ATI Linux driver (fglrx) bugs

[divVerent]

I actually spent 30 euros for Nexuiz development - and bought an ATI Radeon 9600 Mobility. The cheapest ATI I could get, that is.

Damn, do their Linux drivers (fglrx) suck.

Bugs I've already found:

• Offsetmapping works. But don't even think of setting r_glsl_offsetmapping_deluxemapping to 1... if you do, the game immediately segfaults - inside graphics driver routines
• Don't even think of using vid_restart. Instead, exit the game and start it again. vid_restart will cause it to crash. Again inside graphics driver routines. Still, I'm trying to find a way for DP to circumvent that problem.
• UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, NEVER START A SECOND X SERVER. That seems to be the easiest way to get a kernel panic. nvidia had that problem about four years ago - and fixed it.
• It is slow. One should expect the Radeon 9600 Mobility to perform noticably better than a Geforce 2 MX. However, it performs at about the same level. Supposedly this is not the card's but the Linux driver's fault. Given that this, albeit official, driver isn't exactly stable either, it wouldn't even be surprising that it's also slow. To get playable speeds, use low.cfg and set a high gl_picmip. Note that you need to exit and restart the game to make that change apply since vid_restart is broken.

More to come.

Linux users, don't buy ATI. You'll regret it. We'll try our best to at least avoid crashes, but don't expect it to be fast.

If you have any other ATI+Linux related problems, post them in this thread.

If you have an ATI card, you might want to try the driver from http://r300.sourceforge.net/ (which is merged into current X.org). I will report on that later.

[Spirit]

I have an ATI and tried to migrate to Linux some time ago. Well... I am back to WinXP, heh.

You should be aware that you really bought a low-end ATI, maybe the "better" ones perform better. Eg. I had no trouble with vid_restart as far as I remember (ATI 9600XT). I try to get ubuntu to work at the moment, so perhaps I can give you some bugreports soon.

http://r300.sourceforge.net/ : Those drivers seems to be even more outdated than the ATI ones? December 2005 sounds bad.

[TehTux]

I've been burnt before with ATI, and ever since have stuck with Nvidia.

[KadaverJack]

You should be aware that you really bought a low-end ATI, maybe the "better" ones perform better.

ATI? Linux? Better performance? Forget it: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... =357&num=4

http://r300.sourceforge.net/ : Those drivers seems to be even more outdated than the ATI ones? December 2005 sounds bad.

As divVerent said: those drivers are merged in x.org now. That site is outdated, current drivers are in x.org's CVS afaik.

[Ed]

I tried to get ATi's drivers installed on my Dad's machine which has a 9000. Broken beyond belief. So I went back to the free drivers. Things were worse than when I started though. Somehow the ATi drivers had broken GLX entirely so no other driver works either. Should have stuck with the free drivers in the first place because they're a lot better than the ATi ones.

[SavageX]

I've been burnt before with ATI, and ever since have stuck with Nvidia.

Well, strictly speaking nVidia isn't any better from a free software perspective. I'd really prefer free drivers for all of my hardware. Sadly we got following options:

- free driver with (older) ATI card with basic 3D support: Usually even slower than the proprietary drivers - but may still be okay for running future Linux 3D desktops. So you at least can have a productive, completely free setup.
- proprietary ATI driver: slow and unstable.
- free nvidia driver: That one doesn't have any sort of 3D acceleration. Shame on nVidia for not providing enough documentation to get basic OpenGL working.
- proprietary nvidia driver: fast, good support for hardware features - but still a bit unstable (e.g. leads to random lockups here every now and then)

[dIM]

I can confirm that ATI is bad for linux gaming only considering Nexuiz. I am using the fglrx drivers and Nexuiz is so slow that it is not even playable on Linux although on Windows it runs just fine (keeping in mind that it is a Radeon 9000 mobility). The two other games i played on Linux (warsow, tremoulus) run without trouble, but i have not played them on windows yet and from what i have read, i expect them to run even faster there. So i guess the reason why they are well playable on Linux is that the Darkplaces engine is a bit more resource intense in general.

[divVerent]

Okay, I failed to get r300 compiled. I tried:

a) building xf86-driver-ati from X.org 7.1 (which includes that support) for FC5's X.org 7.0. Looked fine, the X server even said "direct rendering enabled" - but Mesa couldn't use it. Found out that it only works with CVS Mesa.

b) building X.org 7.1 against CVS Mesa. Failed because it couldn't find some symbols whose name ended in APPLE. WTF?

I will try to pursue a) again, but this time compiling and installing CVS Mesa into /usr/local and linking DP against it. Any other ideas?

Apart from that, no further crashes on fglrx. Slow but mostly works. Still nothing to recommend.

[esteel]

I have an ATI and tried to migrate to Linux some time ago. Well... I am back to WinXP, heh.
http://r300.sourceforge.net/ : Those drivers seems to be even more outdated than the ATI ones? December 2005 sounds bad.

Well i did migrate to Linux but only after i dropped my Ati9800pro for an NVidia 6600GT. I tried the ati card with the r300 drivers and its hardly supported. Everything crashed after about 10seconds of 3d usage.. The official ati drivers have been better but still tooooooo slow for any real usage.
The nvidia card runs slightly faster then in windows but the testing was not very fair.. Only 10 minutes of playing Nexuiz and then i was happily booting linux and never looked back
So i can just add if people want to use Linux get an NVidia card and forget ATI.

I can confirm that ATI is bad for linux gaming only considering Nexuiz. I am using the fglrx drivers and Nexuiz is so slow that it is not even playable on Linux although on Windows it runs just fine (keeping in mind that it is a Radeon 9000 mobility). The two other games i played on Linux (warsow, tremoulus) run without trouble

Well the engines should be quite similar and DP is normally very fast. But maybe there are some things it does that ati drivers do not like..
A common thing to try is exec low.cfg;gl_combine 0;gl_lockarrays 0 maybe followed by a vid_restart or as DivVerent reported that this will crash ati drivers restarting Nexuiz..
Or even better to start nexuiz like this: ./nexuiz-linux.sh +exec low.cfg +gl_combine 0 +gl_lockarrays

[dIM]

Well the engines should be quite similar and DP is normally very fast. But maybe there are some things it does that ati drivers do not like..
A common thing to try is exec low.cfg;gl_combine 0;gl_lockarrays 0 maybe followed by a vid_restart or as DivVerent reported that this will crash ati drivers restarting Nexuiz..
Or even better to start nexuiz like this: ./nexuiz-linux.sh +exec low.cfg +gl_combine 0 +gl_lockarrays

Have tried this already but it does not improve fps

btw vid_restart works fine here