Been a while since I addressed this thread.

I have been running RTCW - Return to Castle Wolfenstein (800x600 32bpp : crappy resolution-I can do this game 1280x1024 in windows...) with pretty much no troubles, regardless of the low frame rates, the game play, single player mode, is still pretty damn good. I do NOT play online and I imagine the performance would drop significantly if I tried.

The only problem I've noticed thus far, is after approx. 4 or 5 hours of playing last night, the frame rates would drop suddenly while I did an "about-face" or even a really quick corner....this is after blazing through the first mission and three quarters, or thereabouts. So, I save, kill the game, restart the game after a second or two (no reboot-this ain't windows, sigh :-) and problem is all gone. I don't know if this is/was a one time thing or not because I only played another hour or two and saw the problem no more....so far.

I am saying this because of all the complaints on this thread about the radeon. I presonally beleive the radeon is a far superior hardware component than the nVidia equivelant. However, ATI seems to beleive than it's hardware is so great that ATI can save some moola on the drivers, and it shows in the performance of their cards in Linux and in some case's Windows also.

nVidia on the other hand has a great hardware component AND the quality drivers to deliver impact on a few OS's and not just Windows....and now that Knoppix has generated SO MUCH attention from newbies to the linux community ATI may regret that really, really dumb move in due time.

Still, after all is said and done, I have NEVER owned any video card except ATI. I started late in this busniess but for the last 8 years I have gone through about 7 video cards on my "baby's", I have 3 servers, 2 "kids" PC's and a "wifey's" laptop. All running ATI video cards except wifeys laptop, which has some geoforce model, 64MB on-board, she is a computer programmer, she programs filght simulators and extracts data from same, then performs magic on the data by turning it into a 3D, openGL representation of the flight path, including instruments reading s taken from the simjulator, wind, altitude, whatever, she's the expert not me...and she does all this on her LCD laptop screen using a Geoforce. It was that and that alone that convinced me their are more worlds than ATI's and then I instaled Linux and had these probels using the ATI product, which "cemented" my decision to go nVidia on my next "baby"...


BTW, if anyone cares, my baby is an AMD Athlon XP 1800 bonded to n Asus A7V333 and 256 MB PC2700 - 333mhz I beleive, and a Western Digital 120GB 8MB cache, and of course my 19" Samsung makes all this come together beautifully....thats my baby at the present.

Hey, when I bought it it was top 'o the line, sigh, I can feel another PC in my near future,

Cheers guys,

John

yup...seems like an old topic..but still. here's a part of my story:

earlier I had nvidia TNT 2 (32 megs) agp-card, drivers worked well and everything was fine except that the card was getting old..then I got a newer machine, though still old, having ati radeon 7000 64megs agp inside. ati doesn's provide drivers, so I got DRI. installed, and noticed that tuxracer is the only game that runs completely smoothly..everything else even flickered. I got rid of the flickering by un-commenting the VideoRam -line...but still, graphics are slow - even at the fastest I think they're about the same speed than with my old nvidia that had half the memory, and it run in a system with a processor that was 3 times smaller than this. so I have more recourses than then and more powerful card, but I don't get improvement...well, the only good thing was that this card was cheap

I still am not sure whether or not linux truly uses the whole memory of my card, since adding the VideoRam line helped a bit.

i'm just gonna toss mine in the garbage.

Well, I did what I said. I went and bought an old GeoFroce 5200FX and haven't ooked back since...I haven't had a problem running it 1024x768 hi-res in linux and I have tried it on Slax, Debian(native stable), knoppix, Fedora, winbloz...any OS i try seems to just grab it up and make it work. Some games are giving me crappy framerates and resolution(Quake 4 for gods sakes-I still have the original PC I spoke about in 04 only with 1GB ram and two WD 8MB cache HD's)but RTCW plays wonderfully in hi res...So, bye,bye to ATI...my next video card will be in about another year and it also will be an nVidia.

I have an ATI 9600 card in my computer and I found this, and it makes everything work just fine, the first time. So I figured I'd pass this on to you guys :

ATI video drivers

SUSE Linux 10.1 ships with the newly revamped open source radeon driver. That may be fine for 2D rendering, but it doesn't do direct rendering for 3D graphics. To get hardware 3D acceleration (and for XGL support), you still need the proprietary ATI fglrx driver.

Go to the ATI Web site, click on Drivers & Software, then Linux Display Drivers and Software, then on the driver appropriate to your video card. 32-bit SUSE installations need the x86 drivers, and 64-bit SUSE needs the x86_64 versions. After you have clicked the link for your card, yet another link comes up. Click it, scroll down to the downloads table, then right-click the ATI Driver Installer download link and save it to your home directory. You do not need to download any of the other packages.

After the file transfer completes, close all open programs, then press ctrl-alt-F1 to switch to the first virtual terminal. You'll see a text-mode login prompt; log in as root. When you're at the command prompt, type in this command:

init 3

You'll see a bunch of text scroll by, and then a message saying that runlevel 3 has been reached. Press Enter to get the command prompt back, then type the following command in to switch to the directory you downloaded the ATI driver to:

cd /home/username/

Substitute your user name for "username" in the above example. Now you need to change the ATI installer permissions so that it can be run from the command line.

