Petition ATI: Demand better drivers!

[sarumont]

I'm sure many of you running laptops with ATI cards or the latest and greatest AIW have the common problems. If you can get your ATI card working, it runs like a GeForce2MX. Drivers for the TV Tuner? Hell no. Drivers for my mobile card? Dream on, sucka.

Make a difference: petition ATI for better Linux drivers. This site is a start:

http://www.petitiononline.com/atipet/

There are just over 19000 signatures already. Even if you don't run an ATI card, you should help out.

If you feel that this isn't enough, email ATI directly. Eventually they'll have to turn their ears to the Linux communities pleas for support. Nvidia did and they have excellent 3D support under Linux. I've used both Nvidia and ATI cards personally. My ATI card (AIW9600) is sluggish running Neverwinter Nights; my GeForce4 Ti4600 ran it flawlessly under the same settings (max visual effects). The Ti4600 was new in Q1-2002. The AIW9600? Q1-2003 with newer tech and twice the RAM.

An email including this type of information from users across the Linux community is sure to get the attention of the suits at ATI.

[Dolda2000]

This came as a surprise to me. I thought ATi had good Linux drivers.

However, I haven't used an ATi card since I tried a Radeon 7500 about a year ago, for which they had no driver at all, and the open source driver didn't have TV Output support. The really funny thing is that I contacted ATi to get some programming specs for the card so that I could add the TV-Out support myself. They did indeed give specifications for me, but they explicitly lacked all information on TV-Out, even though that was the exact thing I had requested. That was when I gave up and got a GeForce 5200FX.

In either case, I thought that the drivers they had for newer cards were indeed good. Now that I know that's not the case, I'll certainly at least sign the petition.

[benjamin20]

gforce 5200fx oh ya

[loft306]

Heh i think i put up this same petition a while back.....noticed it when i sighed this one...

[variant]

I would rather pettition them to fully open the specs of the cards they produce in conjunction with any third party hardware vendors that they use.

[techieMoe]

I would rather pettition them to fully open the specs of the cards they produce in conjunction with any third party hardware vendors that they use.

Good luck with that.

[robak]

i hope ATI gets moving now and writes drivers that work stable

[smindinvern]

They also need support for the TV features, I've done everything short of writing a custom driver to get those to work, with no success

[Giro]

Drivers for the TV Tuner? Hell no.

What about the GATOS drivers for ATI tv cards i know they dont support all features but they work? And my ATI mobile worked fine under Linux.

[predatorx]

The Gatos project is a work in progress and is designed for xfree.
So no official x.org support last time I checked.
I have a dual head radeon pro and the last crappy 3.14 drivers give a blurred second screen when using dual head.
I checked that in forums: just another Ati crap driver problem: it works on XFree 4.3.
So I had to change distro to get that done in a decent way (hail gentoo).
So after years! still no 64 bit driver ??!!!? They are idiots.
Nvidia has it working since the early CPU's on both Linux and Window$. Ati does not even have a driver for that, while claiming to support Linux.

Seems to me they have stopped in time and lack consumers wishes.
I'll never buy an Ati card again, that's for sure.

FYI: The suse 9.1 Xfree 4.3.99 (or something) also gives a second screen blur, seems to be a wrong version.
Signed the partion, hope it will help others.