ATI Driver observation/speculation

[a12ctic]

Several years ago my computer lineup included a ti4200 and a 9000 pro. Needless to say, poor linux, and windows drivers steered me away from purchasing another ATI card. My next "generation" of computers had a 6100 and a 6600GT. Nvidia cards work in Linux, but they don't have open source drivers. At some point, Nvidia broke the 2d drivers somehow and they were slow for several months.

At this point, AMD had announced open source documentation. The Radeon HD drivers were making progress, as were the generic open source ATI drivers. They also announced a one month release cycle for their closed source ATI drivers. I decided what the hell, my current computer set up now includes a 4830 and a 3200.

I had previously been primary using Windows for a couple months, mainly because of the Windows 7 betas/RCs. I was very happy with CCC/Catalyst in windows. I never had any graphical glitches, no freeze ups, or bsod's related to my video drivers. Not only that, but the performance was amazing. I actually liked them better than the Nvidia drivers, which weren't always flawless. Not to say they didn't work how I wanted them to for the most part, they did, just not as flawlessly as the ATI drivers did.

Anyway, after exhausting all the newer titles I was interested in, I decided to switch back to Linux. I figured my first choice would be Fedora 11. Anyway, the live cd booted into my native resolution and had VERY capable OSS drivers, with Nvidia I had to switch to Vesa drivers (at the resolution of 640x480) before booting a live cd, otherwise, I wouldn't have a usable desktop to boot into. Upon booting, 2D was blisteringly fast. I was blown away honestly. I had never experienced this with ANY Nvidia card. With Nvidia, I just expected my desktop to feel a little choppy unless I enabled composition effects.

At this point, I had tested the OSS drivers, played around with them a little, and decided that I wanted to grab the faster catalyst drivers so I could play some heroes of newerth (recently addicted). I added the rpmfusion repos, and fetched the fglrx (ATI Catalyst drivers) from yum.

It works! 2D, 3D, Wine, etc. I am perfectly happy with ATI's current driver situation. They have the best of both worlds. Soon enough the OSS drivers will become good enough for most desktop users, the Catalyst drivers will be dedicated to workstation users and people like me that like to game in Linux. Their driver set in Windows is no joke either. I'm glad that I purchased ATI cards this round and am looking forward to spectating the ongoing development of the OSS drivers and hopefully one day in the near future being able to rely completely on them. Their driver solution isn't perfect, but hopefully it will be within the next year or two and that is exciting.

Overall, I can say that I would pick ATI's combination of drivers over Nvidia's. Being able to hope for a usable OSS driver, while having working proprietary drivers is far better than having working propriety drivers that are randomly broken with no hope for a real OSS solution. Needless to say, in any light, this means that both companies are recommendable for Linux, and that itself means that incompatibilities are slowly becoming a thing of the past.

[GNU-Fan]

Yes, I feel similar.
I recently bought a specific ATI model because it is the first card with considerable FOSS 3D performance and has full hardware documentation available. It's nice because for the first time I am able to play around with a modern 3D graphics accelerator on the hardware level and learn how it works. These things seem to belong to the most kept secrets in the consumer IT world.

[Rubberman]

I have generally been happier with nVidia Linux drivers than ATI, but if that is changing then it is all for the better - it will put more pressure on nVidia to opensource their drivers (I hope).