ATI Proprietary Drivers

[bigtomrodney]

Hi Guys,
I have been setting up a new suse dual boot for a buddy of mine. He's a long time nVidia user but recently replaced his card with an ATI X850GT. I heard ATI drivers were a bit better and that XGL was even working on a few - so I tried it out. I did some of the configuration over IM and phonecalls with him. The ATI driver version 8.24.xx he got last week was unable to run XGL. I was actually bit annoyed as his GPU is a monster and more than capable.

Anyway, long story short I was in his house yesterday having a look at this install and decided to chance my arm with a driver update. This bare in mind is only a few days after the original one. Before we installed the driver he was getting 150FPS. On my nVidia GeForce 6200 I get about 1500FPS. I wasn't expecting any difference with the upgrade......


...He now gets 4000FPS!

There have been some massive improvements in the drivers from ATI in the 8.25 driver. I actually couldn't believe it. The rendering was really fast. That 4000FPS was inside XGL. It was crazy. The entire XGL Desktop looked fantastic on his machine at 1280x1024.

All I can think is that all the years of asking them for working drivers didn't work, but show them something as being potentially interesting to the general masses and they're right on it. It was great. Also, I would have to say their installer process is very good too, very much oriented to the new user.

[fingal]

Thanks, that might be useful for me as I'm having problems with my fps - even if I follow ATI's instructions to the letter. I think I'll have another go.

[easuter]

even if I follow ATI's instructions to the letter

same here
was getting 2000fps from my 9500.....

hope this new driver realy works, thanx for the heads up!

[easuter]

well, i cant give an opinion about the driver quality yet, because aticonfig screwed up my xorg.conf. spent 20 mins fixing it

i think i'll just burn my ati card and then piss on it

[fingal]

well, i cant give an opinion about the driver quality yet, because aticonfig screwed up my xorg.conf. spent 20 mins fixing it

i think i'll just burn my ati card and then piss on it

Probably best to make a backup copy of xorg.conf ... What frame rate are you getting atm?

[easuter]

yeah, i should have had a backup of xorg (lesson learnt)

my fps is between 1500 to 2000 fps atm. agp 8x and radeon 9500 with acceleration on using the (old) fglrx module.

i didnt bother trying again

[a12ctic]

although ati is picking it up, nvidia is still about x2 better performance wise, oh well its better than nothing.

[fingal]

although ati is picking it up, nvidia is still about x2 better performance wise, oh well its better than nothing.

It might depend on your hardware ... I'm using an elderly ati 9000 and the new software does nothing for it. Time to get rid of it? It doesn't matter what I try, I end up with a very low fps and in fact, my graphics will only render using Mesa and not the proprietary ati stuff.

I know how I could make it work ... I could uninstall everything and start from scratch using my original distro installation, but sometimes when you've updated a lot of packages something somewhere will break and you're left with a more secure (but sub-optimal) box.

Experience suggests that I should try to find the right kernel module and modprobe it in - but where is it? Often doing modprobe -l can help ... but not even modprobe -l | grep ati helps. In any case I used their 'distro specific' installer ... but I still end up back at square one.