For long file names, you don't have to type the whole name into a terminal window. Instead, just type the first few letters and then press the Tab key, and the file name will be automatically completed for you. This is useful in situations like the one you're in now, where there is a long and complex file name to type in. So type the following command into your terminal, and use the Tab key to complete the ATI driver file name, then press Enter to execute the command:

chmod +x ./ati-driver

That will make the program executable; this must be done before you can run it. Now it's time to run the installer. Again, use tab completion instead of typing the name in. You have to add the ./ before the filename to tell the terminal program that the file you are referring to is in the current directory. If you don't specify that, the terminal will look in other places for the file. It sounds crazy, yes, but that's the way GNU/Linux is (and Unix before it). For the below example, the entire file name is typed in. Please note that this may not be the same file name that you downloaded -- it is only an example. You should use tab completion when you type this command in so that you don't accidentally mis-type the long file name. The part of the example that will not change is the switch statement after the file name (the part with the dashes). Here's the example command for the ATI driver installer for a 32-bit system:

./ati-driver-installer-8.24.8-x86.run --buildpkg SuSE/SUSE101-IA32

And for a 64-bit system:

./ati-driver-installer-8.24.8-x86_64.run --buildpkg SuSE/SUSE101-AMD64

After a few dozen lines of text, a driver package will be created. Go ahead and run it with the following command (the first example is for 32-bit systems):

rpm -ivh fglrx_6_9_0_SUSE101-8.24.8-1.i386.rpm

And for 64-bit systems:

rpm -ivh fglrx64_6_9_0_SUSE101-8.24.8-1.x86_64.rpm

Update your system environment variables with this command:

ldconfig

Next, you need to tell SUSE that you want to use this driver instead of the standard one:

aticonfig --initial --input=/etc/X11/xorg.conf

Lastly, you have to tell YaST which driver to load (that's a zero in the example, not a letter):

sax2 -r -m 0=fglrx

Now reboot your computer by typing the following command:

reboot

The next time your system starts, you'll have hardware 3D video acceleration. Please note that every time you update your kernel, you must re-install the ATI video driver.

That might work for an ATI 9600. But not for an ATI 7000VE. The card I am talking about is a few generations older than the one you have. I think thats what all the fuss is about. Some of us prefer to NOT spend money upgrading every generation or two. I usually buy a mid to upper range card and make it last like 6years...or more...I'm still running a Matrox Mystique 4mb card on one of my servers...and I beleive I have an old voodoo on another server...Next year is my "big spender" year and all I can say is that new nVidia (7950 GX2)with the dual GPU's looks totally AWESOME...AND, past history has shown it will most likely be compatible with BOTH OS's for much, much longer than the equivelant ATI models. I had way to many problems with the ATI 7000VE on linux to ever go back there again.

Yeah I hear ya there. I think the how-to is only for 8500 and higher cards. I too have some pretty old cards, such as an old original Vodoo3Dx, and a Nvidia TNT card. But I haven't tried either of those with Linux so, I'm not sure about the compatability.

If you're using slax, deb or a deb variant they both should work just fine, albeit a little slower due to bloat, inless you go with a slim WM; I like the *box WM's, fluxbox being my favorite...

Have any of you ATI Radeon 7000 users switched from FX86 to Xorg? Which is faster? Which is more reliable?

I also have a extended ATI section in my DRI post (link in sig).

Personally, give me anything but ATI for linux...Way too convuluted...

That may be, but I have an ATI Radeon 7000. I'd like to get the most out of it that I can. And I don't want to buy another card. So again, which is faster, XF86 or Xorg? Or is there a difference?

this issue is one which i filed under "unresolvable - deal with it - it is impossible - cry all you want - can't do nothing about it"

it's as simple as that - IT CAN'T BE DONE...

personally i blame ATI...manufacturer should support all of his hardware...

What can't be done? My question is about which is faster with the same hardware, XF86 or Xorg? Are you telling me that it is not possible to bench test a machine, replace XF86 with Xorg and redo the tests and compare the results? I have googled all over for such tests, but either no one has done them, or has not posted.

No, I don't expect a lot from my old ATI card. I do expect it to do what it is designed to do.

Xorg seems to be faster to me. I beleive it is also quickly becoming the standard on distro's...debian still uses xf86, I beleive slackware, fedora, some debian Distro's like, ubuntu and knoppix use or have options to use Xorg...I'd stick with whatever you have that is working, but if you're having troubles using XF86 and want to try out Xorg it would be a good bet that Xorg would work faster...also, if you're worried about speed, stay away from Gnome and KDE and try out one of the *box WM's. Fluxbox, blackbox, openbox...they are exponentially faster than the graphics heavy WM's (like Gnome and KDE) and fluxbox can use other WM features also......

Thanks for the reply, jatcan. I've been following the move to Xorg for some time, but haven't as yet seen the need to switch. There seems to be a lot of politics involved. Xorg is not in the Sarge repository yet, although it is in the backports. My suspicion is that XF86 stopped going forward and that new developments will be in Xorg, so I should switch eventually. BTW, I run Fluxbox.

You say that Xorg seems faster. Have you ever seen any hard evidence of that? Are there any bench testers making comparisons? How did you come to your conclusions?