Graphics drivers developed for Vista, Microsoft’s next generation operating system, will be far more stable than their Windows XP-based counterparts, and not crash the operating system anymore, an executive of graphics chip developer ATI said.
Graphics drivers developed for Vista, Microsoft’s next generation operating system, will be far more stable than their Windows XP-based counterparts, and not crash the operating system anymore, an executive of graphics chip developer ATI said.
That they have to make this claim is laughable in its own right. One reason i have stayed away from ATI is their inability to write a decent video driver. Reminds of the days of Diamond Video cards…great hardware couple with the worst drivers.
That they have to make this claim is laughable in its own right. One reason i have stayed away from ATI is their inability to write a decent video driver. Reminds of the days of Diamond Video cards…great hardware couple with the worst drivers.
I’m not so sure about that myself. I worked technical support for a game distributor that sells over 100 games written by numerous companies.
Lets see, what were the 2 most common video cards that needed driver updates, or downgrades to make games play right or had strange issues in general ?
Intel Integrated crap and nVidia Geforce cards.
In over 2 years I think I took exactly 2 calls where an ATI card was invovled. One was a customer running an ancient Rage Pro chipset and the other was a guy with a 9700 pro on a new install of XP. He failed to load the drivers for the card.
After doing tech support and dealing with all of the cards out there I feel that ATI hands down makes the best card out there. You’ll have far less problems on a wider range of apps vs. an nvidia. Sad but true.
Probably because only 2 of your customers used them since the customer base was all gamers who need the performance and hate losing due to video drivers crashing.
Probably because only 2 of your customers used them since the customer base was all gamers who need the performance and hate losing due to video drivers crashing.
Actually most of our customers were average folks. We even had a few older people who called in regularly wanting everything from game play advice to troubleshooting help.
I experienced the true difference between ATI and nVidia myself trying to help my own mother get a puzzle game running on her system.
She had a GeForce FX 5200 and macromedia director would crash with “unknown error” during gameplay.
So I go through the motions, she tries various drivers, setting changes in nView etc. nothing works.
finally I remember she has a second computer and ask her to test the game on it. works like a champ. I call my step father and asked him what video card was in the second computer. Radeon 9200.
I’ve got an nvidia card myself but after doing that support job for 2 years my next card will be an ATI without a doubt.
From what I’ve seen, Microsoft completely rewrote their driver model for Vista. The new model seems way more interesting and like that guy said, way more stable.
I can’t wait to experience it a little bit more, go Vista ;o
You saw the video clip of the guy talking about Glass, right? How he said that it caches the window in the GPU or some buffer somewhere, so when the app crashes or hangs on a blocking call you don’t get the “one window erases the contents of another window” effect?
If that’s their idea of crash management, I can’t imagine what their idea of driver stability is.
2005: Vendors learned to program drivers that “finally don’t crash the operting systems anymore”. Cool!
it is not about that vendors learned how to write more robust drivers, it is a structural change in the way drivers are used in windows. don’t worry, this is of interest for computer literate people only.
If you’ve used their cards under Windows, or Linux, you probably already know that these guys need some remedial hardware driver development classes.
The Linux drivers are particularly poor — and they’re (relatively speaking) cake to write. I don’t think Vista’s going to help them out that much.
ATI drivers are working great for me under XP. The driver has never once crashed the system. A completely different thing can be said about ATI Linux drivers; I haven’t run Linux in a while now, but when I did – to put is softly – they weren’t something to be proud of (extremely poor performance, a lot of missing stuff,…), you could hardly do anything with it.
Userland audio and video device driver frameworks. Beat that Linux…
“Userland audio and video device driver frameworks. Beat that Linux…”
Quoted for emphasis.
Audio and video drivers (the biggest reasons for a BSOD) now reside in userland, instead of the kernel. When a driver crashes, it is simply restarted instead of taking the system down. No, performance won’t be affected.
This is a good move no matter how you look at it. Unless of course, you’re an anti-MS troll that just wants to bitch about something.
I think you need to re-read my first post there… I am *praising* the new userland frameworks in Vista…
I know that
Hence the “quoted for emphasis”.
