Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1002 mails)

[C <smaug42@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 16:18, Sebastian Siebert <freespacer@xxxxxx> wrote:
> I have experienced the same story with NVIDIA in the past (ago 3-4 years).
> This was the reason that I switched to AMD graphics card. I have not
> regretted it.
>
> I have a ATI Radeon 3870 in my computer. It works with the radeon driver
> (depended of used kernel version, but sometimes not really good) or the
> proprietary ATI Catalyst Display Driver from AMD (That is currently a better
> choice).
>
> There is also one other reason to buy an AMD graphics card. ;-) I am the
> openSUSE Packaging Script Maintainer for ATI Catalyst and a intensive beta
> tester of ATI Catalyst Driver for next versions since November 2010 and have
> a direct contact with AMD. I like to mediate between openSUSE user and AMD,
> if any problems arise with the driver. I help the user in setting up the
> graphics card, but often is not necessary. It is easy to install on
> openSUSE.
>
> http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:ATI_drivers
>
> Everyone gets the graphics card, which he deserves. ;-)

One thing to keep in mind... if you're a gamer and/or like to play
games in Wine, ATI is nothing but a headache and then some.  The vast
majority of games that work perfect in Wine using nVidia cards fail in
odd ways on ATI cards.  Of course, if you're not a gamer, it's not so
much of an issue.

I've had nothing but trouble with ATI, but that's been with the older
card models.  If you want an idea of the scope of the problems with
ATI cards, look back in the list history here with the detailed emails
(from David Rankin) of the significant issues encountered with ATI
dropping binary driver support for cards, and the problems getting
cards working... the discussions were late 2009, and early 2010.  Yah,
I know, a long time ago, and drivers change, but it's well worth the
dig through the archive to get an idea of the pain people have had
with ATI.

I've got a couple computers with ATI video (can't remember the model
numbers.. it's been a while since I used them), and ATI dropped binary
driver support for the cards... last openSUSE release that worked on
install with the video card was 11.0, and 11.1 with workarounds
provided by David Rankin.  The cards do work with the FLOSS drivers,
but I can't get any performance out of them... that means video
playback is next to useless... HDMI doesn't work... Flash is nothing
sort of terrible... as a result the computers are stuck either running
Windows where the native Windows drivers work fine, or stuck in
storage... they are both in storage... replaced by a machine with
Intel video.  I actually get significantly better performance out of
the Intel 3150 video card than I did with the ATI card.


C.
-- 
To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxx
For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@xxxxxxxxxxxx