Nexuiz 2.4.2 and ATI Radeon 48XX - WARNING, Avoid this Card

[Ed]

As for the driver issues, I think you'll realize that with linux if you use the official ATI driver it works very well.

I only tried the official Catalyst driver with a Radeon 9000 once to replace the free Radeon driver and it totally broke OpenGL. Nexuiz was not just unplayable but graphically nonsensical. Luckily ATi no longer supports the Radeon 9000 in their official package so I can't make a monthly attempt at breaking that systems graphics setup. I just settle for the Xorg driver which works.

113 FPS at 2560x1600 with HDR enabled. That is impressive (the GeForce 9600GT got 105). So I don't really see an issue with ATI's official driver or with OpenGL and Nexuiz in general. On a final note, mainstream OpenGL games run just fine on Radeon cards.

What's so impressive about the 4850 beating the 9600GT by less than 8% when the 4850 costs a third more? You're not making a very good argument there.

[Urmel]

Hi there,

I was able to test a Radeon HD4650 occasionally on Windows XP. It's brand new and will be available at around 50 - 60 Eurobucks. As the Catalyst 8.10 doesn't support this card (lol!), I had to use a modded manufacturer driver, basically a 8.8.

It does work. I tested all the effects you can activate from the menue, and I couldn't convince it to crash in any way.

I played a little on a local match with 2 bots on aggressor and had framerates from 150 to 300 fps with the default settings on a 1280 resolution. The test system is a P4 with a gig of RAM. Compared to the performance of a Geforce 7600GT on this system, this is about twice as much.

Maybe next week I'm going to install Vista32 on this rig and go on testing.

Generally I'd recommend to all Radeon users, update your driver to catalyst 8.8 or higher. Something must have happened there, according to openGL.

so long

[ai]

Well, since I upgraded to 8.9 everytime I quit Nexuiz, either by menu or by F10 Nexuiz crashes instead. Now this isn't a problem per se, as Nexuiz does indeed quit. Just not the normal way
Haven't had any problems with too many ATI driver updates. Only one other. However I'm just using x1950 for a card.

[terencehill]

Well, since I upgraded to 8.9 everytime I quit Nexuiz, either by menu or by F10 Nexuiz crashes instead. Now this isn't a problem per se, as Nexuiz does indeed quit. Just not the normal way
Haven't had any problems with too many ATI driver updates. Only one other. However I'm just using x1950 for a card.

Same problem for me after installed ATI 8.10 drivers (8.9 never installed) with Nexuiz.exe (Nexuiz-sdl.exe quit normally). Furthermore, now i can't apply video changes in the menu, pressing apply button coz now Nexuiz (both exes) crashes and it doesn't apply the changes.
The command vid_restart make Nexuiz crash I guess, I've tried it and it crashes in the same way.
I have an old Radeon 9600.

[Urmel]

Having installed a newer driver version (something like newer than 8.10) I can confirm the issue ai posted above. So the 8.8 seems to be the most suitable ATi driver for Nexuiz atm (concerning WXP).

[Urmel]

My tecnicisian gave me a Vista Ultimate 32 DVD for testing purpose, of which I took the opportunity.

So I installed Vista, and after that I installed the Catalyst 8.10. Then I started Nexuiz, and again I wasn't able to crash it, until I pressed F10 for quitting. Then it crashed a little harder than it did on WXP. I had to run the task manager to come back to the desktop where an error message waited for me (the same message as on WXP).

Running the Catalyst 8.8, there are no problems at all, just like on WXP. I assume that this version is the most suitable for Nexuiz players with a Radeon, also on Vista 32.

edit: atm im doing some timedemos with several video cards on that rig for a comparison. Along with the HD4650, I already finished the tests with a GF 7600GT and a GF 8500GT. I'm trying to get some more cards and gonna post my results when I'm done.

[TVR]

The reverse-engineered 'Omega' ATi X.org device drivers provide greater 3D performance in comparison to the reverse-engineered 'nv' nVidia device drivers.

If one uses a GNU/Linux distribution for the sole purpose of supporting FOSS, those reverse-engineered drivers should be used for the respective brands.

[Alien]

Omega drivers are not available for Linux.

Ati provides fglrx, nvidia provides nvidia driver. There are two OSS drivers: 2d only driver nv and not fully functional nouveau driver, supporting 3d. Basically, nouveau is meant for RE, not for end-user right now. Same goes to similar effort of suse and amd with their radeonhd driver.

[Urmel]

ATi released their 8.11 driver. Nothing changed about the problem ai posted has changed. On XP closes at F10 or vid_restart with an error message, and on Vista the Nexuiz screen freezes until you start the task manager and get an error message as well.

So still the 8.8 is the first choice if you want to avoid this.