I was speaking towards those who I know will put it down.
Sorry if I was unclear.
Linux’s audio and video drivers are already in userspace. DRI, for example, has a kernel driver to bang the hardware, and puts the bulk of the driver logic in userspace. The graphics driver can still crash the kernel (because of the kernel component), but that’s inevitable on the PC architecture. No matter how the OS is designed, if it has access to the hardware registers on the graphics card (which at least some component of the graphics stack must), it can crash the OS. It’s just that the kernel driver in the DRI (and presumably the Vista) architectures are very small, since all they do is setup interrupts, validate command packages, and program the DMA engine. Most of the actual graphics logic is in a userspace library like libGL.so. ALSA works much the same way, with a kernel driver handling low-level functionality, and most of the audio logic (like mixing) being in userspace. Moreover, the bulk of the overall sound system (gstreamer), is in userspace too.
I’d make that score 6 if I could.
Actually, I’m pretty sure Linux has had the ability to host drivers in userland for some time–at the cost of performance of course. Then again, so has Windows. The interesting thing now is that Microsoft is reevaluating some arguably poor–or at least obselete–design decisions and placing a renewed emphasis on pushing everything out of kernel mode that doesn’t need to be there. It’s a great move, and one that’s long overdue. 🙂
Where precisly do you think the X drivers reside?
Now user-space audio drivers, yeah. It’s something I want to do with Syllable, too.
Beat that Linux…
All of Unix world beat that even before Windows existed.
Userland doesn’t mean anything for stability. It is the separation from kernel that counts. Userland can only account for security. But before Vista will get out, there will be SELinux enhanced version of xorg (and it was announced long before Vista came up with this). This was just the first document mentioning this that came on my mind, but as I remember mailing list on xorg mentioned this long ago
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/FC5Future
All *X has separated those 2 (kernel and X) from begining. Ever heard for X Windows being part of kernel? I haven’t. Separation on the other hand is good for stability so that is good for Windows.
You can’t beat something you’ve already beaten
I think all of the free X11 drivers run in user-mode by default…
I’ve had kernelmode drivers crash (nvidia’s) and still had network use of the machine before too. Course, it wasn’t the driver crashing, it was likely the drivers use of the x server.
Under linux 3D drivers are userspace libs (running under user account) and this is for more that four years.
Placing system software into user land is such a bad idea. Of course, Microsoft never did have a firm grasp on the idea of system containment… Their ways have always been toward the VM approach, so placing this in what MS sees as “user mode” might have just saved us the pains of running Vista through their VM concepts.
Windows NT used graphic drivers in user space before NT4. They ended up changing that due to the penalty of context switching (graphics were SLOW). I imagine they decided to do this because they came up with a much better way to deal with this.
Didn’t Windows have userland graphics right up to NT3.51?
I never experienced a crash ever when I used to use it on my old 486. Even with the “Windows 95 Shell” patch for NT.
They’ve already said that for 98 / 2000 / XP …
It’s incredible ! ATI build good card but crap drivers like Creative sound card …
Hopefully as they have better performance in DirectX/Direct3D crap, Microsoft help them to regain market places by implementing OpenGL via DIrect3D => “bad luck” for nvidia great cards in Opengl…
It’s great now if you want to growth your product sells you just have to support stupid(because they already exist but they’re not microsoft’s) standards and that’s it ! Good work !
I bought a Radeon 9600XT a while back, and it’s drivers have been a pain in the ass in Windows and Linux. System has been completely stable with any other hardware I’ve used it with, and yet I get more random crashes in Windows games than with any other card I’ve had.
Their Linux drivers are even worse; I’ve been waiting hopefully that we’d see improvement over the last year as they brought in more people to work on the Linux drivers, but they’re still years behind NVidia in features, and stability is worse by far. In the current driver, monitor detection is messed up, so a system that allowed me to work in 1400×1050 before now only allows 1280×1024. And that was a month ago; no fix in sight.
Luckilly, althhough not as feature complete as the proprietary versions, the open source ati drivers are pretty stable… in my experience anyway. I’ve never had them be the cause of a crash.
