# ATI hates Linux and GL **URL:** \ **Category:** OpenGL\ **Tags:** linux\ **Created:** [April 4, 2005, 10:31pm UTC](https://community.khronos.org/t/ati-hates-linux-and-gl/48093 "2005-04-04T22:31:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![glfreak](https://community.khronos.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/aca169/32.png) [@glfreak](https://community.khronos.org/u/glfreak)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2005, 10:31pm UTC](https://community.khronos.org/t/ati-hates-linux-and-gl/48093/1 "2005-04-04T22:31:00Z")
Hello I was surprised when I tried to install ATI Radeon driver under Redhat 9. I used the latest ones specifically fglrx 4.3. The exact problem is unresolved symbols, and modules could not be loaded. AMD64 ATI Radeon 9250 128 MB VRAM Thanks. ---
**Author:** ![Obli](https://community.khronos.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/o/ea666f/32.png) [@Obli](https://community.khronos.org/u/Obli)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2005, 11:32pm UTC](https://community.khronos.org/t/ati-hates-linux-and-gl/48093/2 "2005-04-04T23:32:00Z")
Maybe you shall try Fedora? As far as I know RedHat is somewhat old. Maybe you need a more recent distro. By the way, make an ATi work under linux is all but easy. I think you won’t be able to just write “./install” and getting all the things done. ---
**Author:** ![PkK](https://community.khronos.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/ecb155/32.png) [@PkK](https://community.khronos.org/u/PkK)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2005, 8:50am UTC](https://community.khronos.org/t/ati-hates-linux-and-gl/48093/3 "2005-04-07T08:50:00Z")
The Radeon 9250 is supported by the free DRI drivers, which are more stable, faster and support more features than the proprietary fglrx drivers. ---
**Author:** ![glfreak](https://community.khronos.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/aca169/32.png) [@glfreak](https://community.khronos.org/u/glfreak)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2005, 4:33pm UTC](https://community.khronos.org/t/ati-hates-linux-and-gl/48093/4 "2005-04-07T16:33:00Z")
How to get them? ---
**Author:** ![stanlylee](https://community.khronos.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/4da419/32.png) [@stanlylee](https://community.khronos.org/u/stanlylee)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2005, 4:58pm UTC](https://community.khronos.org/t/ati-hates-linux-and-gl/48093/5 "2005-04-07T16:58:00Z")
Maybe you get a wrong version of Kenerl-source/Kernel-header ---
**Author:** ![PkK](https://community.khronos.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/ecb155/32.png) [@PkK](https://community.khronos.org/u/PkK)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2005, 12:49am UTC](https://community.khronos.org/t/ati-hates-linux-and-gl/48093/6 "2005-04-08T00:49:00Z")
The DRM (direct rendering manager) part of the free drivers is included in the standard kernels. Just choose the “drm” and “radeon” options when recompiling your kernel. The 3D driver should be included with your X. It’s called r200\_dri.so and lives somewhere in a subdirectory of /usr/X11/lib/. You just have to adjust your xorg.conf or the XFree86 eqivalent. If you want all the latest bleeding-edge features you can compile the drivers from source. See [http://dri.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/](http://dri.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/) for more information on that. If you are a Debian user there are Debian packages at [nixnuts.net](http://nixnuts.net), which are updated about once a month to the latest CVS version. ---
**Author:** ![idr](https://community.khronos.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/i/9de053/32.png) [@idr](https://community.khronos.org/u/idr)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2005, 7:14am UTC](https://community.khronos.org/t/ati-hates-linux-and-gl/48093/7 "2005-04-08T07:14:00Z")
> The Radeon 9250 is supported by the free DRI drivers, which are more stable, faster and support more features than the proprietary fglrx drivers. > Speaking as someone who has done a lot of work on the open-source R200 driver over the last 3 years, let me curb your enthusiasm a little. 😉 There are a lot of things that the open-source driver either does not support or does not support anywhere near as well as it could. There is no support for [ATI\_fragment\_shader](http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ogl-sample/registry/ATI/fragment_shader.txt) , and support for [ARB\_vertex\_program](http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ogl-sample/registry/ARB/vertex_program.txt) is very, very slow. Support for [ARB\_vertex\_buffer\_object](http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ogl-sample/registry/ARB/vertex_buffer_object.txt) is equally poor. Nobody has even started working on [ARB\_pixel\_buffer\_object](http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ogl-sample/registry/ARB/pixel_buffer_object.txt) or [EXT\_framebuffer\_object](http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ogl-sample/registry/EXT/framebuffer_object.txt) . Work is, slowly, being done on all these issues. When you consider that there are less than a dozen people doing all the work on all the open-source drivers, it shouldn’t surprise you that it’s going to take awhile. Of course, we’re always looking for fresh volunteers. 😉 Basically, our Quake3 performance is better (in recent driver builds), but our UT2k4 performance is much, much worse. I’m pretty sure our Enemy Territory performance, at least on some maps, is worse than the closed-source ATI driver as well. I don’t recall what the standing is in Doom3. Either way, Doom3 gets the crappy ARB path (due to lack of [ATI\_fragment\_shader](http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ogl-sample/registry/ATI/fragment_shader.txt) support) while the ATI driver gets the much higher quality r200 path. ---
