John Andersen wrote:

Jim Flanagan wrote:

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Greetings all,

I have moved away from ATi cards for a year or so now, and am considering upgrading the card on one box. Before I blindly go out a get an Nvidia card I wanted to check here to see if the situation with the Ati drivers had improved. Does anyone have any recent experiences with these newer card and openSuse, good or bad.

Thanks,

Jim F

In my experience, ATI proprietary drivers have steadily improved in quality, and for the most part work quite well. I have no problem with them.

YMMV

Their installers work better each time, so much so that I do longer use the command line version of their installers.

My own experience has been that the drivers work well, but if you are planning to get compiz or something alike, depending on the model (I have a Radeon 1600), you may have to be prepare to do a some xorg.conf tweaking before you can get it to work properly. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Clayton wrote:

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I have moved away from ATi cards for a year or so now, and am considering upgrading the card on one box. Before I blindly go out a get an Nvidia card I wanted to check here to see if the situation with the Ati drivers had improved. Does anyone have any recent experiences with these newer card and openSuse, good or bad.

In my experience, ATI proprietary drivers have steadily improved in quality, and for the most part work quite well. I have no problem with them.

The drivers are better, but anything would be better than the mess they were in for so long.

Generally speaking.. for normal desktop use, they do work OK, but there are still a lot of gotchas. For example, there is some weirdness in the driver (even the latest one) that breaks things horribly if you run MythTV. Without tweaking, using an ATI card with MythTV can mean full system lockups at worst, or more often scrambled video when changing channels on a TV tuner, painfully slow menu transitions, and unresponding menus (all happens on my system with the ATI card). This is all known and loads of discussion on the web about it... how to get around some probs.. others you just have to live with.

Personally, I really regret buying a computer with an ATI card (I have a dedicated PC for my MythTV media center).

C.

Thanks to all for the good advise. Sounds like ATI is getting in gear with Linux. I may try one again, depends on what's on sale. Many thanks, Jim F -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

If you're planning on doing anything at all that requires 3D acceleration, go with nvidia.

Oh yah, I forgot about that since I don't game at all on the computer that has an ATI card. If you want to play games... particularly if you venture into Cedega or Wine for playing some more mainstream Windows games in Linux, ATI cards are often explicitly named as not supported (ie you take you chances) or not working at all (ie exactly that.. 100% not working) where nVidia cards work fine. It all comes down to what you want from your video card. General desktop, pretty much any card will do, including ATI. If you want the extras for gaming etc, then, as Nkoli said, skip ATI and go with nVidia. C. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

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If you're planning on doing anything at all that requires 3D acceleration, go with nvidia.

I have no problem with 3D on the ATI card in my laptop (X1400 or something).

Do you do any gaming? I know that Cedega explicitly states that on some games ATI will not work with any video driver up to the current release. Again, it all comes down to what you're using the vid card for. For gaming and for MythTV, ATI is a bad choice. For regular desktop, either card works fine. C. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

John Andersen wrote:

Jim Flanagan wrote:

...

Greetings all,

I have moved away from ATi cards for a year or so now, and am considering upgrading the card on one box. Before I blindly go out a get an Nvidia card I wanted to check here to see if the situation with the Ati drivers had improved. Does anyone have any recent experiences with these newer card and openSuse, good or bad.

Thanks,

Jim F

In my experience, ATI proprietary drivers have steadily improved in quality, and for the most part work quite well. I have no problem with them.

YMMV

Their installers work better each time, so much so that I do longer use the command line version of their installers.

Jim, What John says has held true up through the last two ati-driver releases. the 8.9 driver works fine. The 8.10 and 8.11 driver suffer from performance issues .. and .. the 8.11 driver will not build on anything later than 10.3 due to missing code. See: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=444912 However, these are just the normal growing pains and I would have no hesitation in buying another ATI card for my linux boxes. Currently I have 6 boxes running ATI cards and 4 boxes running nvidia. I'm happy with both cards. I usually just go with whatever gives the most bang for the buck. It's hard to pass up a new 8800GT w/512M for $90 and even harder to pass up a new OEM ATI X800 PE w/256M GDDR3 for $35. -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Countdown for openSuSE 11.1 Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 http://counter.opensuse.org/11.1/small Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

John Andersen wrote:

On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 10:31 AM, David C. Rankin wrote:

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What John says has held true up through the last two ati-driver releases. the 8.9 driver works fine. The 8.10 and 8.11 driver suffer from performance issues .. and .. the 8.11 driver will not build on anything later than 10.3 due to missing code. See:

https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=444912

And for the record David, 8.12 is out TODAY

https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/catalyst_8...

Sorry for the late reply. I've been dealing with this little pneumonia thing that has damn near killed me. One hell of a Christmas present ;-) The 8.12 driver has issues. 3D is broken and that funky performance issue that we have seen in now 8.10-8.12 is still there. I have posted separately about that and I've talked with Dirsch about it. More growing pains I guess. Evidently ATI/AMD doesn't have time for these Linux issues right now. So I'm not sure whether I should be looking forward to 9-1, or just real damn happy that 8-9 is still working flawlessly for me. -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org