I find the one in DragonFly to work really well…
Yeah, the OSS drivers for ATI on linux are pretty decent to, but you don’t get full 3d support, which is basically the idea buying a graphics card these days, otherwise we would have been still pretty happy with our PCI 8mb Sis cards.
“Even with high-end IGPs you will see degradation when you open too many windows and move them around.”
When I play Doom 3 and I get attacked from all sides by several monsters I’d expect degradation. Not while just moving a frigging window around! I think they’re going overboard with all the eyecandy in Windows if something like that needs more graphic performance than one of the latest games.
I bought my laptop before they started offering upgradeable video cards and so I got a ATI 9600. On linux the drivers are really piss-poor performance wise compared to windows, and on windows freaking ATI wouldn’t even put out damn mobile drivers until a couple months ago. And because of some weird bios issue, I couldn’t have 3d acceleration on while watching video.
The new drivers have been stable and performance in windows is great for the generation of card it is, but i’ll be getting nvidia next time unless ATI turns around.
Oh, and just to top it off no hardware-accelerated COMPOSITE with ATI drivers in xorg….grrrr.
3d acceleration for watching videos ?????
This won’t help much no… Videos are 2d, even thought the objects filmed are 3d.
milagro!
Running the drivers in user-space won’t make them more stable, it will simply mitigate the impact of instability. Instead of crashing the system when the video server fails, all of your graphic state would be invalidated. If ATi’s drivers are still buggy, they’ll still be annoying. If ATi on the other hand has improved the correctness of their drivers, then I hope they take the effort to backport all corrections.
Well said.
I too hope they backport corrections.
It will stop the system from being taken down though. And to address poorly written drivers, Microsoft has created the new Display Driver Model. So they are taking 2 steps to ensure stability.
Thank you for your fact-based comment (what? facts on the web? don’t ever let me catch you doing that again! ;-)). “Correctness,” as you called it, is the true key to stability. Moving the drivers to user-space will indeed mitigate the impact of erroneous code, but it won’t make bad code into good, and don’t imagine for a minute that it is some sort of universal panacea, automatically bringing about a new era of system stability, either. You may shut the door on kernel space faults, but, stretching the metaphor to its limits, there will probably be windows that are still open and even if you identify and close all the windows, you still won’t have sealed all the cracks and crannies. The very fact that the drivers must access and manipulate the hardware provides ample opportunity to wreck the system without involving the kernel at all. I suppose if your code was able to poke at the right hardware ports, it might cause an unsolicited interrupt that the kernel couldn’t handle, but now I proceed far into the dimension speculation.
“According to Bar-Haim, the “user mode-based” drivers depart from Windows XP’s “kernel mode-based” model, and are thus unable to crash the operating system: “Microsoft had concerns about the stability of drivers in XP when they noticed an unreasonable high amount of XP crashes due to device drivers. With LDDM, we can run the driver engine for months without crashing,” he said.”
I believe this is what is known as a “hostage to fortune”.
Microsoft beats Linux once again.
Care to elaborate this? …Or it is just that your brain can’t follow your hands as they are typing happy trolling.
Since you obviously don’t have a clue how Windows and *X deffer or work. Windows Video drivers were part of kernel (and that is a major flaw), *X has had them separated from the beggining.
Userland just means that drivers are not running in system admin privilege. Again, Linux project SEEnhancedX or Trusted-X-Windows has been active for a quite some time now.
Unfortunately, Xorg is going to be very far behind Vista with Avalon and Aero. It’s too bad that there was so much cruft from the Xfree86 codebase.
Xorg at the minute is so far advanced of what windows has it is scary for microsoft. When Vista get released, which, lets just say could be next year…. that is still 12 months more of a head start that Xorg still has over Windows.
I am writing this from my xorg desktop, with KDE using transparency, shaders, and blending………… and all this eye-candy is a waste of time.
Why is this in X in the first place ?
Why do you want it in Windows ?
After a while it just gets distracting and confusing, especially if you are trying to show someone something onscreen, and they are not used to the eye-candy
I am writing this from my xorg desktop, with KDE using transparency, shaders, and blending………… and all this eye-candy is a waste of time.
Why is this in X in the first place ?
