ATi drivers...
 

I have a Gforce 2 vid card, bu there's no drivers yet, so, I was wondering if ATI cards are detected or come with drivers, if that's the case i may change my NVIDIA vid card for an ATI one.

What do you mean? Both nVidia and ATI offer drivers, but they are closed-source (not open-source), so are not provided with any free distribution (you can get them pre-compiled if you buy Mandrake, or SuSE or possibly even RH).

However, both nVidia and ATI provide their drivers on their respective websites, and you can install them yourself. Search Google, there are lots of HOW-TOs that should explain the process.

In addition, nVidia's drivers are currently far better than ATIs drivers. Stick with NV for now, get the drivers from http://www.nvidia.com

In what respect are the nVidia drivers "better"? I have had no problems with the ATI drivers-- and, let's face it, no matter how much "better" the nVidia drivers might be, they aren't going to help ramsees get much out of a GeForce 2 series card in any case.

So if ramsees is planning to upgrade his/her card anyway, s/he should get the best card available in his or her price range, without regard to which has "better" drivers, if you're not even going to explain what that means, or when ramsees hasn't said what s/he will be using the 3D for.... After all, all of us don't play UT2004/Enemy Territory/America's Army/insert your fave FPS here... some of us do 3D rendering, or play games with less stringent requirements than needed by the hot game of the week.

i just installed ati drivers last night and now that I think I have done it correctly, it is very simple.

The Nvidia linux drivers seemed harder to install because I needed to edit some file and ended up crashing the graphic utility of fedora core 1.

ATI drivers just run the rpm file and then asnswer some questions and then reboot - I am having issues installing UT2004 but everything looks good.

Yes, the hardest part is just reconfiguring the kernel so that a couple of internal functions replaced by the driver are deactivated, but you only have to do that once (unless you upgrade your kernel or something). OK, if you have an nForce motherboard, you have to install some mobo drivers and maybe patch the kernel as well, but that has more to do with the interaction between the kernel and the motherboard than it does with the ATI drivers.

But once you've got the backend straightened out, it takes 5 minutes to install the drivers, and I must say, Neverwinter Nights looks pretty doggone good. Sadly my CD-ROM drive is in the shop or I'd go on at length about how good other things look too, but I can't install UT2004 or Far Cry (which I've heard does work under Linux, via Wine or WineX, can't remember) to see how good they look as well. ;)

Framerates in the ATI drivers are consistently worse than with nVidia. I should know, I own both a Radeon 9600XT, and a GeForce4 MX460.

It's sad, but the MX460 gets better framerates in UT2004 and Savage than my 9600xt, whereas under windows, it's completely the other way around.

The 9600XT is a far more powerful card, which should blow the mx460 out of the water. But it doesn't, because of ATIs comparatively poor drivers.

Doesn't matter if ramsees doesn't play UT2004 or Savage, or doesn't care about framerates. It's not like they're unplayably slow, is it?

If you said that there was some horrific display corruption, then that would be one thing. But I don't find "50 fps" (or even 100, when you're talking about the framerates that these cards produce) less to be particularly conclusive or important, although I admit that it might be to some.

ATI drivers are not good in my opinion. I have a 9500Pro, and a GeForce FX5200.

The ATI card is a monster compared to the FX5200, and using the latest drivers for each the FX5200 blows the ATI card away in UT2004, and other graphical apps. The nVidia drivers are incredible and far more advanced, they have a utility that compiles a driver for your specific kernel. The ATI drivers are harder to get running, but still very easy compared normal linux drivers.

12 fps in onslaught, no matter what settings i use, is A MAJOR PROBLEM.

As you say, that is unplayably slow :)

Indeed it is.

When I get UT2004 running on Fedora Core 1 , is there a way to see what my FPS are to make sure my card is running well.

I bought this card for $499.00 so it better run as good as UT2004 can be ran.

I have a ATI Radion 9800XT, pretty decent card IMHO.

It will run dreadfully. Type stat fps at the UT console to see how badly.

It's just a case of waiting for decent drivers...

What? paying $500 bucks for a card that has the word dredfull in it is not looking good. How soon can I expect this to change?

will I get better performance with Nvidia card on my system? Or should I just hold off untill drivers better for ATI?

I have an 9800XT but will pick up 5900/5950 if that betters my performance...