Playing again with the ATI proprietary driver
December 21st, 2007
I’ve been using the ATI fglrx driver from the Gutsy repos, and it works pretty well. What I don’t like about them is that to use Compiz, I have to use XGL.. Now, this is easy enough to do in Gutsy, just apt-get install xserver-xgl and restart. However, xgl slows things down significantly, so I would prefer to use aiglx, as can be done with the free/open ATI driver.
In November, ATI/AMD released a new fglrx driver that supported aiglx, but all the reports I heard said it was still a bit buggy…so I waited.
If I can find time soon, I will test out the newest driver that was just released on December 19th. In the meanwhile, if you get a chance to play with it before I do, please write a quick comment here and let me know what you think. Thanks!
Entry Filed under: Linux / Ubuntu
7 Comments Add your own
1. ulrich | December 21st, 2007 at 7:08 am
i don’t want to sound mean, but the new fglrx is just the same mess as always. compiz is way too slow, scrolling in firefox is hell, video is only visible in fullscreenmode, and so on… i’m back on plain old radeon/ati.
2. yoshi314 | December 21st, 2007 at 8:17 am
fglrx sucks as usual. my hope rests with opensource efforts (radeonhd,radeon)
3. Dareus | December 21st, 2007 at 9:07 am
I’m using ati open driver and it work quite fine with my xpress200m (laptop-integrated) but i can’t have compiz working… That’s painful
4. georg | December 21st, 2007 at 9:34 am
A discussion about the new driver can be found here: http://www.phoronix.com/forums/s...
I think the dealbreaker this time is, that some widescreen resolutions (and 1400×1050) don’t work at all and there are still huge problems with dualhead-setups.
I honestly don’t understand how they get their drivers through QA.
If those problems don’t concern you, I would give it a shot, there are some nice bugfixes included.
5. Ross Peoples | December 21st, 2007 at 9:43 am
I tried that new driver using the newest Envy to install it. This was two days ago. Whenever I logged in, the entire screen turned white and the only thing I could see was the mouse pointer. I had to drop into single user mode and remove the driver before I could use Gnome. I have an X850 Platinum Edition, running a 24-inch (widescreen) LCD.
The only thing I don’t like about open source driver (aside from video playback problems) is that it makes everything so bright and white-washed. So I’m stuck with the older fglrx driver like most.
6. matthew | December 21st, 2007 at 9:50 am
Hmm. Well, I read the phoronix forum link georg supplied (thank you, btw). The bummer is that my laptop’s native resolution is 1400×1050, like many of the people having problems. It seems likely I will have to wait until January to get a usable and new fglrx driver…or perhaps until after Duke Nukem Forever comes out… I am following the development of the open driver as well and would love to see that take the lead.
7. jdong | December 21st, 2007 at 12:50 pm
It’s still as bad as usual. I tried the new driver yesterday, it still cannot run Xgl at acceptable speeds especially with video, it sucks even more in AIGLX mode where firefox scrolling is excruciating.
The 8.3* series with xserver-xgl still gives best Compiz performance. Using DISPLAY=:0 game_command can be used to launch fullscreen games with no performance impact.
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