Why do you want it in Windows ?
A: windows fading as they minimize looks awesome.
B: The same framework will make the desktop seem faster.
C: why not if my GPU and CPU can handle it?
Unfortunately, Xorg won’t be able to leverage the GPUs like Microsoft can. Translucency has been on XP for ages for all the cards. Xorg just can’t compete with Microsoft or Apple.
why did you even attempt this troll ?
I am the biggest supporter of XP on this site,
and I hate the way my friend Dave comes here spouting off about Linux.
I dont like Linux
BUT
his desktop is amazing looking
my XP is plain and boring compared to his KDE
XP has not got transparancy in it, and it has not got shaders.
He calls this eye-candy, but I think it looks amazing. I cannot wait for the same thing in Vista. I have an Nvidia FX5500 with 256mb ram. That will be enough for Vistas goodies, as the KDE Dave uses is running on a 32mb Nvidia gforce2
Unfortunately, Xorg is going to be very far behind Vista with Avalon and AeroUnfortunately, Xorg is going to be very far behind Vista with Avalon and Aero
1.Avalon and Aero are connected with drivers being removed from kernel to userland, how??? Oh, yes just the same as elefant and plane, you can put elefant on plane but you can’t put a plane on elefant (in fact, you can, but it becomes a bloody mess). Completely different mechanism than drivers. Aero and Avalon are connected to the driver only by the fact that they don’t work if there is no driver. Driver on the other hand doesn’t care if Aero or Avalon are present.
As you seem to be impressed by MS PR, I hope you understand that some of us aren’t. Some of us actualy translate that from PR BS to reality. PR texts are to be read in the same manner as patents, carefully and never without a lawyer, then crossing fingers and hoping that 10% will actualy be succesfuly implemented (this last one differs when reading patents, there it should be guesssing how global and trivial the whole thing really is). For a proof of this fact you can just look at history. How much was cut from every Windows release? It is the same for Vista, they already cut few major parts out, after PR machine announced them. Wasn’t Vista supposed to be based upon .NET technology completely? WinFS?…
Next points are my personal opinion
2.Aero is almost nothing else but eye-candy effects, in xorg this is a job for Xrender extension. On what Xrender relies on is dependent on your configuration, it can either depend on xgl, xaa or it can even suck if your configuration is messed up (just like Aero can suck if your driver sucks).
3.Avalon might be impressive if other frameworks wouldn’t exist for ages now (XUL,…). True that it extends to 3D API, but extension IS NOT inovation. Extension will forever be only extension.
4.What you forgot to mention, Vista should also apply resolution independant display (this is the only real improvement against older tech, no more screwed up dialogs when you set Large fonts), again nothing new. Look at GTK. GTK 2.8 relies on cairo for drawing (that is, if you select cairo theme), meaning everything is drawn by vectors.
By the way. Your short answers are very poorly elaborated when you want to proove something. It seems like comment from PR pumped geek that only understand “great”, “better”, “faster”,… from the PR announcement and built all of his believe based on that fact.
Again my opinion.
It is not the fact that I hate Windows, I can respect some good tech in any OS. And all good I can say to Vista (generally and not only drivers related) is:
1.This news about drivers being moved from kernel. Very good
2.Moving to *X like privileges. About time
3.Indigo (if I translated PR texts correctly it should mainly mean unification of communication API layer, but as I said PR texts are hard to read between “better”, “faster”,.. mainly because nothig real doesn’t yet exists and they are describing their fiction) seems impressive. Not that it is something special, but Windows really needed something like that. On Linux for example I can send and receive data from from and to something from bash command line. Windows so far had individual API for everything, which plain sucks. Personaly, I don’t care if any other OS implements Indigo, it is not something special, but Windows programming sucked when communication API needed to be used. But the thing it worries me is that Indigo will never get backported to W2K or older which means all of new software using Indigo will automatically exclude those systems.
It’s too bad that there was so much cruft from the Xfree86 codebase.
True if you talk about grand monolithic X codetree. That’s why R7 is modular and should be out these days. To simplify coding of any part in xorg. R6.9 is due out same time as R7 and it is the last of its monolithic breed (that is, if I followed mailing list correctly).
