Open ATI Driver More Popular Than Catalyst

[dgrafenhofer]

The only reason I still use the fglrx driver is power management...

Same situation over here. I am aMobility HD3650 Laptop user too.

[monraaf]

Well 2d performance is not really better

In my experience it is, I haven't done any benchmarking though so it may be subjective.

on 32 bit at least normal flash is accellerated fullscreen with fglrx.

I remember trying that with fglrx, iirc you had to add OverrideGPUValidation = 1 to /etc/adobe/mms.cfg to get it, because those useless idiots from Adobe only tested their code with NVidia cards. But iirc it didn't seem to make much difference.

[deanjo]

When you think about 9-3 driver as last legacy driver release thats clear. The difference can be only R300-R500 cards and a few with R600+ who are oss believers - the users have just no other choice.

Ding, ding we have a winner! When distro's progress to the point that they have no option but to use it, it no longer is a matter of choice but necessity.

[Tares]

Good that OS ati drivers are progressing but untill I'll get more frames in hon I wont ditch fglrx

[deanjo]

Good that OS ati drivers are progressing but untill I'll get more frames in hon I wont ditch fglrx

Or until ATI decides to stop providing fglrx for your card.

[Tares]

Or until ATI decides to stop providing fglrx for your card.

That won't happen unless ATI stop providing any fglrx driver or I'll switch to nvidia

[deanjo]

That won't happen unless ATI stop providing any fglrx driver or I'll switch to nvidia

Well seeing how they still produce and sell product out there that has already been axed out of fglrx (the rs690 for example which is still present in many laptops), it's not out of the realm of reality for others to follow suite.

[frantaylor]

No surprise. I have two laptops with older Radeon Mobility chipsets. ATI has abandoned both of them so I have to use the free driver. It's a shame because Google Earth does not work on either of them any more. It ran fine on both way back when I could get ATI drivers.

People complain that nVidia does not support older hardware, but ATI is much worse in this respect.

[Tsiolkovsky]

I also switched to radeon

I'm also one of those who switched to radeon after voting for fglrx in the survey. For me radeon also accellerates KDE with desktop effect enabled much betetr than fglrx. Not to mention all the freezing problems I had with fglrx.

I think it would be by far the best for all if AMD/ATI just abandon ther non-free and closed river and merge all the stuff into open source radeon driver and from this on focus only on open source radeon driver. The separate radeonhd driver should also be merged into normal radeon driver. With all working together on one codebase things could improve even more and much more quickly.

[deanjo]

No surprise. I have two laptops with older Radeon Mobility chipsets. ATI has abandoned both of them so I have to use the free driver. It's a shame because Google Earth does not work on either of them any more. It ran fine on both way back when I could get ATI drivers.

People complain that nVidia does not support older hardware, but ATI is much worse in this respect.

Ya it was the biggest reason why we decided to buy 50 nvidia based laptops at work instead of the cheaper ATI options. We need them to be supported at least through their useful lifetime (which is about 3 years for us).