We all know Mike Harris knows his stuff, but here is independent confirmation about the "Built by ATI"/"Powered by ATI" controversy we had on psyche-list a few days ago (prior to Mike's retreat from the unneeded abuse he was subjected to). This is specifically about ATI's new closed drivers for the 8x00/9x00 series cards. I personally think the difference between "Built" and "Powered" is more than just a PCI subsystem ID, and that is probably why the current XFree86 drivers are having some issues. BTW- I don't recommend video bios flashing, don't come crying to me if you fubar it. http://seneca.me.umn.edu/pipermail/flightgear-devel/2002-November/013461.html Full text follows in case of slashdot effect... [Flightgear-devel] ATI vs. Linux Andy Ross flightgear-devel@flightgear.org Wed, 27 Nov 2002 15:23:14 -0800 ________________________________________________________________________ Probably most of you noticed last week that ATI has released a unified linux driver package for all of their 8x00/9x00 cards. I've been wanting to try one of these for a long time, but have been a little scared of the DRI drivers which are still maturing. This was a good excuse to buy a cheap ($70) Radeon 8500LE and try it. The short report is that it works and seems to run FlightGear very well, but I wouldn't recommend buying one purely for their Linux drivers. Stay with NVidia for now. Continue reading for the story of compatibility hell. Background: ATI's business model differs from NVidia in that they manufacture and market their own circuit boards, not just the graphics chips. Mostly. They actually *do* sell the chips to OEMs, who market third party Radeon-compatible boards. In their marketing parlance, their own boards are "Built by ATI", while third parties sell "Powered by ATI" hardware. Most of the low end mail order cards are of this type; ATI's hardware seems to be sold mostly off of store shelves. In practice, this doesn't make much difference. While some OEMs might skimp on parts or use cheap memory, most don't, and the hardware is 100% software compatible. ATI's windows drivers have always worked equally well for OEM hardware and "Built by ATI" cards. Except their Linux drivers. For reasons unknown, the recently released drivers do an explicit check to see that they are running on "built by" hardware, and exit if they find a "powered by" card. Guess which one I bought? Not that I could tell -- I ordered a "ATI Radeon 8500LE 64MB" card from a mail order vendor. There is no information in the distribution channel to indicate what you are getting. Nor is there any documentation on ATI's site that the linux drivers only work on "pure" hardware. So I'm SOL. ATI clearly says on their website that Radeon 8500's are supported, but in reality most Radeon 8500 cards are *not* supported. Someone lied to me. But nothing is ever unfixable. Remember that the hardware really is software compatible (the DRI drivers and Windows drivers don't care what they are running on). It turns out that the "OEMness" of the card is stored in the PCI subsystem ID, and that value is defined in the card's BIOS code. And the BIOS can be flashed. So I'm off to the realm of the hardware modder and overclocker. It turns out that utilities are available to put a retail BIOS into an OEM card, which will defeat the stupid version check. I found one at http://www.xcl-clan.com/ -- woo hoo. Except that it's a DOS program. Remember that I'm a Linux guy. I have no DOS, nor FAT partition, nor even a floppy drive in this machine. So after a few hours finding and burning a FreeDOS CD and figuring out how to get a ramdisk working, I'm golden. The card has new BIOS, and it works, and the steam coming out of my ears hadn't yet caused any major burns. Yay. Apparently some people enjoy this stuff... In summary: unless you are 100% sure that your card is a "built by" variant (which basically means that you have to have purchased it in a dark red ATI box at a retail store), are happy with gray market stuff like BIOS reflashing, or absolutely *must* have one of the super-high-end super-expensive 9700 cards (for which no alternatives exist), stay away from Radeon cards for Linux. The technical decision to cut off perfectly working hardware is pure idiocy, and the marketing scheme that makes it impossible for a consumer to tell the difference between supported and unsupported products is downright dishonest. It's not that the drivers themselves are poor quality, or that I think ATI is actually trying to abuse its customers. But this driver release is just not good. Between them, the ATI marketing, engineering and manufacturing people have turned a fairly standard software release into a bloody, frothing mess. Give them another release to fix the release stupidities (or at least document their hardware limitations) and hopefully things will get better. And the competition isn't even close, anyway. Except at the very high end, the NVidia hardware and drivers are just as fast, just as cheap, and (most importantly) just work. I'm going to give the DRI stuff a whirl tonight. It lacks a lot of the fancier hardware features (programmable shaders), but FlightGear doesn't use them anyway. After last night's experience, I'd honestly give up 10-20% in performance to not have to use the ATI dreck. Andy -- Andrew J. Ross NextBus Information Systems Senior Software Engineer Emeryville, CA andy@nextbus.com http://www.nextbus.com "Men go crazy in conflagrations. They only get better one by one." - Sting (misquoted) -- ********************************************************************** Chris Kloiber, RHCE Red Hat,Inc. aka 1801 Varsity Dr. Enterprise Support "WireHead" Raleigh, NC 27606 ********************************************************************** -- Psyche-list mailing list Psyche-list@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/psyche-list