I don’t get my info from PR. I get my info from the developers through channel9. Sometimes they usem marketing words, but anyone who can’t see through that, and learn to analyze what they present, is an idiot that doesn’t deserve the right to criticize software.
I don’t get my info from PR.
Good for you:)
I get my info from the developers through channel9.
You do realise that Scobble and his minions are a part of PR representing the development at MS
Sometimes they usem marketing words, but anyone who can’t see through that, and learn to analyze what they present, is an idiot that doesn’t deserve the right to criticize software.
Sorry, but I don’t understand two things.
1.Who would be the idiot here??? (Since you reply here, I have to assume that you’re the Anonymous (IP: 4.245.78.—) who was criticizing xorg without knowing basic thing about it or the Graphic system structure in any OS, and thus he doesn’t deserve to criticize software (at least not xorg and linux), based on your comment)
2.Analyzing what they present is a double edged knife. Nobody ever presents bad things.
Fact is, everybody has the right to criticize, as long as his knowledge is good enough to elaborate his opinion and show its correctness in his own viewpoint.
Scoble is not PR. Of course he’s not going to really criticize Microsoft, but his videos are the best source for information without the PR spin. It REALLY isn’t hard to watch the videos and get the good and the bad from it. The people he interviews are often willing to admit shortcomings as well.
No, I wasn’t that person. My IP is 69.160.23.x.
People have a right to criticize, but you shouldn’t if you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about and get your information from the trolls here or at slashdot, or even that guy from eWeek.
The fact that you would discount anything coming from Microsoft as “PR spin” or what have you is ridiculous. Learn some critical thinking.
Sorry, but I somehow replied to my self, my answer is here
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=11976&comment_id=35713
Scobble…
Yes, he is PR, at least in my eyes. And yes I often watch channel9 too. Not to get my daily portion of criticism, but for the sole reason that my development involves crossplatform operations. This is the reason why I can’t do anything but follow news on all fronts.
No, I wasn’t that person. My IP is 69.160.23.x.
As I said I had to assume since you answered on specified question.
People have a right to criticize, but you shouldn’t if you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about and get your information from the trolls here or at slashdot, or even that guy from eWeek.
Now, can you specify, where my comment was wrong? That is all I’m asking in this thread, for someone to elaborate on Vista and drivers and why Linux would need to catch up.
Let me sum this thread.
1.Windows great, Linux catch this if you can (that would be complete comment)
2.Me: telling why not (not so long but understandable)
3.Windows the best (that would be complete comment)
4.Me: summing up why this is just catching up with the rest of the world (not so long but understandable)
5.Windows has Aero and Avalon (that would be complete comment)
6.Me: summing up why Aero and Avalon is not relevant to the drivers, posting MY OWN opinion why and how do I think of Aero and Avalon and why this isn’t something new, and even posting one good but missing poin about Vista, after that few good things about Vista in my opinion (long long comment)
7.You: I heard on channel9 its true, and as I understand proclaiming me an idiot for criticizing (that would be complete comment)
8.Me: Misstook you for Anonymous and taken the level of scepticism over Corporate owned development PR (Not so long comment)
9:Answering you’re not anonymous, telling me to STFU and sending me to criticism school
So far the whole thread about Windows having something superior is based on the fact that you heard that on channel9 and they told it will rock.
Trouble in whole thread is that not one of you presented any fact but simple zealotry
The fact that you would discount anything coming from Microsoft as “PR spin” or what have you is ridiculous. Learn some critical thinking.
??? Discount anything? Not really, but I can’t account them something that is not something new, but just embrace&extend of something that already existed. On the other hand I do account them WinFS idea over the Apple Spotlight and beagle. Apple copied idea from them and then even accused them of copying.
I always try to look from neutral perspective, now either you haven’t read the whole thread or you would need to listen to your pleasant advice you gave me. I’m bashing Linux when it needs to be bashed, and I do the same with Windows and OSX (ok, OSX I hate and I’m a little biased when commenting it).
My opinion:
OS Criticism is mostly learned by how many times OS development screws your plans when developing your own app and by the number of times when something screwed up in your app, but it wasn’t your fault.
