On Thursday 23 July 2009 20:48:44 jdow wrote:
From: "Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, 2009/July/23 10:56
apologies for the unduly harsh tone but, seriously, will there ever
be radeon drivers available for fedora that aren't complete junk?
this has been going on for some time now, and nothing's changed.
Hell no. This is X-windows. I've had drivers crashing left and right on
my old laptop since FC5 or so. And it's just been getting worse with time
not better. Now I understand why ATI drivers are crap on Windows, too.
They must play the Adaptec game, you pick your chip rev for the bugs you
are willing to work around. Over the last 5 or so years I have developed
an intense hate for ATI anything, even now that they are related to AMD.
+1
It seems that radeon driver works for some cards (typically old/low-end ones),
but in general it is basically a complete gamble. Proprietary ATI drivers Just
Don't Work (tm). And it's been like that since I got my first ATI card (at the
time of FC2).
The situation is really sad --- ATI claim to support open source, yet they
release the code only for obsolete cards. Intel cards are open source, but
that still doesn't mean that bugs get fixed, and the driver is extremely
unstable. This leaves us with nVidia --- yum install akmod-nvidia and
everything Just Works. Yes, it's closed source, but it works, contrary to both
ATI and Intel.
I really don't understand why so many people hate nVidia. It has good support,
they demonstrated very good cooperation with KDE4 developers recently, the
driver works with both high- and low-end cards... Yes, it is closed source,
but so is ATI (except for the old X-family cards). And people at nVidia are at
least honest about not giving the source.
If you want a high-end graphics card to do
3D/gaming/googleearth/Compiz/whatever, nVidia (with binary drivers) is
basically the only choice. ATI drivers don't work with 3D, open-source radeon
driver doesn't support HD cards, and Intel just doesn't have high-end graphics
cards.
I know, nVidia also had its bad moments, but on large timescale they
demonstrate stability. ATI has never demonstrated any. I'll never buy ATI
graphics card again.
Best, :-)
Marko
