xorg & ATI

[Werner Punz]

Travis Hagglund wrote:
> OK, I've been using Ubuntu for a few months now, and I have accepted the
> fact that my limited knowledge of linux and the problems that the
> developers have in dealing with proprietary drivers will leave many
> areas for improvement on my desktop.  One of those areas is 3d
> acceleration for my ati radeon 9700.  I am presently running Hoary with
> the xorg radeon drivers, which gives me a nice dual head setup, but no
> 3d accel.  But now I understand that ati have released xorg drivers for
> my card.  Are these the same drivers Ubuntu has available as
> xorg-driver-fglrx?  I have installed that package but don't seem to have
> any fglrx drivers on my system.
> 
> If anyone has some insight on this matter please enlighten me.
> 
> By the way, Ubuntu has helped open up a whole new world outside of
> windows for me.  Funny how their name is completely opposite from their
> "mushroom" philosophy.   
> 
> 
Well... ATI and Linux is a general problem...
To sum it up, ATIs X drivers suck, due to their we wont invest more into 
development than
market share philosophy (that means that Windows gets most investment 
then MacOSX then Linux (which is totally bogus because 90% of the code 
could probably be shared like NVidia does it)).

I would recommend to go the NVidia route, if you plan to stay on Linux, 
or just wait until the X.org ATI drivers catch up to the level you need 
them.
I rather doubt ATI will do any serious investement which is needed
to get their closed source drivers up to NVidia quality.

But the situation could be worse, look at FreeBSD for example ;-)