Like it or not, we have heard this same kind of crap from ATI for many years now… Our drivers will do this, our drivers will do that… Yadda, yadda, yadda…
It was the crappy ATI driver for the Rage Fury Pro for Windows 98 that had so many problems I swore off ATI cards for ever. Like it or not, Nvidia has stable drivers, and they are customizable / tweakable a heck of a lot more under Linux / WIndows than anything ATI ever put out. The only working ATI card I have ever seen is this ATI chipset provided inside of my Nintendo Gamecube, and well, with Nintendo management not having a damn clue about what games really want (and I especially mean not another DVD-lookalike controller or a pointless Mario clone) it will probably be the last decent working ATI chipset ever made… Decent working is a relative statement, of course…
Moriarty
I wonder what everyone is talking about, because ihave never had an any problems with my ATI drivers for my 9800Pro card, and if i am not mistaken, it is the same drivers package that is used for almost all ATI radeon cards.
I have a radeon 9600 pro that I have used in 3 different computers and I must say in one of the comps it is rock solid… always works, in the other 2 boxes it is horriable, had systems lock up… all sorts of problems.
I believe they do not test their drivers on a large enough array of hardware.
I have never had stability issues with nVidia.
I really hope ATI gets their act together with their drivers because their hardware is excellebnt….. I would love to utulize it.
Plus userland drivers are easier to debug and develop.
However, we’re talking gfx *device* drivers here – at least some portion of the driver (or one driver, if there will be userland/kernel pairs) must be allowed to mess around with gfx card hardware *directly* – and that is the trickiest part.
Too bad, modern OS’ don’t use more than just two protection mode rings, that would be safest.
Then again, crappy drivers are crappy drivers, whatever the mode.
thats funny, bc when i install the ATI vista drivers on my vista beta, vista won’t boot anymore. black screen. hmmm….
All good and fine but when are they going to take 64-bit seriously?
Isn’t an obvious choice to ship XP-64bit/Vista-64-bit with computers with a 64-bit CPU?
Yes, So what. First I never encountered any crash from nVidia graphics cards on windows, second I need that stability when we deal with Optical Drives rather than any thing else. I was able to bring vista ultimate Build 5219 to its knees by only a corrupt DVD, now whos problem is this? Definately MS.
The error message that I recieved was saying: “Windows is trying to determine why windows explorer is not responding, Windows is checking for a solution to the problem” which is was not able to find it in 30 minutes.
Windows is not a stable platform and it will never be a good workstation; you can consider it a bad desktop OS.
couldn’t provide proper drivers in the past (speaking of ancient 2d gfx card times), is unable to provide them now, and I have doubts they’ll be able to in the future. And that doesn’t really mean that I’m a fan of Nvidia – being one of the companies holding the torch, regarding their proprietary interests, in despise of their customers.
windows before NT4 had graphics out of kernel mode.
One more point I forgot to add, was that lots of the crashes in windows from my experience, comes from explorer.exe. And moving graphics drivers out of kernelspace wont help here, if explorer.exe goes down, system goes down… I’m glad I don’t have any explorer.exe on my system, that would be about as unsafe as building a webbrowser with an ability to run viruses into the linux kernel if you really think abut i…
Explorer.exe takes the system down? huh?
It’s just a normal process like any other.
And when exactly was the last time you used Explorer?
1998?
We keep hearing those claims from Microsoft everytime they release a new version of Windows. You can’t believe anything of that. In fact, Vista has insane hardware requirements and doesn’t even run on most desktops available today.
Really… ? Vista has insane hardware requirements? Please show us the requirements.
There hasn’t even been any sort of official word as to what the hardware req’s will be.
It’d be neat if all userspace drivers had to be implemented in managed code, but somehow I just don’t see that happening.
I remember reading an article about managed DirectX a while ago (initially it was done in C# and it was dog slow, but it was later redone in managed C++ and was as fast as contemporary unmanaged code), so if that can be done, I can’t see why userspace drivers would be more difficult.
Thoughts?
