First the good part, I am glad that ATI has finally managed to get a good working installer. Now the bad part for me: since I switcht to an x850 (R481 Core) I cant use the Driver, since it seems that the specifiy PCI-ID is not in this driver, which results in an "no matching pci ID found" after running fglrxconfig (which would be nice to have in a GUI version, or at least a menue based text version). Hope they manage to add this product soon... gets kind of anoying always having to wait month over month until they manage to fix things like this. Also the missing 64bit driver is some what disapointing (even though I only own 32Bit maschines).
While I will admit that I only skimmed through the article, I think you failed to mention that it is nearly impossible to install the ATI drivers, especially with 3d Acceleration on most distributions.
Though the statements here regarding NVIDIA is generically true - I am personally unhappy with the "mouse moves but screen frozen" bug - due to which I can't use the 3D acceleration on FX-5700 ( though the problem is not there with GeForce2 MX cards, for example. ) . Its been almost a year and half since this bug surfaced on the nvidia linux board but the problem persists - thanks to the closed nature of the nvidia drivers.
In regards to the DRI project drivers "not being there", I will offer that you've been trying the official released drivers that are typically included with the distributions. (By the way, you can _almost_ play UT 2k4 with the drivers- I know, I recently tried it on a Centrino based laptop and an r200 based GPU.) Recent improvements include 3D accel across Xinerama screens and TCL support- these are betas in the version control system and should be showing shortly in the distributions as they're wrung out.
You can add one more dissenting opinion to the growing list in regard to the comment about 64/64 being a meager boost compared to 32/32 UT2004. A 15% boost in performance is better than a processor upgrade, some vid card upgrades and certainly better than anything expensive ram can do compared to value ram (2-2-2 vs 3-3-3 @400). I just hope 64bit windows will be able to show the same level of performance gains.
I'm inclined to agree with the opinions of thoe others, I felt the relative gains from going to 64bitwas quite appreciable.
At this point I'm not sure I would even have expected the ~10% gain seen, so it's quite decent from my perspctive.
ATI's performance under Linux still remains wholly unimpressive at best. Seeing the less then impressive 5700U beating the X800 Pro in a number of cases only serves to underline how poorly ATI's drivers perform.
It doesn't impact me personally as I rarely use Linux and not at all for gaming, but for those that do nVidia is still clearly the manufacturer of choice.
Intel said that going from 32 to 64 bits will just allow one to add (address) more than 4 GBs of RAM to a system and that's all.
AMD always said that the added registers would allow for improvements no matter how much RAM you have.
I guess AMD was right.
PS. How much improvement is necessary to go from meager to the next level? The way I see if from the article it's something like this.
0-10% Abysmal
10-20% Meager
20-30% Poor
30-40% Average
40-50% Good
50%> Excellent
I don't think we will ever see a greater than 30% increase going from 32 to 64 bit in order to get a positive rating, but hey, some people are harder to please than others.
I have to agree also with #5,8,10. I must not know what the definition of "meager" is. Any improvement over 10% is totally significant by any measurement.
Just looking back at an old Anandtech article comparing Unreal 32 to 64 bit performance in SuSe 9.1 shows 32bit performance at 26 fps and 64bit at 25 fps. Now a 1fps difference is meager and shows 32bit winning over 64bit.
I know this was a very different system but the absolute frame rate is not what's important. Its the difference between 64bit vs. 32bit. Driver development has come a long way and now we are seeing a 13 to 15% increase in fps going from 32 to 64bit.
And you can't say that its just the drivers because the same drivers are being used in 32 and 64 bit modes in this new comparison and we are still seeing a "huge" (not meager) gain in performance going from 32 to 64bit.
Framing articles in reference to old data is a good way to measure improvements. I think that is how we know if an older video card is outperformed by a newer one, a new operating system works better than an older, etc.
Pannenkoek: Unfortunately I have large doubts about ATI or NVIDIA ever opening up their drivers. Both companies have more software engineers than hardware engineers. They spend a *lot* of time and money reinventing the wheel between the two of them - and I think they want to keep it that way.
MooseMuffin: It's SUSE 9.1 - i think i might have a typo in there somewhere. We kept it at 9.1 instead of 9.2 just for that reason (the kernel is very updated though).
I back up #5: 10-15% gain from 32bit to 64bit is not "meager"...
Before you ditch the open source 3D drivers for the newer videocards (if any exist...), please keep in mind they have to reverse engineer the cards, as NVIDIA and ATI don't co-operate and no hardware spec's are available. As far as I know only serious 2D OSS drivers are in development.
