Christopher Shanahan on 22 Feb 2009 12:42:54 -0800


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Re: [PLUG] ATI Open Source Driver Status


On Saturday 21 February 2009 14:17:59 Casey Bralla wrote:
> I'm planning a video card purcahse soon. I'd like to go with ATI due
> to their better open source support (or at least, better open source
> noises).
>
> The last I heard, ATI closed source drivers were superior to the open
> source ones.
>
> Anybody have any opinions on them?



I'm using an ASUS EAH4850 512Mb PCIe v2 card with dual 21" monitors
running the radeonhd driver on openSUSE 11.1 without problems. The card
with the radeonhd driver works very well, though I don't do any gaming.
I spent a lot of time researching video cards for my latest machine
paying close attention to heat and size. A number of the higher-end
cards require two open slots and a lot of room in your case - they are
long and their heat sinks make them wide.


For example:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121253


As for ATI's driver, I've used it in the (recent) past but I find that
the radeonhd driver does what I need very well so I have no need to
compile ATI's driver myself or look for a binary package. I'm running a
64-bit OS so compiling ATI's driver isn't as straight forward as it is
for a 32-bit environment. To do so I would have had to install a large
number of 32-bit libraries on my 64-bit machine, and then deal with a
number of additional package dependencies. Completely do-able, just not
worth the trouble for me. Note that there is (now) a binary package
available for openSUSE 11.1 64-bit, but it wasn't available when the
OS was first released.


I'm also running KDE v4.2 so when I purchased my ATI card I had to
consider all the problems nvidia was having with their driver and KDE
4.x. And the open source nv driver isn't as far along as the open source
radeonhd driver.




--
Christopher Shanahan
GPG Key: 85B5 228C 8FC1 A457 179C EBFD 0F4F F1A0 A768


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