James wrote: >ATI Technologies Inc Radeon R250 Lf [FireGL 9000], on a portable. > >1. Should I switch to ATI OpenGL ? If not what do I loose? Why? > >
I'm pretty sure you don't need the ATI drivers, the built-in radeon driver has 3D acceleration for your card. You only need the ati-drivers for R300 or greater. Mostly, if they work, you will lose any kind of software suspend/power management support. I have no idea why ATI can't support such a simple thing as suspend/resume, when the necessary events have been in the kernel for over a year, and every _other_ driver supports it, including nvidia...this is the main reason I refuse to run the ATI drivers on my mobility 9600. You will also lose the ability to use the radeonfb driver for your console...the two drivers do not play nice together. You can use either text mode or vesafb (slow) for console support. >3. Is this just another Open Source versus Vendor Closed source >binaries pissing_contest or is the ATI OpenGL really >beneficial in means of performance/features? > > Well, I don't get particularly religious about open-source vs. closed source drivers...but the ATI drivers are for me the clearest example of why linux drivers should be opensource. If a vendor is going to provide closed-source drivers, I expect them to keep them up to date, support most features in the current kernel release, and provide some kind of support to their users. ATI doesn't seem interested in any of these....releases every 2-3 months, with the same issues over and over again....no response to email or web forums (checkout rage3d.com)...etc. <rant> That, and their configuration script still asks me whether I want to enable middle-mouse-button emulation...I haven't needed that in, oh, 8 years!! And this is a linux 2.6 kernel....you don't *need* to detect my mouse, the kernel already did!! And thats besides asking me what the HSync and VSync ranges are for an LCD display connected via DVI which is _just_ _plain_ _idiotic_. "X -configure" is sooo much more sane--it still misconfigures my mouse, but at least it doesn't ask me stupid questions while doing it! </rant> -Richard -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