So your entire OS will no longer crash when graphics drivers malfunction. But every application running that depends on the graphics system will surely be terminated abnormally, and you’ll still lose work/play as always. The same has always been true for Linux applications running on X. On Linux, a bad driver or even a bad application can crash X or even freeze the entire OS in no time flat. It happens regularly on my Linux systems.
Just because the driver faults doesn’t mean the apps do as well. Most apps would continue to run normally. If the driver faults, it’s either reset or replaced with the standard VGA driver. In either case, applications continue to work. Even most 3D apps would likely work because they currently check for lost device context.
Bad drivers are bad drivers. It doesn’t matter, if they lock your machine or just restart your UI session – you lose your work anyhow.
What’s far more important, is that they’re ditching OpenGL with Vista.
Since the whole UI will be controlled by one API (DirectX) there will be serious problems with cooperation with other API’s (like OpenGL). Some wrappers will be produced, but they will have performace issues (like all wrappers).
Result – all apps that rely on OpenGL (medical, cad, etc.) are ported to Direct3D = another open cross-platform standard is being killed, and customers are locked in a proprietary standard.
That’s windowed opengl, games can still use fullscreen opengl at full performance so who cares?
Full performance? The hole point about this is that OpenGL is getting as much as 50% reduced performance, else why would nvidia care?
About insane hardware rquirements, check this:
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/09/07/vista_hardware_reqs/
Let’s all jump on the Vista PR band wagon, it’s new, it’s improved, it’s AMAZING! It even keeps ATi drivers from sucking! WOW!
i have a x800 on desktop and pre ordering a thinkpad z60m with ati x600. wats the linux driver status for both desktop and laptop. last time i tried everything was messed up.
on desktop: i installed the suse ati version. everything ran well.after a few days my X crashed. and bfore that xine/mplayer video queality looked like shit…
never tried on notebook
note: i dont play games on linux.
the linux vesa driver will run perfectly for you then.
if you are not using the machine for games then you have no need for the ati drivers as the concentrate on 3d performance.
but why did you install the suse generic ati drivers and not the official ones from ati themselves ?
I have gone back to ATI hardware, after somt time off, because of poor drivers. I pushed the envelope, doing this on AMD64 & have found that SuSE 10, with the kernel source installed, will load the ATI drivers ok. Tip, select the custom option & then build for the particular version of SuSE you are runing.
Both Debian & Ubuntu’s AMD64 ATI compatibility is horrible, compared to Nvidia. With Nvidia, all you need is a working kernel image & matching headers & you are away. With ATI, in cotractiction to the advertising, you need divine intervention….. Give it a couple more driver releases.
If you are keen, drop by Rage3D, & be prepared to spend a bunch of time “problem solving….”
The SuSE distro, is sweet though & DVD playback is grand. Use apt-get for rpm, to do the hard work (install the app synaptic).
<snip>
# A very basic sources.list file.
# Remove “base” in case you are behind a slow connection.
# Fastest repository comes first, with netselect it is possible to determine
# the fastest repository easily.
# Visit the server to determine which apt components are provided.
rpm ftp://mirrors.mathematik.uni-bielefeld.de/pub/linux/suse/apt/ SuSE/SuSE-10.0-x86_64 update security rpmkeys
rpm ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/apt/ SuSE/SuSE-10.0-x86_64 update security rpmkeys
# The list with all available components can be found at:
# http://linix01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm
# Some components provide experimental software, select wisely!
# http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/apt/SuSE/%{suse_version_strin…
# Consult the link above if you want to include uri’s for src rpms
rpm file:/ftp/pub/linux/suse/apt SuSE/10.0-x86_64 rpmkeys base java update extra kernel-of-the-day suse-people suse-projects packman suser-drcux suser-jengelh security
rpm ftp://ftp4.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/apt SuSE/10.0-x86_64 rpmkeys base java update extra kernel-of-the-day suse-people suse-projects packman suser-drcux suser-jengelh security
rpm file:/ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/apt/SuSE/9.2-x86_64 rpmkeys suser-jmorris
<snip>
*HTH*
Greek Geek 🙂
but why did you install the suse generic ati drivers and not the official ones from ati themselves ?
cause ati official dirver is even worse all suse users wait for suse-fied version of the driver sigh…
Unlucky then.
