Vikingod

Our own Alex Billington had the chance to ask ATI's Terry Makedon some questions about ATI and their newest video card, the x1900XTX, as well as some plans and prospects for the future both in their drivers and their hardware.
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Read More / Source: ThinkComputers

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big_D

No mention of when they are going to start providing 3D support for their X series cards

I have the official ATi fglrx drivers installed on my Mobility X700 based laptop and it struggles to produce a 2D desktop, whilst 3D is non-existent.

E.g. my old SiS chipset laptop makes nearly 300fps with glxgears, my FX6600GT makes over 7000fps, while the X700 struggles to make 20fps...

With the new XGL and Compiz packages available for Gnome on my SUSE installation, it looks fantastic on my nVidia based machines, but on my laptop I couldn't even start the desktop...

With ATi's current attitude towards driver writing, I won't be making the mistake of buying another machine with an ATi chipset...

The_Neon_Cowboy

Currently as of FEB2006
linux made up 3.4% of the market ,
MAC OS 3.6%
and windows 93%
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

So again I'm not supruized that it not given as much attention. Keep
in mind there are over 500 diffrent flavors of linux that make up that %
so any given linux OS has a tiny market share when it comes to everyday pcs.

Have you tried the latest release at least?
ATI Linux driver version 8.23.7 Discussion

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big_D

There might be lots of distributions out there, but there is only one Kernel to support, which ATi does with cards upto the 9000 series, so that is 1 Kernel driver, and it comes with an auto installer for installing under most distributions. It is just that ATi seem to believe, that while the 9000 series is perfectly capable of performing 3D functions, the X series cards are not up to snuff.

Edit: It is like saying they have to write separate drivers for Windows 2000, XP Home, XP Pro, XP MCE, XP Home N, XP Pro N, XP Home OEM, XP Pro OEM etc.

Compare this with nVidia, the best 3D Ati card is a Radeon 9000 series, not exactly sparking these days, whilst the best nVidia is a 7900GTX SLI configuration, a big difference.

I have half a dozen workstations here with nVidia cards in and they can all do video playback and play 3D games and run in dual head mode, compare that to my ATi based laptop, it can't do video playback (it manages 1 frame every 2-3 seconds) and can't do anything involving 3D or transparency effects.

nVidia seem to be able to support their hardware under Linux without any problems, no matter how small the market is. ATi really are shooting themselves in the foot with this attitude.

I specify computers for clients all the time, and because ATi's attitude, I always specify nVidia, because at the moment I know, no matter what direction the clients take in the future, nVidia are more likely to support their own hardware than Ati are.

I haven't tried the drivers from that post from yesterday, I installed the laptop last month... I'll have a look, although the link is broken...