**Author:** ![PkK](https://community.khronos.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/ecb155/32.png) [@PkK](https://community.khronos.org/u/PkK)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2005, 10:30am UTC](https://community.khronos.org/t/ati-hates-linux-and-gl/48093/8 "2005-04-08T10:30:00Z")
Well, GL\_ARB\_vertex\_program and GL\_NV\_vertex\_program aren’t hardware-accelerated (I know it, I added support to the r200 driver), but it isn’t that slow. I don’t miss GL\_ATI\_fragment\_shader much since it’s really limited. I think the main thing missing from the free driver is support for GL\_ARB\_occlusion query. But both drivers provide a OpenGL 1.3 implementation. With the addition of HyperZ support speed has improved a bit further. ---
**Author:** ![PkK](https://community.khronos.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/ecb155/32.png) [@PkK](https://community.khronos.org/u/PkK)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2005, 10:34am UTC](https://community.khronos.org/t/ati-hates-linux-and-gl/48093/9 "2005-04-08T10:34:00Z")
GL\_EXT\_framebuffer\_object and GL\_ARB\_pixel\_buffer\_object aren’t supported by the nonfree drivers either; not even on Windows and ATI’s Linux drivers usually pick up features from the windows drivers only after some time has passed. ---
**Author:** ![system](https://community.khronos.org/uploads/default/original/2X/b/ba89cb49313a0e869198c8be354afde8bcae027e.png) [@system](https://community.khronos.org/u/system)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2005, 7:00pm UTC](https://community.khronos.org/t/ati-hates-linux-and-gl/48093/10 "2005-04-11T19:00:00Z")
I tired the stupid DRI drivers but they did’nt work. They don’t support my Radeon 9250 AGP 128 MB ATI sucks M$ ass NVIDIA rules out the way God bless 3Dfx ---
**Author:** ![system](https://community.khronos.org/uploads/default/original/2X/b/ba89cb49313a0e869198c8be354afde8bcae027e.png) [@system](https://community.khronos.org/u/system)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2005, 8:12pm UTC](https://community.khronos.org/t/ati-hates-linux-and-gl/48093/11 "2005-04-13T20:12:00Z")
I will replace my ATI with NVIDIA or even 3Dfx Voodoo 3, at least it works under linux. ---
**Author:** ![system](https://community.khronos.org/uploads/default/original/2X/b/ba89cb49313a0e869198c8be354afde8bcae027e.png) [@system](https://community.khronos.org/u/system)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2005, 9:43pm UTC](https://community.khronos.org/t/ati-hates-linux-and-gl/48093/12 "2005-04-13T21:43:00Z")
I tried the ATI drivers for XF86 4.3, but unresolved symbols while loading the fglxrmod.o module. What’s wrong? Is it a bug in Redhat 9, or is it ATI? ---
**Author:** ![T101](https://community.khronos.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@T101](https://community.khronos.org/u/T101)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2005, 10:35pm UTC](https://community.khronos.org/t/ati-hates-linux-and-gl/48093/13 "2005-04-13T22:35:00Z")
I don’t have an ATi on my Linux box, I bought the nVidia because I intended to run Linux. I had read that ATi’s linux support wasn’t very good at the time. It’s a while back, but I seem to remember that you need to install includes and libraries that came with the card’s drivers rather than the ones that came with RH9 (RH9 comes with a rather stripped down Mesa I believe). ---
**Author:** ![system](https://community.khronos.org/uploads/default/original/2X/b/ba89cb49313a0e869198c8be354afde8bcae027e.png) [@system](https://community.khronos.org/u/system)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2005, 4:12pm UTC](https://community.khronos.org/t/ati-hates-linux-and-gl/48093/14 "2005-04-19T16:12:00Z")
Let me say this. Save yourself the trouble and switch to Nvidia. Trust my you won’t regret it. Their linux drivers are extremely fast and well supported. I had an ATI FireGL 8800 with a radeon 200 chip in it. The DRI stuff did not work well. Very poor performance of the drivers. While I was able to get ATI proprietary drivers to work eventually it was not without alot of pain and effort researching the issue online. I have been using linux since 1995 so I am no stranger to the operating system but I imagine some of the things I had to do to get the fglrx drivers from ati working would scare off an newcomer and is probably beyond the realm of expertise of someone coming over to the linux camp from microsoft windows. The ATI drivers worked pretty well performance wise _but_ there were random lock ups of the entire operating system and kernel. So I dumped the FireGL 8800 card and went to an ATI GeForce FX 5500. Clearly the nvidia card is a newer generation gpu so it outperformed the firegl card but I am basing my recommendation not on the performance but rather on the ease of installation and support for nvidia on linux. Who cares that the 3d accelerated drivers on linux are closed source. Everything else I own on my linux workstation is open source so I can tolerate a closed source driver as long as it gives me the performance I need. And near as I can tell the performance of the nvidia drivers on linux are on par with the same drivers on windows. Kudos to Nvidia so doing such a bangup job with supporting linux! ---
