On 2009-05-13 (Wednesday) 12:43:25 Clontarf[X] wrote: > vitamin wrote: > > Clontarf[X] wrote: > > > Starting wine or a wine'd program causes an immediate restart of the X > > > server, returning the the gdm greeting/login screen. > > > > Buggy video drivers. > > What I was thinking. Any known stable/non-buggy ATI drivers that you know > of? There is no such a thing (at least not yet). Many people who try to use ATI Linux drivers eventually come to conclusion that ATI drivers for Linux are unstable and have big amount of major bugs. And I learned this from my recent experience too. Instead of telling you "ATI drivers are bad" I will tell you whole story so you can understand better why I have such opinion about ATI drivers. I always knew that ATI cards have bad drivers so I never purchased them. However, few months ago I received a gift - yet another computer to my house; the computer wasn't so bad except it was equipped with ATI card. I decided to use it (the computer) for SolidWorks: it doesn't work on Wine so you need Windows to use it. In the past I used VMWare and using separate computer for this purpose (to run programs that doesn't work on Wine yet) is an improvement and working on multiple computers is very convenient with good KVM switch. Obviously, first I tried new computer "as is" with ATI card under Windows. It wasn't bad... it was horrible. Even when I opened very simple model in SolidWorks performance was bad - about 1-3 FPS (at least 30-60 FPS was expected) with very heavy tearing (VSync didn't work). Even worse, when SolidWorks window was maximized there was heavy corruption in 3D viewport and even in small window there was a lot of artifacts. In fact, only games on Windows worked well with ATI card... Everything else worked bad or didn't worked at all. Obviously, I decided to replace ATI card with something better. So I took NVidia card from my another computer (running Linux) and temporally inserted ATI card into it just in order to see how it will work with Linux. Since computer I took the NVidia card from was used mostly for non-gaming activities and tasks, I thought maybe ATI card can handle that. I tried to install ATI driver for Linux... There was a lot of issues in the ATI driver installer such as strange conflicts, problems with compiling kernel module, segfaults, and some other issues. After wasting some hours I solved all of them: I used solutions published in some forums by other people so all problems I encountered was known bugs in ATI driver installer. And that's was just ATI driver installation... Then I tried to use it (the driver). It is well known that with ATI card in Linux you can forget about gaming but I decided to test this myself and now I can confirm this: all my games I tested with ATI card in Linux (and I tested only games that work with NVidia card perfectly) didn't work with ATI card for one or another reason: major graphical glitches (so technically game runs but looks ugly), major bugs in the kernel module (so I had either "immediate restarts of the X server" like you do or hard crashes of whole system). Yes I know there is some games that do work with ATI cards very well but this doesn't change the fact that number of games you can run perfectly with ATI card in Linux is much less than number of games you can run perfectly with NVidia card. So I didn't test ATI card with games in Linux any farther because this was pointless. Computer where I tested ATI card with Linux have three X sessions running: one mine, one for my brother and third one for playing games and watching movies. Obviously, there was at least few switches between these sessions per day. And in my case ATI card (its driver) failed to work even for pure 2D tasks: major bug in ATI kernel module lead to system hard crash once or twice (!) per day (usually when trying to switch between X sessions). After few days of testing I learned that ATI card is useless (at least for me) in both Windows and Linux. Conclusion (from my personal experience): ATI card can only satisfy your needs only if you use Windows and all 3D applications you run in Windows are games or very simple professional 3D software. In any other case you may and probably will encounter major bugs in ATI driver even on Windows. On Linux this even worse: even if you manage to run some games or other 3D applications there will be a lot of games that run perfectly with NVidia card but run badly or not at all with ATI card. Even worse, ATI card is very unstable (1-2 hard crashes per day in my case!). As a result, I didn't find any use for my ATI card (X1600) and after few days of bad experience replaced it with much better NVidia card (and NVidia offers much better drivers for their cards; also NVidia drivers for both Linux and Windows work well and are stable). Your best option is to buy NVidia card. If you have no money to buy NVidia card, your only hope that at some point in the future there will be better drivers for ATI cards. I know that ATI put some effort trying to improve ATI Linux driver but they need to put much more effort before I ever decide to even consider to buy ATI card. For now ATI driver for Linux is far from perfect (and from my personal experience I discovered that their Windows driver is much better than Linux one but far from perfect either) and this is especially obvious when you trying to use Wine for games on computer with ATI card.
