ATI Driver Woes
I have an ATI 3250 in my machine (running Ubuntu 9.04) and apparently ATI has some driver issues. I can’t seem to run a video fullscreen without it running very slowly if compiz is enabled. I also can’t use wine for anything requiring 3d accelleration. I think I may just end up getting an nvidia card. I really miss my compiz. 
I’ll probably give them until 9.10 is released to see what happens though. Has anyone else had good luck with ATI and linux, specifically for wine and for compiz?
4 comments
I can run Compiz with my ATI card just fine. We both know that this is partially a bug in the way that Compiz manages the screen, and that it can’t be denied if it works perfect without the effects enabled. Also, if you can run 3D accelerated games, but not in WINE this is again, not the sole fault of the drivers. They have support to do all the other 3D stuff that is not going through 2 pieces of software that will forever and ever be in beta stage, so why must you dogg on them so?
And for what its worth, I would much rather run Aero in Windows 7 RC than Compiz, Compiz can do some ok stuff, but the effects need cleaned up, the effects in KDE4 beta looked much cleaner. What you could do is run Ubuntu inside of a VM and your Compiz will work much better, really, you have 8Gig of RAM, its not like it would hurt you, and besides, then you would always have the underlying Windows 7 AWESOMENESS.
Windows (with the release of DX 10) finally made graphics speed up to par with the the other OSs. The reason being that drivers before had issues with switching to the CPU since none of the driver was managed in userspace (as far as I understand it.) It caused speed issues. The The reason I know it is the ATI drivers and not the card, or compiz is because I have another machine w/ an NVidia card, and tested this on an Intel Integrated card, which doesn’t have any of the problems that I described. The Open Source ATI drivers don’t have this issue, but they aren’t yet available for this generation of card (despite ATI having committed to releasing open source drivers for all of their later cards.) The card is fine, but the driver leaves a lot to be desired. For example, there is no way for me to work with overscan using the HDMI port. This means that I’m limited to VGA for my monitor rather than HDMI which would provide me better color control. That is an issue with the driver. Also, when running through HDMI, I found that enabling compiz at all would kill performance. At least through VGA I can do compiz so long as I’m not having a video play.
umm, you totally don’t make sense here, you start off about DX10, then you start kind of implying that DX is the reason your compiz doesn’t work. Your Compiz does because of one thing, COMPIZ, I don’t know why you keep trying to blame it on other stuff. And as far as the HDMI stuff, that is either the fault of Compiz, or the lackluster drivers available to Linux.
@Joseph Brower
I was just pointing out some of the differences. ATI, in developing drivers built on a totally diff system than DX9 and previous had a lot of work, which could be part of why they had major issues in Vista (until they got their drivers cleaned up) and could still be having some issues with Ubuntu. The drivers are lackluster, but are improving. If it was compiz’s problem though, wouldn’t I have the issues under Nvidia, or Intel cards?