I just got rid of all fglrx-driver-issues...

[zybork]

It... is... a curse... It cost many people many hours of their lives... Those swift, nifty graphics cards from ATI.

Great hardware, tough. More performance per  € than all the others, those cards really rock - if you get them to work properly, dammit! Most of these cards are driven [pun intended] by the (in?)famous fglrx-driver, and that driver - just doesn't work. It doesn't like nonstandard hardware configurations, it doesn't like the amd64-archtitecture, it doesn't like if you switch to tty-console, it doesn't like if the computer shuts down, it doesn't like me, it seems, and it usually needs hours/day/eternities of configuring that little xorg.conf-file.

And then, after untold suffering and misery, I finally found the overall solution for all my ATI resp. fglrx-problems, I found the solution to just download an installer and get a perfect result without browsing the rage3d-forum for ages, I found the solution that works nearly instantly:

I switched to nvidia.

Greetings from hell, you motherf.ckers!

[Taiyo.uk]

Aww... zybork needs a cuddle.

[Knowitall66]

Talk to this guy?
Scrap that:
Was really there any point in this post?

[Odin]

I actually thought about switching to ATi from my NVIDIA card because AMD has released full chip documentation and promises a working open-source driver.

[Caveman]

Zybork, "I told you so" (and countless others)
Even if ATI/AMD has released (nearly) full documentation and //promised// something it remains to be seen if they keep their promise.
And even then the first release of a fully working driver is bound to be borked, so contemplating going from Nvidia to ATI is not something you should be doing in the near future. Maybe in a year or two, and then only for new cards, as the old ones will prolly not have been included support in their driver...

[zybork]

Three things:

1.: As far as I know, they have released all the technical specifications, the radeonhd-driver being the first result, an open source driver that should support all the features etc., but: This driver is hardly usable yet, currently, it does not even support 2D-accleration! However, being an open driver, it is very promising, it should be a great thing in a few months or maybe years.

2.: ATI employs two (again: two) programmers for the Linux-section. nvidia actually employs about a dozen or so. This is the main reason why one should not use ATI in the near future and consequently the reason why that nvidia-driver is ways better than anything from ATI. You are perfectly right with your saying about the new cards by the way, because if the radeonhd-driver mentioned above will support cards, this will very likely exclude older cards.

3. There is a certain reason why neither ATI nor nvidia like to release full specifications, because each of them cloned so many features from the other company, the moment one of them releases full specs it may get sued to the ground by the other company.

However, I am very happy with my nvidia-card now  Not because it has better results (I think the ATI-card actually may have worked better), but because it works.

[Caveman]

However, I am very happy with my nvidia-card now  Not because it has better results (I think the ATI-card actually may have worked better), but because it works.

Oxymoron anyone? *g*

[Taiyo.uk]

1.: As far as I know, they have released all the technical specifications

Oh dear....

At the time of writing only a small part of the specifications have been released. No 2D/3D acceleration. The radeonhd driver in it's current state is little more than a skeletal hardware/display detection and modesetting driver. The only accelerated feature is the hardware cursor.

[zybork]

Quoting myself:

There is a certain reason why neither ATI nor nvidia like to release full specifications, because each of them cloned so many features from the other company, the moment one of them releases full specs it may get sued to the ground by the other company.

I know that the radeonhd can do nothing currently, but: This might change in the future

...good luck, ATI. You are making impressive hardware. I wish you the best, may you once become a better manufacturer of Linux drivers one day. Meanwhile, I am happy buying products from your competitor

[kevlarman]

Zybork, "I told you so" (and countless others)
Even if ATI/AMD has released (nearly) full documentation and //promised// something it remains to be seen if they keep their promise.
And even then the first release of a fully working driver is bound to be borked, so contemplating going from Nvidia to ATI is not something you should be doing in the near future. Maybe in a year or two, and then only for new cards, as the old ones will prolly not have been included support in their driver...

amd/ati is releaseing hardware specs and providing a bare-bones driver for r500/r600, ati already did provide specs for r200 cards, and based on the r200 driver, an r300 driver was reverse-engineered that works reasonably well. that leaves a very small subset of ati cards that won't have open source drivers (and that's assuming that ati doesn't eventually release r300/r400 specs anyway, it's obviously in their best interests to focus on their newer cards until there's a driver at least comparable to radeon/ati for r200)

[Caveman]

Heck, I don't care about the religion surrounding ATI.
All I see is that no ATI-Card is fully supported even if they released some specs.
Why else would there be any need to reverse-eng?

As for the 'supported' cards, which one exactly is usable with fully activated 3D, 2D and can be run with the latest version of X.org?

[zybork]

Heck, I don't care about the religion surrounding ATI.

If you can get an ATI-card of two thirds of the price of an equal nvidia-card,... well, I can see nothing religious about saving money.

As for the 'supported' cards, which one exactly is usable with fully activated 3D, 2D and can be run with the latest version of X.org?

Well, there is a bunch of cards fully supported by this nifty fglrx-driver. But unfortunately, "supported" does not necessarily mean "working", you may have a card that is fully supported officially, but if it works or not depends merely on your hardware, you correct xorg-configuration and on the angle between Mercury, Mars and Pluto...

And if you want to do such things like using more than one monitor, rotating one of them by 90° or attaching a TV-set to the card, you will have even more fun...

[Caveman]

Correct me if I am wrong, but if you buy such a card for 2/3 of an nvidia, doesn't that mean you are throwing away money? Then why buy it in the first place?

Sure, it looks kinda leet if you have a recent card pinned onto the wall, but wouldn't it be smarter to do w/o that leetness and invest the money into a supported card?

fglXX...
It's a nice project, yes.
And it will be powerful, too.
Sadly it will also be out of date and the supported cards generations behind, when it will be working in a usable manner.

And that arguing is what I meant with "religion".
Everybody keeps chanting "ati is better", but only in exactly one and only one case is there a grain of truth to be found...
If you have WindowsXP.

[zybork]

Hm, maybe there is a misunderstanding, I do not buy graphics cards, at least not recent ones, I use 2nd hand cards or cards that are one or two years old or so if you know what I mean, because anything else would mean to throw money out of the window if you know what I mean. And I used to prefer ATI cards because they are really a bit better than nvidia cards in respects of hardware. And if I can get a €50-card to work instead of an €70-card, hooray, I just saved money worth a good dinner to get the same results, and I really often did so, I had no trouble with my last ATI-card for example, and the card before, well, I just did not care about 3D-acceleration. But then, after three years, I upgraded my computer, and that was were the trouble started.

Finally, I kind of gave up and actually bought an nvidia-card.

Also, I do not throw away my old card, I sell it. (No, you won't find it on ebay, by the way.) This reduces the "total cost of ownership" immensely.

I am not of those freaks who always have to get the latest hardware, because I know that "three weeks later" it will be worth only half the price those people buy it for, so don't be afraid