I don’t use Suse purely because I do not like the way they “alter” stuff for their distro, ie multimedia stuff.
Microsoft have WDM and then they say XP will improve on this, then Microsoft come out and say XP is unstable because of bad drivers. Excuses is all I hear, so what are they going to say when Vista becomes unstable, bad drivers?. Bad drivers don’t get into the linux kernel(unless distros put them in i.e SuSE) they are checked and reported back if problems arise, unlike Windows.
That’s wrong. Xorg has built in transparency and shadows using render acceleration. The new version of xorg (in cvs) has full acceleration for ati, nvidia and a number of others by default. Windows XP doesn’t have this since you need a program like winFX, stardock stuff to get these effects. KDE can do these effects by default and has done so since 3.4.
I’ve tried the OSS nvidia driver in xorg cvs and although there is a lag when dragging the window, it’s coming along nicely and it not final. Apparently the ati OSS driver in there is very good indeed.
Uhhh… Windows has been able to do transparency since Windows 2000. Either through window regions, or through layered windows.
Yes, we all know how well this works… Thanks, but I rather stick to Mac OS and Linux, keep my current video card, and save my money.
Actually it works fine with any video card. Window regions were around in 9x even.
Layered windows are only recommended for things like small dialogs and menus, but it works fine.
…Now IN 3D…
and a guarrantee data pulverization…
yours truly
iMoron… trolling along
Yawn! Welcome to the party WinTel users… you’re late but welcome anyways. lol
Now Xorg will have something to strive for in the graphics department.
Atmospheric conditions with Hurricanes in the gulf seem more stable than ATI Windows drivers.
I’ve owned 3 ATI products. 1 crashed my computer 3 times a day with random blue screens. 1 mysteriously fried. The replacement fried. The replacement to the replacement fried. Finally, I gave up and bough nVidia. 2 years later, I’d been hearing good reviews of ATI again, so I thought I’d give it another go, stupidly. The included drivers failed. Updated drivers failed. Finally, I had to search archives on ATI’s website for 2 versions prior to current for ones to finally work. And even those kept popping up error messages every time I booted. ATI could be 3 times faster than nVidia for 1/2 the price – but never again will I buy another ATI product.
It’s nice to let us know. Please do tell me as soon as they’re here, I might just try again one of their cards, after 6 years.
Funny that, nVidia seem to manage to write stable drivers for XP (and 98, and 95, and ME). We should have guessed that ATI were just waiting for Vista to do it.
…has improved because now if you look at the difference between Nvidia cards and ATI cards in the Opengl game Doom 3 the gap is not as far. ATI did have driver issues I think but I have never had problems with my Mobility 9800 ATI graphics card. This thing is rock solid in any application I throw at it.
Granted it did piss me off that ATI never had driversets for their mobile cards but rather they would allow manufacturers like Dell and HP and so on to release their driversets…till a few months ago. I think ATI makes decent products hardwarewise and softwarewise. Now what remains to be seen is their decent competitor to Nvidia’s 7800 GTX.
Seems like to me that most of the people on here who cry about drivers are those that run linux.
duh!
Again, who the f*** cares about linux?
Why should they?
Nobody makes money in that market, it’s been shown over and over, and over again.
It’s just an anti-Microsoft world and a poor one at that. Very little to no software innovation on there either, it’s mostly about hacks and crappy software and the software that is good has also found it’s way on to windows as well.
Linux? Game Over
So is there a reason I should care about linux and ATI drivers?
Its funny to read how ppl are bashing ATI for “poor” XP drivers, well in my opinion they are the most stable thing out! I’m using ATI hardware for two years now, so please ppl learn one for a time to use your hardware properly! and if you dont like ATI buy Nvidia , thats all folks, keep the mood 🙂
At least Microsoft can now show message that points to the real origin for the crash instead of general BSOD which most of the people is mistake of the Microsoft employees.
Vista’s ATI’S drivers are better then Windows XP’s Drivers. That is funny, but when was the last time anyone heard that. A driver on one OS better then a new Os, here I have my OS (Circlebase OS, Sindeck Media, Inc.)