Re: How well does Fedora handle ATI cards?

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gilpel@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> So, Radeon is free, Catalyst/fglrx non-free?

Not quite.

radeon and radeonhd are free-as-in-speech (libre). They're [supposedly]
fully supported by the community and Redhat. These are updated with
every kernel version.
- Radeon will work on most cards, and will almost definitely work on old
ATI cards. Some new cards are not supported.
- RadeonHD mostly works with newer cards only (at least it used to) --
and is still under development. Old cards are not likely to work.

catalyst/fglrx is proprietary but free-as-in-beer (gratis). They're
[supposedly] supported by ATI (I guess AMD, now). In practical terms,
they should work on all recent ATI cards, but not all kernel versions
(they're distributed as pre-compiled code and will only work with a
small set of kernel versions). Many (most?) old cards are not supported.
There's no point asking ATI/AMD for help, they'll either ignore you or
tell you to hang tight until next version of the driver is released. On
the flipside, the 3D support is* best here.

* That used to be the case about a year ago. I don't think radeon
could've progressed enough to beat fglrx in performance, but it should
have fairly good performance.

See http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showpost.php?p=20922 if you want to
get some historical background.

Practically, you should try the drivers in the following order and stick
with the one that works for you:
1. radeon
2. radeonhd
3. fglrx

> Ok, so that's why, when I bought my computer and I said I would use Linux,
> the salesman suggested I buy an Nvidia card.
>   

My coworker is also an nvidia enthusiast, but my ATI X1400 works
perfectly well with fglrx (I still haven't upgraded from F8, and radeon
driver wasn't good enough for me there). I've also tried F11 live cd and
the fresh radeon support looks good so far.
OTOH, I've had the worst time while trying nvidia proprietary driver


> I've installed Compiz, but are there other uses for 3D ? If not, if one
> doesn't care about Compiz, I understand that Frank Cox says he had no
> problem whatsoever with his ATI cards.
>   

Yes - many games use 3D :)
Some media players can also use 3D acceleration to render video -- this
could give you very nice features like antialiasing/deinterlacing/etc
with low cpu overhead (since they're implemented in videocard hardware).
Not sure if these always work in practice, though.


HTH

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