Does anybody have any recent experience with ATI on Linux?

The reason I'm asking is because my video card has been dying (at one point it had one of NVIDIA's three malicious drivers for a while, which is probably what triggered it's downward spiral) for the last year or so and looks like it may finally blow up. I really want to ditch Nvidia and their bad price to performance ratio cards not to mention drivers that burn stuff up. The problem is the last time I owned an ATI card (this was before AMD bought them) the thing was an absolute piece of crap that would crash constantly under Windows and wouldn't really handle anything 3D under Linux with it's official driver. Does ATI still suck under Linux, or has AMD turned them around?

I have some ATI Linux experience. What Distro are you using?

If you are using a distro that supports proprietary drivers, you can use the FGLRX driver. It will run most games smoothly, especially if you have a good card.

This is a nice ATI card

So a decent card on a distro that supports proprietary drivers (Ubuntu, etc.) won't have much issue then? Ever try running any games under WINE with the card you have?

btw I plan on stepping up from a 1GB Geforce 9800GTX and have been looking at these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...-_-Product

Yes, I've run Anarchy Online through wine, but that's it. That product you listed should run a lot of games smoothly, so it looks like you're good.

Alright cool. Thanks, looks like my system will be an all AMD system after my current card blows up.

I have a Radeon HD5850 and I use it with Ubuntu 10.04 and AMD proprietary driver. Games run smoothly on my screen at 1920x1080: I have to say that I haven't tried Xonotic yet but Nexuiz (and OpenArena, AlienArena and Sauerbraten) run perfectly.

01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RS780M/RS780MN [Radeon HD 3200 Graphics]

Works with proprietary driver with few glitches. e.g. you can't switch to another desktop if you have a fullscreened OpenGL window. You can but it will still be on top of everything.

Generally in my expirience nvidia works better as long as you don't need to use some kernels patches like rt and can live without all the newest opensource goodies like KMS. But ATI proprietary driver has the same problems.

I've got a 4890OC + Phenom II 945 and it gets along at a fair pace with proprietary drivers. It's not uncommon for me to get >700 FPS playing on CPMA maps (1440x900, graphics on Ultimate) in Xonotic. It's just a shame there are no good open source ATI drivers available .

The cards themselves are very nice, and I was surprised how well mine handled anti-aliasing compared to NVIDIA cards.

Lee_Stricklin: i have an Nvidia GPU and works fine both under windows or linux, its weird their drivers are more stable than the ones from ATI.

"at one point it had one of NVIDIA's three malicious drivers for a while" what driver? the beta one? as far as i know linux distro`s have an script or repo that help you install an official driver.

"Does ATI still suck under Linux, or has AMD turned them around? ": Yes still suck, no but maybe in future.
All linux distro`s have KMS for Nvidia an ATI maybe their open source driver has improved

Lee_Stricklin: i have an Nvidia GPU and works fine both under windows or linux, its weird their drivers are more stable than the ones from ATI.

"at one point it had one of NVIDIA's three malicious drivers for a while" what driver? the beta one? as far as i know linux distro`s have an script or repo that help you install an official driver.

"Does ATI still suck under Linux, or has AMD turned them around? ": Yes still suck, no but maybe in future.
All linux distro`s have KMS for Nvidia an ATI maybe their open source driver has improved

Nvidia released a Windows driver that was discovered by StarCraft II beta testers to screw up cards. One of the things it was known to do was shut the fans off, but even those that had their fans forced on or had watercooling still had cards blow up. Nvidia eventually pulled the driver. Before they knew about those problems however, they released two Linux and Unix drivers that were based off of it and for quite sometime my card was running until I found out it was bad (by which point, my card was already getting artifacts, etc.). Just like the Windows driver, those were later pulled. My card has an aftermarket cooler on it as well and the fans are on max no matter what. The dangerous drivers I'm talking about are:

196.75 (Windows)
195.36.08 (Unix/Linux)
195.36.03 (Unix/Linux)

btw I prefer to manually install my drivers, stays more up to date that way.

Links:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/warni...-card/7551
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/announcement.php?f=14

Lee_Stricklin: i know about those issues with those drivers. My luck was that i did not install either of them(on windows or linux). I do the same thing, i download the driver from the nvidia site and compile the kernel module my self, of course after a day or two since the driver is released as a precaution since they had that problem with drivers.

I got a Radeon HD3850 and it runs just fine with fglrx. The only problem I've run into is the hdmi audio - I needed to blacklist the kernel module (hda-intel or sth like that) or else it was fighting with my SB live which soundcard would be the default one ;-P.

Well, in my experience fglrx provides good and stable acceleration where it works, with a Radeon HD3650 on 64-bit Fedora 8 to 13. "where it works" means that the greatest issue is that fglrx breaks with every X.org version increment, falling back to the OSS driver until AMD fix it. The open-source drivers are currently under heavy development (read: unstable), slow and feature-incomplete. This pretty much summarises were the r600g driver is right now, see their other benchmarking articles for r600c/r300 driver performance. The stock F13 driver (R600c as of early 2010) provides stable but sluggish partial acceleration - Q3-flavoured stuff, radiant, blender, etc. work but xon, sauer, syntensity, etc. does not.