Prolixium dot com: News >> Blog >> ATI Sucks!

I hate ATI. I hate them more, now.

Over the last year or two the driver support for the "Mobility Radeon 9600 M10" in my IBM T42 has steadily been getting worse.

First, there's some problem with 2D acceleration, so things start drawing a little slower. 3D will still work, so will XVideo. I figured this would be fixed, but I guess not.

Then, some driver bug is introduced recently that doesn't allow the fglrx kernel module to work (see previous blog post). This prevents XVideo and 3D acceleration from working at all. No chance at all to play videos fullscreen anymore without XVideo, as everything will have to be done in software.

Now, nothing works at all. X won't start:

(II) Primary Device is: PCI 01@00:00:0
(WW) Falling back to old probe method for fglrx
(II) ATI Proprietary Linux Driver Version Identifier:8.65.4
(II) ATI Proprietary Linux Driver Release Identifier: 8.65                                 
(II) ATI Proprietary Linux Driver Build Date: Aug 13 2009 21:15:30
(II) Loading PCS database from /etc/ati/amdpcsdb
(EE) No devices detected.

And aticonfig hates me:

eclipse:/etc/X11# aticonfig --ovt Xv --initial -i /etc/X11/xorg.conf
aticonfig: No supported adapters detected

I don't know why I still keep this laptop. I use my Eee PC almost exclusively when I'm mobile, now. The fan still has some problems, too (even after replacing it once), so sometimes it won't boot up due to a fan error.

Thinking of defenestration!

(I wrote something else out, but it didn't like my math and it dropped my response.)

Key points:
ATI sucks at writing drivers. fglrx has always sucked with Linux.
ATI hurt themselves when they stopped releasing documentation for people to write drivers, but the move by AMD to open-up documentation recently has made them the only option, and their cards themselves aren't bad.