ati driver working shocker!

[Chris H]

Just rummaging through me xorg.conf file and find that the driver is actually ati and not fglrx as I'd assumed.

 

I am stunned as I've never had this level of functionality out of the ati driver before.

 

Amazing, truly.

 

 

[moved from Software by spinynorman]

[ianw1974]

Unless it's changed, I think the ati driver is the open source one, whereas the fglrx is the closed-source one provided by ATI themselves.

 

How are you finding the performance with the ati driver? Is it any good compared to the fglrx? Reason I ask, is that I have a card that only works with the ATI driver, and none of the fglrx ones and performance was always pretty bad.

[scarecrow]

The ati driver is indeed the opensource one provided by xorg, and there have NEVER been any issues with it.

But it doesn't support hardware-accelerated 3D.

For regular 2D, it's equally good (or better) than the fglrx one.

Edited November 26, 2008 by scarecrow

[Chris H]

The ati driver has never worked good for me with anything other than a plain desktop. Add stuff like compiz and it goes like a dog. Intrepid Ibex runs like this, hence my wanting to load fglrx and toasting the installation.

 

No 3D? glxgears gives me about 1500fps which is par for the course with this chipset.

 

The other thing that the ati driver didn't help with was hibernation/suspend. Would never work unless fglrx was loaded. Mind you, yet to get suspend working with anything other than debian based distros, but that's another post :D

 

Laptop is a Uniwill something, AMD 64-bit athlon 3400+, 1Gb RAM, ATI M9700 chipset.

[theYinYeti]

In my recent experience, the ati driver is more stable than the fglrx one, and its performance is better too as long as you don't use a compositing window manager (I did not try games).

However, this open-source driver becomes very slow with real transparency enabled (Metacity as a compositing window manager), and Hibernate does fail.

 

Yves.