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  #1  
Old 30-Apr-2008, 08:28 AM
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ATI's Linux drivers
absolutely suck.

I spent most of the evening fighting with ATI's drivers trying to get even minimal performance out of them along with hardware acceleration. It was impossible.

Basic graphics performance in Gnome was so bad that to scroll down a page in Firefox, or any other application I tried, was so slow as to be completely unusable. Using the down arrow on the scroll bar in Firefox caused the page to scroll at about 1/8 of an inch every 4-5 seconds. You could watch the refresh line scroll down the screen it was so slow. In Evolution or Thunderbird scrolling down the list of folders in the inbox would cause all the names of the folders to run together.

Trying to use the mouse wheel for scrolling was impossible. The pages simply wouldn't scroll. After fighting with this for some time I finally found a couple of conversations between Ubuntu developers and it seems that this type of performance is typical of ATI's proprietary drivers for quite a few of ATI's newer GPU's.

ATI really needs to get it together. It's a major gamble to buy an ATI card if you run Linux as you never really know what performance will be like until you get the card into your system, and when it's bad, it's really, really, really bad.


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  #2  
Old 30-Apr-2008, 08:36 AM
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It's just another conspiracy. ATI is actually in bed with Microsoft, keepin' the man down.

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  #3  
Old 30-Apr-2008, 08:38 AM
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by BosonMichael View Post
It's just another conspiracy. ATI is actually in bed with Microsoft, keepin' the man down.
”
man that make me laugh out loud.

Why would your graphics drivers affect the ability to scroll with the mousewheel?

"Im Nerdy in the extreme and whiter than sour cream"


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  #4  
Old 30-Apr-2008, 01:28 PM
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the Via Chipsets aren't all that better, I've just picked up a Inno3D iChill 7600GT DDR3 its a bit OTT but wanted to play it safe lol, @Fergal I dont think its affecting the mouse wheel speed but the GFX card is struggling to make the screen move up and down
Last edited by ThomasMc : 30-Apr-2008 at 02:25 PM.
 
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  #5  
Old 30-Apr-2008, 01:50 PM
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Originally Posted by Fergal1982 View Post
man that make me laugh out loud.

Why would your graphics drivers affect the ability to scroll with the mousewheel?
”
Wow. Didn't think I'd be having to explain this to anyone....

Uhhhh.... Gui's are all graphics....


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  #6  
Old 30-Apr-2008, 02:09 PM
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Originally Posted by ffreeloader View Post
Wow. Didn't think I'd be having to explain this to anyone....

Uhhhh.... Gui's are all graphics....
”
yeah, but whether your mouse scrollwheel moves the page up and down isnt controlled by the Graphics card. How it renders may be, but not the actual function.

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  #7  
Old 30-Apr-2008, 02:16 PM
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You'd be surprised. A screen scroll is often programmed as a 'Bit Blit'. You can either do it the hard way and program it yourself, or ask the hardware to do it. If the hardware won't do it then you need to simulate this in software, which can be amazingly slow.

Harry.

 
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  #8  
Old 30-Apr-2008, 03:59 PM
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Originally Posted by Fergal1982 View Post
yeah, but whether your mouse scrollwheel moves the page up and down isnt controlled by the Graphics card. How it renders may be, but not the actual function.
”
That's right. The graphics card's job is to render graphics. Changing from ATI's drivers to the Xorg open source driver returned me to normal functionality. The scroll arrows and scrolling with the mouse wheel now function normally, i.e. it doesn't take several seconds to scroll an 1/8th of an inch of screen real estate. I don't have hardware rendering or 3D acceleration with them, but at least my system is usable again.

I don't know that I've ever seen such poor graphics rendering by any card, including cards built-in motherboards. This card is a PCI Expressx16 2.0 card in a PCI Expressx16 2.0 slot, has 512 megs of ram, a 600 mhz GPU, and with the drivers the manufacturer writes the performance is so bad the system is unusable.


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  #9  
Old 30-Apr-2008, 04:00 PM
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Originally Posted by ffreeloader View Post
Wow. Didn't think I'd be having to explain this to anyone....

Uhhhh.... Gui's are all graphics....
”

In the spirit of the board, just explaining what you meant would be a nicer approach.

 
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  #10  
Old 30-Apr-2008, 04:04 PM
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so... to clarify then, when you said:

Quote:
“
 Trying to use the mouse wheel for scrolling was impossible. The pages simply wouldn't scroll.
”
what you actually meant, was:

Quote:
“
 Trying to use the mouse wheel for scrolling was impossible. The pages would scroll horrendously slowly, as to be unusable
”
Can you see why I misunderstood you? Your initial comment implies that it simply didnt work. not an inch of movement was gained by scrolling.

"Im Nerdy in the extreme and whiter than sour cream"


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  #11  
Old 30-Apr-2008, 04:18 PM
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Fergal1982 View Post
so... to clarify then, when you said:


what you actually meant, was:



Can you see why I misunderstood you? Your initial comment implies that it simply didnt work. not an inch of movement was gained by scrolling.
”
LOL. You mean you misunderstand a sentence which I can't understand myself? And here I thought you were smart....

I musta been having a brain fart....


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Old 30-Apr-2008, 04:37 PM
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At least you get a screen!
Installed Hardy Heron a couple of days ago, booted in, all fine, then enabled the ATI restricted drivers.
After the mandatory restart, all I get is a blank screen!

Tempted to dig out my old Green FX5900 XT (current card is a Red X1950 Pro) and see if that's any better.

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Old 30-Apr-2008, 05:02 PM
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Originally Posted by ffreeloader View Post
LOL. You mean you misunderstand a sentence which I can't understand myself? And here I thought you were smart....

I musta been having a brain fart....
”
no, thats senility im afraid.

"Im Nerdy in the extreme and whiter than sour cream"


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Old 30-Apr-2008, 05:12 PM
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Originally Posted by Gaz 45 View Post
At least you get a screen!
Installed Hardy Heron a couple of days ago, booted in, all fine, then enabled the ATI restricted drivers.
After the mandatory restart, all I get is a blank screen!

Tempted to dig out my old Green FX5900 XT (current card is a Red X1950 Pro) and see if that's any better.
”
Go take a look at the Xorg logs after a failed xserver start, from a console (CTRL>Alt>F1 to F6). They are in /var/log, and should have a naming convention like Xorg.0.log, at least that's the naming convention in Debian, and the older logs normally have .1, .2.tgz, etc... tacked onto them. Each boot attempt creates a new log. I normally use "less" to view them so I can scroll back and forth through the logs.


Behold, the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.

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  #15  
Old 30-Apr-2008, 07:06 PM
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In my experience ATI drivers are always crap, another vote for NVidia !

Don't worry freddy I understood you perfectly ! Yeah software bitblt's suck, I remember playing with the software only driver for direct X once, nasty...

Last edited by dmarsh : 30-Apr-2008 at 07:08 PM.
 
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