Also, we should not applause ATI's gains in performance, as they were abominable to start with. However, we should applause their changing attitude towards open source platforms. Let us hope it will continue to improve!
And let us hope NVIDIA and ATI will open their hardware in the future, so open source drivers can be made for them. No buggy proprietary drivers tainting the kernel anymore. But I fear we may wait a long time for that to happen. ATI is hugging Direct3D and MS too closely to encourage development of good OSS drivers as a way to counter NVIDIA's lead in OpenGL. And NVIDIA won't open up as long as that is the case.
Nevertheless, hereby I beg NVIDIA and ATI to design their future generation cards in such a way that opening the spec will not expose their holy IP.
...performance gains between 32-bit and 64-bit distributions on Unreal Tournament 2004 were meager
I agree with Icehawk, and beg to differ with the author. >10% performance gains are not "meager" by any stretch. Imagine NVidia/ATI releases a new Windows driver that increases performance 10%. I'm pretty sure nobody would say that was a "meager" improvement.
I don't know why they say the bump in 64-bit UT performance is minor - if you look at the total delta from 1.0-611 32-bit -> 1.0-6629 64-bit it is a ~13% increase on the 6800 and ~15% on the 5700U which is pretty darn good IMO.
Yet another Windows fanboi making the same tired old 'joke' that actually has no basis in fact.
Windows:
Open internet browser
find gpu website
search website to find downloads page
compare version available for download with already installed version
download driver installer
run a file search find where windows hid the download this time
run driver installer
wait for reboot
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23 Comments
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DarkTrooper - Tuesday, December 6, 2005 - link
First the good part, I am glad that ATI has finally managed to get a good working installer. Now the bad part for me: since I switcht to an x850 (R481 Core) I cant use the Driver, since it seems that the specifiy PCI-ID is not in this driver, which results in an "no matching pci ID found" after running fglrxconfig (which would be nice to have in a GUI version, or at least a menue based text version). Hope they manage to add this product soon... gets kind of anoying always having to wait month over month until they manage to fix things like this. Also the missing 64bit driver is some what disapointing (even though I only own 32Bit maschines).mpineiro - Thursday, May 5, 2005 - link
While I will admit that I only skimmed through the article, I think you failed to mention that it is nearly impossible to install the ATI drivers, especially with 3d Acceleration on most distributions.momenman - Friday, December 31, 2004 - link
Though the statements here regarding NVIDIA is generically true - I am personally unhappy with the "mouse moves but screen frozen" bug - due to which I can't use the 3D acceleration on FX-5700 ( though the problem is not there with GeForce2 MX cards, for example. ) . Its been almost a year and half since this bug surfaced on the nvidia linux board but the problem persists - thanks to the closed nature of the nvidia drivers.Let's just wait and see .....
svartalf - Sunday, December 19, 2004 - link
In regards to the DRI project drivers "not being there", I will offer that you've been trying the official released drivers that are typically included with the distributions. (By the way, you can _almost_ play UT 2k4 with the drivers- I know, I recently tried it on a Centrino based laptop and an r200 based GPU.) Recent improvements include 3D accel across Xinerama screens and TCL support- these are betas in the version control system and should be showing shortly in the distributions as they're wrung out.SLIM - Saturday, December 18, 2004 - link
You can add one more dissenting opinion to the growing list in regard to the comment about 64/64 being a meager boost compared to 32/32 UT2004. A 15% boost in performance is better than a processor upgrade, some vid card upgrades and certainly better than anything expensive ram can do compared to value ram (2-2-2 vs 3-3-3 @400). I just hope 64bit windows will be able to show the same level of performance gains.Saist - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
I'm just going to say this to the author:try to install ATi drivers into Debian.
if you get that to succeed. Please do an article on how you did it.
Rand - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
I'm inclined to agree with the opinions of thoe others, I felt the relative gains from going to 64bitwas quite appreciable.At this point I'm not sure I would even have expected the ~10% gain seen, so it's quite decent from my perspctive.
ATI's performance under Linux still remains wholly unimpressive at best. Seeing the less then impressive 5700U beating the X800 Pro in a number of cases only serves to underline how poorly ATI's drivers perform.
It doesn't impact me personally as I rarely use Linux and not at all for gaming, but for those that do nVidia is still clearly the manufacturer of choice.
mlittl3 - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
Oh and one other thing.Intel said that going from 32 to 64 bits will just allow one to add (address) more than 4 GBs of RAM to a system and that's all.
AMD always said that the added registers would allow for improvements no matter how much RAM you have.
I guess AMD was right.
PS. How much improvement is necessary to go from meager to the next level? The way I see if from the article it's something like this.
