ATI and Linux

quicksilver · Post by **quicksilver** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 5:56 am

I keep hearing comments that ATI cards don't like to work with Linux. Can someone give some more info on this?

I have my eye on a 4670. I'll most likely be using Windows 7 on it, but at some point I want to give Ubuntu a shot. Will it work? What about the 4650? I'm also considering a laptop that has a 4650.

Thanks for any info

~El~Jefe~ · Post by **~El~Jefe~** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 6:18 am

they do not work in linux. People that say they do only say that because they do not own an nvidia card and just say things in forums that are not helpful. Ubuntu would not work with my asrock board and 3870 card. The card never was recognized properly. ever. It had to be manually messed with for a couple of days. I could have worked 2 days and bought a nvidia 295gtx instead.

Now, linux is the ONLY os that you CAN make ANYTHING work.

That means spending hours upon hours of failures upon failures. it will work though. I point you to a program called Cedega. It takes windows games and runs them full on linux. It is a paid program. They dont support nvidia. this is the key program for linux gaming. That's a good hint.

nvidia is fully supported and works out of the box.

so dont bother. plus, 4xxx series isnt even dx 11. If you are still going to buy dx10 hardware, nvidia is a much better performer and is supported by all OS's. even macintosh!

(called 'hack-in-tosh')

Vicotnik · Post by **Vicotnik** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 9:59 am

I've used xubuntu and ubuntu with my current 4670 and with my old 3870 without any problems. The OS asks if you want to use the closed binary driver, click yes and it works fine.

Granted I'm still a light linux user and I haven't played any real 3D games under that OS, but common desktop stuff works just fine.

That being said, I'm hoping that my next card will be a nVidia card, mainly because I want to make use of the excellent hardware acceleration for h264 that seems to work fine under linux with the nVidia cards. I'm also fed up with the bloated CCC under Windows. Now if just nVidia could release a card with performance and power consumption better than my current 4670...

Post by **CA_Steve** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 10:48 am

A better source for Linux than here - Phoronix

ryboto · Post by **ryboto** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 11:37 am

Yea, I had zero issues with my 3870 and a few different versions of Ubuntu.

coreyography · Post by **coreyography** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 7:37 pm

I'd also advise you to check out Phoronix, as another poster pointed out.

My experience? For what I did on Linux, ATI worked just fine, on a Mobility X1400 and a HD4870. ATI's problem is that their proprietary drivers, which have the best support for newer boards, are pretty much crap compared to NVidia's. I always used the open-source drivers and they worked great, although I only got 3D acceleration on the X1400 because it was older.

ATI has committed to releasing docs that will allow 3rd-party developers to write drivers, so over time that will probably make up for the shortcomings in their proprietary drivers. NVidia has shown no such inclination. If you don't like proprietary binary drivers, that may sway your decision (though this doesn't sound like it is the case).

NVidia is currently better at video decoding in GPU hardware, though ATI has made some announcements in that area as well.

In the end it depends on what you want to do. If you plan to make heavy-duty use of your GPU in Linux, and want near-term gratification, go with NVidia. If you only want to sample Linux right now, and ATI over NVidia on Windows is more important to you, I'd say stay with ATI and use the open-source drivers in Linux. I needed the former, and so when I replaced my 4870 due to trouble with aftermarket cooling and inability to remount the stock heatsink, I got a GTX275.

alecmg · Post by **alecmg** » Wed Oct 21, 2009 5:24 am

ATI closed drivers are quite ok. Necessary to have full 3d support and power management features atm.
They do lack some major features (I can't get fast composition to work or video acceleration), but all-in-all its quite good.

MamiyaOtaru · Post by **MamiyaOtaru** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 12:23 am

LH has a pretty good rant about the state of non-nVidia graphics on Linux. Don't be too put off by the name, he's pretty spot on.

Of course, I feel like gaming on Linux is in a worse state than it was a few years ago even, so you're probably fine going with ATI and dual booting so you can game in Windows.

coreyography · Post by **coreyography** » Tue Oct 27, 2009 9:26 pm

alecmg wrote:ATI closed drivers are quite ok. Necessary to have full 3d support and power management features atm.

I had lots of problems with them on 64-bit; maybe 32-bit is fine, or on a distro that does the 64/32 mix differently than mine (Arch Linux, which does not officially support that mix; they prefer to be 64-bit only).

The driver itself is 64-bit, but Catalyst and the supporting utils are not yet. I ended up removing the whole mess and running the Xorg "ati" driver (the "radeon" driver gave me some issues, too) before I got an NVidia card.

NVidia's drivers and utilities so far have been a pleasure to use, and they fully support 64-bit on Linux (hopefully FreeBSD soon so I can try that) Only drawback (and not a major one) is that I had to resurrect my xorg.conf

I do hold out hope for ATI, though. I believe their releasing their specs will pay off in the long run for them and their users, and it will allow me to use their card on most any OS I want. I like Linux better than Windows, but in general not better than the *BSDs I've tried.

alecmg · Post by **alecmg** » Wed Oct 28, 2009 3:24 am

coreyography
I'm on Arch and 64bit, and ATI drivers don't give me any trouble.
I run some 32bit apps like Wine.

The fact that ATI drivers are not perfect or do not even comply to standarts is pointed out that catalyst is maintained only in user repository, not official one.

rogerwillson · Post by **rogerwillson** » Wed Oct 28, 2009 11:34 pm

hi there....

Even if you have a 64-bit cpu, if you have 32bit Suse installed, you need the 32 bit driver. If the Disk you used to install Suse didn't have 64 anywhere on it, then you very likely would use the regular x86 driver.

thejamppa · Post by **thejamppa** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 12:49 am

My problem has been that everything worked fine in Ubuntu 64-bit 9.4 till day I changed HD 4670 intoHD 4850. After that I could not make ubuntu work with that computer so I wait till I have change and time to install 9.10 and see if I can my Sapphire HD 4850 work with it.

However Ubuntu works in integrated HD 3000 like a dream... Weird.

expxe · Post by **expxe** » Sat Nov 28, 2009 6:09 pm

go ubuntu!

lm · Post by lm » Sat Nov 28, 2009 10:12 pm

EDIT: Not relevant anymore.