linux and ati free drivers

[Yakor]

Anyone use linux and ati free drivers?
what video card? How it work?
I have now hd3450. hd3450 work slow, and sometimes show artefacts.
I think about buy hd6670 or hd6750 or hd6770. How this videocards in work?

[Beherith]

You are probably better off with nvidia with linux, and in particular, spring. Sometimes its just not worth the 10-20% better theoretical performance with ATI cards when you factor in their drivers.

[SpliFF]

I've spent quite a lot of time on this recently.

Firstly, I can confirm Spring runs with low graphics settings on ATI 1950xt with 3.0.4 kernel using the OSS driver and KMS enabled.

There are some caveats:

• You must set LoadingMT=0 in your spring settings or Spring will crash/freeze on load with kernel errors related to "GEM lookup" and "CS parser" written to dmesg.
• You should use HardwareCursor=1 or your mouse may lag or cause a crash
• You should install libdxtn so S3TC/DDS textures work as expected.
• I have seen occasional glitches when zooming particular maps (Supreme Battlefield is one example). I suspect related to the presence of water or my choice of water rendering settings.

If it runs on the 1950xt (which is about 8 years old) it should run on any HD* card with higher settings.

I also run Spring on a HD6870 with the closed-source driver and haven't experienced any issues. I did try to switch to the OSS driver but at the time I didn't know about the LoadingMT setting so it was crashing on load.

On a more general note I have never had issues with any software or game except Spring. System stability is good, blender works, webGL works, compiz works on both drivers and cards. Framerates on the HD6870 are more than adequate at 2560x1600 when playing games like Shogun TW2 under Windows or Civ5 under Wine.

In short, my experience with ATI on linux and windows has been excellent with the exception of Spring under the OSS driver. In Springs' case the main issue is that no Spring devs and very few players use the ATI OSS driver. Issues go unnoticed and are difficult to fix. Things should improve as the OSS driver stabilises (there have been massive changes in the kernel graphics system since 2.6).

Of course you don't have to use the OSS driver and probably should use fglrx if you're running a HD* card. I only switched because:

• I like experimenting with the bleeding edge
• I hate proprietary drivers in linux
• fglrx only supports HD* and higher.

[PixelOfDeath]

Actually for me fglrx works equivalent good on Linux and Win7. Well... I even have consistent bugs on both systems. :/

I tried to play around with the oss ati drivers. But I still use the Ubuntu LTS, and so I can't use current versions of that drivers without to much work. I wait for the next LTS to try it again.

[Cheesecan]

I have a HD 3470 and used to have HD 2300. Fglrx performance is horrible enough as it, is I don't know why you would even try to use the free drivers.

You would be better off buying a nvidia card or if you are on a tight budget, an A-series APU. 6000-series are not worth the money if you run linux.

[pheldens]

thanks for the LoadingMT=0 tip!

[psusi]

I think my card was the HD 4850, and I've always run the OSS drivers without issue until spring. With the OSS drivers on Ubuntu 11.10, the grass and other ground clutter is flickery and the game frequently crashes. With fglrx, the whole screen often goes wonky at the start when I click on a build icon and I have to keep trying to tab out or switch to a tty and back to get it to clear up. It also often makes the whole screen green as soon as I start building and I just have to quit and restart. Once I get over that though, it seems to run fine. On the other hand, I can't run gnome-shell with fglrx because it goes nuts ( but works great with the OSS driver ).

[abma]

hm, with the opensource drivers and it seems to run stable but with many graphical glitches. (linux 3.2, ubuntu 12.04 beta)

also, the performance is very bad. (opensource drivers with ~20 fps vs binary drivers with ~300 fps) currently still unplayable it seems :-/

i only had to install libxt3n by:

Code: Select all

git clone git://people.freedesktop.org/~mareko/libtxc_dxtn
cd libtxc_dxtn
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr
sudo make install

but at least, it works! :D (didn't work with this system some time ago...)

stranged/blocking problem is, that units are drawn at the wrong position... seems to happen randomly. (not caused by a specific unit)

see:

screen00190.jpg

(272.38 KiB) Downloaded 2 times

[SpliFF]

I've noticed the issue with units being drawn in the air or off-map. I've found it doesn't happen if you render only unit icons so I'm guessing it must be something in the fartexturehandler or unitdrawer displaylist or FBO implementation. I'd put my money on the fartexturehandler since I've noticed this issue is more predominant on distant units than those close to the camera.

EDIT: Doesn't seem to be fartextures after all.