trolling.

[kusuriya]

I don't get the "thank you for how far you have come and what you have done" argument. They have done little. They released specs and are waiting for others to do something, but they themselves don't really do anything. They even paid someone to do something, but that someone doesn't seem to do, or be able to do it.

AMD, just freakin' do it yourself.

My friend if you don't get that argument you must be relativity new to Linux. the first sets of linux drivers the ones before the version bump... lets just say IF you found them and IF you got them working on your consumer card, it made the bugs that we are experiencing a walk in the park, way way back when, I actually had FGLRX blow out an entire partition (not on its own, I added a new drive and was restripeing the array but still how it cause a kernel panic ill never know). They used to be sooo bad that ATI was the butt of many jokes of the Linux community and an example of How Not to do Things on Linux (TM).

[RealNC]

I'm not new to Linux. I'm using it since Slackware 2. That was 1994.

I'm only going to say "thank you" to Matrox and Intel. Rock-solid and fast drivers. ATI/AMD is full of problems. What's there to thank? It's a piece of crap. I ain't gonna say "thanks" for something just because it's less crap than before.

Don't say "thanks" to crap, even if doesn't stink as much as it did in the past. Only say thanks to good stuff.

I'll hold back my "thank you"'s until I get something that works. I don't need all features. I don't need leet stuff. I only need the *BASIC* functionality to work. (Not crashing, switching VTs, no tearing, etc.)

[kusuriya]

Intel I can agree with, but Matrox? Last I checked (its been a while since I have soo I will admit I could be wrong now) but try running the Parhelia in dual head, I remember seeing an entire forum dedicated to workarounds to get dual and tri head working, and still it never worked well, and you couldn't get 3d. and all I am really saying thanks for is they have came a long way from not supporting to where they are now. Intel didn't wake up over night and have the support they have for their vid cards now did they? Rome wasn't built in a day was it? yes its taking some time, and in the mean time you still have the xorg-ati drivers which now if you get the SVN ones support 3d accel on the rv500 and below and radeonHD will get there. Point is they are trying and while they do not deserve adoration just yet some simple recognition of how far they have come in such a short time is due, and always remember whine and cry about the FGLRX driver but like has been said they cant change the driver much for non FireGL cards because the driver is actually optimized for the firegl cards and most of the problems that exist on the consumer cards using the firegl drivers do not exist on the firegl cards and the fixes mess up the performance enhancements on the firegl cards. (And my personal Opinion of that awnser is well then fork them and make a consumer and a firegl driver but meh that makes sense)

[Joe Sixpack]

From what I've been reading all over the net, your experience with ATI drivers depends on 2 things:

Chipset and Platform.

Supposedly, the R500 line is a lot less problematic than the R600 series. Also, if you notice most people that who say they've never had a problem with ATi are using the 32-bit drivers.

I have a HD 3870 with and AMD64, so I'm double screwed. The kernel configuration is hit or miss, with different howto's often contradicting each other. I ended up saying "To hell with it", and just installed openSUSE 11 since they provide the drivers for you.

I must be honest and say that I didn't have any problems whatsoever with Nvidia drivers on my other computer - although I will admit that it was a 32 bit pc, not AMD64.

[mirv]

I can only speak with gentoo experience here, but it's been a while since there have been any real problems between 64bit and 32bit drivers from ati - I think it more comes down to drivers + "extra stuff" (libraries, x version, etc). Most often, half the "driver" problems I have (well, had, I don't have any at current) disappear with an update to xorg and associated libs.
But I will agree that I have a general sense of people with r600 cores having issues (I have an r500 core). That shouldn't be too surprising really - newer core, newer drivers, more issues. That being said, I've noticed a dramatically reduced "show stopper" (my definition: total computer deadlock) problems being reported in the forums. I've also heard more grumblings coming from nvidia users recently (not personally tried nvidia + linux for over a year now).
So while ati may not fix everything overnight, they do continuously work on it, continuously improve, and have stuck to releasing a new driver every month. So I still think they're doing a great job.

[deanjo]

I don't get the "thank you for how far you have come and what you have done" argument. They have done little. They released specs and are waiting for others to do something, but they themselves don't really do anything. They even paid someone to do something, but that someone doesn't seem to do, or be able to do it.

AMD, just freakin' do it yourself.

Hey, the FOSS community cried for documentation and "they would do it themselves". FOSS community claimed that's all they needed. It's up to the FOSS community to put up or shut up. Whatever ATI does extra is just "gravy". It's more then what the FOSS community asked for and should be treated as such. You want to scream at someone, scream at the same people that said that all they needed was documentation.

[Almindor]

Um, sorry but NO. I payed for this card and it still doesn't work 100% after a YEAR on Linux but ALSO ON WINDOWS because of their crappy driver and lame development mechanism (3 teams? come f-ing on!).

The worst thing is that while they fix N bugs, they introduce M new ones. For example, the ETQW SIGSEGV was fixed in 8.8 but now I get artefacts in the game. Flash fullscreen (the youtube version) doesn't work "again" (worked in 8.7, not in 8.6) AND they still can't get their act together on properly supporting Cg shaders.

That's just the Linux problems, now Windows (8.8):
Artefacts in Quake1! Quake f-ing one! That game probably used immediate mode people! How lame must the driver be??

Seriously, the OSS !reverse-engineered! done-in-free time by people who could be making big money elsewhere with their time is already better in some aspects (like text draw speed in 2D).

ATI/AMD should dig a hole and kill themselves for this kind of disgrace. I've been waiting for a year for them to get their act together but never again am I touching a card from this company.

If you want to thank anyone, thank the OSS people who work on the free driver!

[Janusz11]

Well, I personally wouldn't know what to thank ATi for either. When my old Radeon died on me a couple of years ago I consciously replaced it with a nVidia GeForce card because of all the problems I had with the Radeon. Needless to say that I first planned to get a nVidia card again when I planned to build myself a new computer lately. But I read almost as many complaints about the performance of the nVidia cards bigger than a GeForce 7xxx as I read complains about the driver for the ATi cards. So I decided to pick up a Radeon HD4870, because I think that's the best bang for the buck one can get momentarily.

I was really disappointed when I realized that not much has changed since I switched to nVidia a couple of years ago. Yes, the Catalyst driver now supports compositing desktop effects. But it still isn't working with any new Kernel or Xorg release. I think I could live with the latter and the odd behaviour of the driver (ignoring parts of the xorg.conf, not able to creating one when none is present and so on). But the fact that this card is absolutely useless for watching DVDs is not acceptable for me.

In this respect, I agree with others here in the forum: I can't understand why ATi isn't targeting those (basic) issues first instead of just adding new features to the driver.

I'm sure that all the hardcore gamers really appreciated that ATi has finally added crossfire support to the driver lately so that they can now enjoy Crysis in all its glory and don't have to worry about Far Cry 2 either- but wait, last time I checked those games weren't available for Linux anyway!

So, why add new features to a driver that probably only a minority will make use of (if at all) when you know that there are more important issues that should be fixed first.

That said, I don't see anything I could thank ATi for. In this respect I also have to wonder about the biased articles here at Phoronix. Just because AMD/ATi announced to support Linux is no reason to praise them to the skies now. It doesn't change the fact that their driver still has a lot of problems.