ATI releases new Linux drivers

[Nite_Hawk]

Hi Everyone,

ATI has finally released unified linux drivers for the 8XXX and 9XXX series cards. They seem to be fairly similar to nvidia's binary drivers in that there is an opensource wrapper around a binary core. Currently it looks like they are only releasing them in rpm format, so those of us running debian will have to alien or do some repackaging. :-?

Still, it's cool that they got these out. If I have some time I'll try to get them up and going with my 9700pro and see if I might be able to try some benchmarks at some point. Apparently these drivers support S3TC, so UT2003 should work fine.

You can get the drivers from ATI's driver page here:

http://mirror.ati.com/support/driver.html

Nite_Hawk

[Humus]

I got them up and running. Seams great to me so far, now I only need to port my framework to Linux, which should keep me busy for a while I guess :)

[demalion]

They keep calling them OpenGL 2.0 drivers. What is going on with that monicker?

[mono]

Anyone tested these drivers? I'm sticking with Nvidia until I hear good things about ATI's linux drivers. Well, its good that they EXIST, but how does the 9700's performance stack up in Linux as opposed to Windows? My GF4 Ti4600 performs as good or usually better under linux, at least with my id titles: RtCW and Q3A.

[Ante P]

They keep calling them OpenGL 2.0 drivers. What is going on with that monicker?

They recently sent out a press release correcting that calling them Open GL 1.4 with 2.0 extentions/functionality or something like that.

[Nite_Hawk]

Performance from what I can see seems to be decent in some areas and poorer in others. UT2003 for example seems to be slower than it should, but that may be a problem with the UT2003 linux build as well. Someone needs to do some performance comparisons of common programs under linux and windows and see how they match up.

Over all given that this is their second release, I think they are doing fairly well. I'm a bit disgruntled by the rpm only packaging (I run debian), but over all they seem to be interested in making their linux drivers work. For now if you immediately need good linux driver support, nvidia is pretty good. (though they've had problems with the binary nature of their drivers). If you are willing to wait a bit, the 9700pro looks awsome. If you want opensource support, you'll have to go with something like a 8500.

Nite_Hawk

[Humus]

While I haven't done any serious tests the performance seams to be similar in Linux as in Windows in my demos at least. In most of my demos the fillrate needs easily overshadows any driver overhead so it's probably not the best measurement. The demo that would be best for comparing driver performance would probably be the Infinite terrain demo, it runs a little slower in Linux than Windows, like 120fps vs. 130fps.

[mono]

Good to hear the performance is on par with their Windows implementation.

UT2003 isn't a good basis for comparison, because it runs much better under DirectX than OpenGL, and Linux of course must run OpenGL.

Now if only I could dupe someone out of a 9700 Pro.. :)