nick smith

anyone using a radeon 9500 and up video card get 3D or opengl or
anything like that working? everything ive read so far says it cant be
done, im using kernel 2.6. i cant find any howtos for this either. any
help would be appriciated.

thanks

nick


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holly bostick

Yes, I have an AIW 9800SE, and I have 3D/OpenGl working (had it working
under Mandrake, Debian, and Slackware before I switched to Gentoo).

But you have to emerge ati-drivers (the proprietary, closed source
drivers from ATI) to get it-- you can't get it from the kernel drivers.

There's an ATI howto on the Gentoo docs site; check it out as well
(because there are some kernel settings you have to make sure are
enabled/disabled for the ATI driver to actually work).

HTH,
Holly

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nick smith

could i trouble you to ask you to post a link to the page? im having
difficulty finding it.

thanks

nick

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holly bostick

It's at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/ati-faq.xml, but it sucks (it's for
lower-level cards that can use the kernel drivers for 3D acceleration);

use The ATI Radeon How-To at
http://www.rage3d.com/content/articles/atilinuxhowto/ instead; it also
has nice distro-specific sections, so you'll see that this is actually
much easier to accomplish under Gentoo than, say, SuSE.

Don't expect miracles, though-- while I have few problems with most of
the native binary 3D games I play, these drivers are generally conceeded
to be horrifically bad, and it seems to be true; many things that run
perfectly well with nvidia drivers run badly or not at all with ATI
drivers (although ATI has recently promised to get serious and produce
some decent drivers which should be showing up in the next couple of
weeks, if they keep to their promised release cycle). The current point
upgrade is just a hotfix because Doom3 (native) would not run *at all*
with an installed ATI CARD. Xorg above 6.7.0-r* will not run with ATI
drivers (it won't start, so if you have upgraded already, downgrade and
mask all the upgrades until this is fixed). I have an AIW card, and
TV-in is not supported for this chipset and, according to a recent ATI
online chat, there is "no focus" on when it will be supported (though I
trust the Gatos project is doing its best to decode whatever info they
have managed to get from ATI about the Rage Theater 200 chip). Meaning
that I paid a premium for a feature I cannot use. Don't even get me
started on Wine/X/Cedega and the conflicts there.

I can watch movies, and Neverwinter Nights runs OK, so it could be
worse. But if I could replay the day I bought a video card while I was
still dual-booting-- without knowing that just a couple of months later
I'd be a pure Linux user-- I can't say it would be an ATI card. If you
have an alternative card (and I do mean almost any alternative card at
all; I'm seriously thinking about sticking my old Matrox G400 back in
this box), you might want to consider using it instead. Depending on
what you want to do, you may be in for some rough seas.

Holly

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nick smith

wow thanks for all the input, i thought nvidia didnt have native support
in linux, and that ATI did, i must be mistaken, my card has TV-out and i
also have an ATI tv-tuner card in there i wish some day to get working.
and i do have an nvidia FX 5200 256meg PCI card just laying in my closet
i could dig out and use instead of you are suggesting i go back to
nvidia, (was getting alot of flickering where i didnt with ATI in
windows) i use to dual monitor so i had my radeon 9700 agp and fx 5200
pci card which was a rockin combination in windows. are you suggesting
i go back to nvidia? i just remember how much of a pain it was in debian
to setup an nvidia card for 3D, downloading propritary drivers because
they wouldnt release the source code etc, and jumping through hoops to
get it to work. have they gotten better at that? is it easier in gentoo?
and last but not least would you have a link to a how to on that?

again thanks for all your input, its very informative.

nick

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holly bostick

<snip>

Yes, you are. The drivers are still closed source but are apparently
much better, because nVidia apparently takes Linux somewhat seriously.

That might be possible; some of them do work, but there's a big chunk that don't atm.


<snip>

Well, you own both cards, if you find you can't do what you want with
the ATI card, you can just pull it out and put in the nVidia card. You,
unlike me, don't have to find more money to buy another card. So try
them both and see what you think.

i just remember how much of a pain it was in debian

Gentoo nVidia How to is located at
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/nvidia-guide.xml .

Holly

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holly bostick

<snip>

Yes, you are. The drivers are still closed source but are apparently
much better, because nVidia apparently takes Linux somewhat seriously.

That might be possible; some of them do work, but there's a big chunk that don't atm.


<snip>

Well, you own both cards, if you find you can't do what you want with
the ATI card, you can just pull it out and put in the nVidia card. You,
unlike me, don't have to find more money to buy another card. So try
them both and see what you think.

i just remember how much of a pain it was in debian

Gentoo nVidia How to is located at
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/nvidia-guide.xml .

Holly

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