**Author:** ![system](https://community.khronos.org/uploads/default/original/2X/b/ba89cb49313a0e869198c8be354afde8bcae027e.png) [@system](https://community.khronos.org/u/system)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2005, 7:50pm UTC](https://community.khronos.org/t/ati-hates-linux-and-gl/48093/15 "2005-04-24T19:50:00Z")
I installed XF86 4.5 in my Redhat 9. I tried ATI’s gl drivers, but to no avail: unresolved external symbols in the driver module. I guess it’s not possible at all to run ATI Radeon 9250 128 MB AGP on Linux. If you have a solution please help. Thanks. ---
**Author:** ![system](https://community.khronos.org/uploads/default/original/2X/b/ba89cb49313a0e869198c8be354afde8bcae027e.png) [@system](https://community.khronos.org/u/system)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2005, 1:35am UTC](https://community.khronos.org/t/ati-hates-linux-and-gl/48093/16 "2005-05-10T01:35:00Z")
I’m running Suse 9.1 with a ATI Radeon 9800 Pro … my Laptop uses 9.1 too, but with a ATI mobility RADEON 9700. On Sunday I got it running (on Laptop, quite easy I have to admit) but only got 1800 fps with glxgears (or am I running th wrong program ?) Who cares. With the current drivers an my current kernel it works just perfect. But a few month ago, it was a few days fight of pain anf swaet to get my tower working. ATI sucks for Linux ! I never tried NVidia, but only can be better. ---
**Author:** ![system](https://community.khronos.org/uploads/default/original/2X/b/ba89cb49313a0e869198c8be354afde8bcae027e.png) [@system](https://community.khronos.org/u/system)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2005, 4:45pm UTC](https://community.khronos.org/t/ati-hates-linux-and-gl/48093/17 "2005-05-26T16:45:00Z")
This is a professional forum and we should take matters seriously. Let me first more clarify some points. Moderators hate to initiate a flame wars and I do too. But we should differenciate between a flamewar of X vs. Y and a critisim which should support OpenGL. Otherwise we end up developers and front end users stuck to one card (associating OpenGL with only one vendor) and maybe replacing the gl prefix with “nv.” I suspect a company like ATI cannot make a competetive drivers for OpenGL/X Window accelration under Linux. And we don’t want to count on third party, I don’t want to call drivers, hacks, such as DRI and so. ATI should re-consider this and start working on decent drivers for Linux. ---
**Author:** ![idr](https://community.khronos.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/i/9de053/32.png) [@idr](https://community.khronos.org/u/idr)\ **Post date:** [May 27, 2005, 2:52pm UTC](https://community.khronos.org/t/ati-hates-linux-and-gl/48093/18 "2005-05-27T14:52:00Z")
Zigzag: Could you please quantify “They don’t support my Radeon 9250 AGP 128 MB”? I’ve done a lot of work on that driver over the last 2+ years, and, as far as I know, it should support all members of the R200 family. I’m idr on freenode if you want to drop by #dri-devel sometime. ---
**Author:** ![PkK](https://community.khronos.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/ecb155/32.png) [@PkK](https://community.khronos.org/u/PkK)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2005, 5:47am UTC](https://community.khronos.org/t/ati-hates-linux-and-gl/48093/19 "2005-05-28T05:47:00Z")
\> And we don’t want to count on third party, I don’t \> want to call drivers, hacks, such as DRI and so. I disagree. I prefer free drivers like the DRI ones to the nonfree ones from the hardware vendor. Free graphics drivers are important for the free software community. When desktop environments start using 3D features it is essential to have free 3D drivers to be able to have a system running only free software. Hardware vendors should release the necessary documentation so that free drivers can be written. ---
**Author:** ![system](https://community.khronos.org/uploads/default/original/2X/b/ba89cb49313a0e869198c8be354afde8bcae027e.png) [@system](https://community.khronos.org/u/system)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2005, 5:34pm UTC](https://community.khronos.org/t/ati-hates-linux-and-gl/48093/20 "2005-05-29T17:34:00Z")
Let me clarify my points. Why NVIDIA Linux Drivers out-perform their Windows counterpart? Because proigramming drivers for linux can be more direct nad straightforward. Why ATI drivers are non-exist under linux. Simply because they don’t want to. Just give me a link to a working ATI driver. [Next page](https://community.khronos.org/t/ati-hates-linux-and-gl/48093.md?page=2)