fglrx – Andrew the Hopeless Techie

Tag Archive: fglrx

Andrew the Hopeless Techie > fglrx

Fedora 12 – No love from ATI/AMD

March 5, 2010 24 Comments

Fedora 12 has been out for some time now and we are on the verge of Fedora 13 just around the corner. Yet ATI/AMD fails once again to provide support for the latest Xorg release.

From what I have read around the web it appears that AMD does not think they will support xorg 1.7 until Ubuntu 10.4 is released. When i looked further into this it would appear their logic behind this is due to Ubuntu being a distribution widely accepted by users. Due to the large base of both first time and experienced users they feel Ubuntu 10.4 will be a point in which a huge majority of users will be using xorg 1.7

I say what about Fedora? Fedora has millions of users and the number grows daily, why then do we always get the short end of the stick people tend to look at our distribution as nothing more then a testing ground for Red Hat. This could not be farther from the truth in fact several companies use Fedora in their infrastructure and some even contribute back. The fact that Red Hat periodically takes a Fedora release and makes the necessary modifications to it so it suits a Enterprise environment does not mean that we are a “Red Hat” testing ground.

I might be impartial here and that is ok as a majority of the users reading this feel the same way but I ask you this now, Why is it that ATI fails to keep up with the current stable release cycle of Xorg when Nvidia does this just fine.

Now before the sticks and stones go flying here keep in mind that Nvidia has just as many graphics cards and releases a new card on about the same frequency as ATI yet they manage to always have a working Linux driver with the latest xorg. I know I could just use a Nvidia card with my computer and stop complaining but I ask you why should I? I have a perfectly good graphics card working now it happens to be ATI and I ask merely to have it work with Fedora 12 (not to mention Fedora 13 which is around the corner). I have no attachment to ATI over nvidia mind you I just do not want to replace a set of good graphics cards for the sole purpose of not dealing with the ATI Linux issue.

All that aside i realize this is just my opinion and that it means nothing and will accomplish nothing however I felt it prudent to share my thoughts.

I am in no way affiliated with Red Hat, Nvidia, ATI or AMD any views expressed here are solely that of myself and in no way represent any of the the above mentioned parties in any official manner.

Fedora, Linux, Ubuntu

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FGLRX/Catalyst Woes! ATI Get with the big picture allready!

January 22, 2010 5 Comments

Well now I have been told and told and even experienced first hand why NVidia is better to its linux user base then ATI however I did not heed the warnings and now I have reached a perdicament.

ATI offers their drivers for video cards for linux however what seems to be the case lately is that X.org and ATI do not seem to be on the same page. ATI releases an update for their drivers to support a new Xorg version and then xorg goes and releases a new stable version which then takes ATI 6 months to make a driver for. Well this is all and good except that by the time ATI releases that driver update to support it the development cycle continues and bam another xorg stable version is rolled out. leaving ATI once again in the wake of its success.

Now Nvidia does not seem to have nearly as long of a delay in their support for new xorg versions why then does ATI insist on falling behind in this.

The simple answer is that they are pre-concerned with adding support for newer cards instead of enabling their existing current products to function properly. This leave people like myself with the decision do use an older xorg and continue using the drivers which in my case means an older Fedora version or use the open source drivers.

I often get told “Try the new mesa experimental drivers they support 3d perfectly” To which I have to say no they do not at least not in the way that someone installing the fglrx driver would expect. When i say that I want the same support that fglrx has I mean that i want to run 3d games like World of Warcraft in WINE something that to me is not possible with the experimental drivers.

Now before i get people saying “Install the mesa-dri-experimental package” I am going to say I have done this and see  no change at all. I have even downloaded and compiles the radeonHD driver with no luck as well.

Bottom line here is that why does ATI not take their linux users seriously? Why do they take 6 months to add support for a new xorg version?

Fedora, Non-Specific

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