0-10% Abysmal
10-20% Meager
20-30% Poor
30-40% Average
40-50% Good
50%> Excellent
I don't think we will ever see a greater than 30% increase going from 32 to 64 bit in order to get a positive rating, but hey, some people are harder to please than others.
mlittl3 - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
I have to agree also with #5,8,10. I must not know what the definition of "meager" is. Any improvement over 10% is totally significant by any measurement.Just looking back at an old Anandtech article comparing Unreal 32 to 64 bit performance in SuSe 9.1 shows 32bit performance at 26 fps and 64bit at 25 fps. Now a 1fps difference is meager and shows 32bit winning over 64bit.
http://www.anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=2114...
I know this was a very different system but the absolute frame rate is not what's important. Its the difference between 64bit vs. 32bit. Driver development has come a long way and now we are seeing a 13 to 15% increase in fps going from 32 to 64bit.
And you can't say that its just the drivers because the same drivers are being used in 32 and 64 bit modes in this new comparison and we are still seeing a "huge" (not meager) gain in performance going from 32 to 64bit.
Framing articles in reference to old data is a good way to measure improvements. I think that is how we know if an older video card is outperformed by a newer one, a new operating system works better than an older, etc.
deathwalker - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
yawwnnn!!!!KristopherKubicki - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
Pannenkoek: Unfortunately I have large doubts about ATI or NVIDIA ever opening up their drivers. Both companies have more software engineers than hardware engineers. They spend a *lot* of time and money reinventing the wheel between the two of them - and I think they want to keep it that way.Kristopher
KristopherKubicki - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
MooseMuffin: It's SUSE 9.1 - i think i might have a typo in there somewhere. We kept it at 9.1 instead of 9.2 just for that reason (the kernel is very updated though).Hope that helps,
Kristopher
Pannenkoek - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
I back up #5: 10-15% gain from 32bit to 64bit is not "meager"...Before you ditch the open source 3D drivers for the newer videocards (if any exist...), please keep in mind they have to reverse engineer the cards, as NVIDIA and ATI don't co-operate and no hardware spec's are available. As far as I know only serious 2D OSS drivers are in development.
Also, we should not applause ATI's gains in performance, as they were abominable to start with. However, we should applause their changing attitude towards open source platforms. Let us hope it will continue to improve!
And let us hope NVIDIA and ATI will open their hardware in the future, so open source drivers can be made for them. No buggy proprietary drivers tainting the kernel anymore. But I fear we may wait a long time for that to happen. ATI is hugging Direct3D and MS too closely to encourage development of good OSS drivers as a way to counter NVIDIA's lead in OpenGL. And NVIDIA won't open up as long as that is the case.
Nevertheless, hereby I beg NVIDIA and ATI to design their future generation cards in such a way that opening the spec will not expose their holy IP.
Myrandex - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
And that should only increase with time with optimized 64bit code, drivers, improved operating system components, etc.icarus4586 - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
...performance gains between 32-bit and 64-bit distributions on Unreal Tournament 2004 were meagerI agree with Icehawk, and beg to differ with the author. >10% performance gains are not "meager" by any stretch. Imagine NVidia/ATI releases a new Windows driver that increases performance 10%. I'm pretty sure nobody would say that was a "meager" improvement.
R3MF - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
thank god i have an nForce2 and Ti4200, SUSE 9.1 runs like a dream.i have just bought an nForce3Ultra and 6800GT for the parents.
i will upgrade to an nForce4 and 6800GT early next year.
notice a trend? you would have to be daft using ATI silicon in a machine you intend to install Linux onto.
Icehawk - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
I should say total delta from 32:32-bit to 64:64-bit .Icehawk - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
I don't know why they say the bump in 64-bit UT performance is minor - if you look at the total delta from 1.0-611 32-bit -> 1.0-6629 64-bit it is a ~13% increase on the 6800 and ~15% on the 5700U which is pretty darn good IMO.MooseMuffin - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
How did you guys get these drivers installed on Suse 9.2? As far as I can tell suse 9.2 uses xorg and ati only supplies xfree drivers.mickyb - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
ATI's performance is shameful on linux. They have some serious work to do.bersl2 - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
Encumbered, closed-source drivers are still the pits. Booooooo!crimson117 - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
Great, hot new linux video driver!Now if I can just figure out how to install the darn things...
justniz - Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - link
Yet another Windows fanboi making the same tired old 'joke' that actually has no basis in fact.Windows:
Open internet browser
find gpu website
search website to find downloads page
compare version available for download with already installed version
download driver installer
run a file search find where windows hid the download this time
run driver installer
wait for reboot
Linux:
type: apt-get update nvidia-driver