Bob Sanders schreef: > On Tue, 05 Jul 2005 18:41:57 +0200 > Holly Bostick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > >>Now, $DEITY forbid I should mix into this heated discussion (despite >>myself being an ATI user with a fair number of opinions on the subject). >> > > > But Holly, I've not noticed you being all that restrained in the past. > Especially > given the amount of problems you've had with the ATI drivers under Linux. :)
True. But the fact that I found tangible improvements in the current release-- for example, Knights of the Old Republic now actually starts and runs, whereas up to now it failed to even start with some error that specifically said (ATIGLX) (or something like, but the failure was clearly in the ATI driver)-- has put me in a state of limbo.... because yeah, KotOR runs, but there are *no textures* (screenshot of the effect is at http://img90.echo.cx/my.php?image=img13049jc.jpg do check it out, it's incredible), making the menus difficult to read, the conversation choices impossible to read, and the whole thing is insanely slow. It's an improvement, but the ultimate effect is that one would almost prefer that it just fail to start... as John Cleese said in "Clockwise", 'It's not the despair. I can take the despair. It's the hope.' But *I can see* that they're working on it (because last month it wouldn't even start, now it starts, with severe graphical errors. Doom3 worked about this badly when it was first released, too, and now it runs great). So I have to wait another 5 weeks or so to see if that will get better.... but at least *something* got tangibly better, so I can have real hope that the situation will improve even more in the not-too-distant future. Besides which, 1) I'm used to this-- "this" being great cards with horrible drivers, having previously owned a Matrox G200 when AGP first got started, and 2) I still don't have any disposable funds to buy another video card atm. So yeah, I'm restrained, because I'm getting input that suggests I should/could change my mind (the drivers are improving), but I don't have enough data to actually convince me to do so (it's only one release, the drivers are still extremely bad, I can't upgrade my kernel to 2.6.12 until the next ATI release, etc, etc). But it took Matrox some 2 years from the time I bought my G200 (and was later given a G400 Max as a gift) before the OGL drivers were working and stable-- and I used the card till about a year and a half ago (it was of course defeated by DirectX 9 and, to a lesser extent, T&L)-- which means that between the two cards I got about 5 years of service (and one of the cards was a gift, don't forget). And if this ATI card does start living up to its potential, I expect it to serve well for two, maybe even three more years before I have some real need to upgrade, which was, after all, the plan when I bought it. So the card doesn't do everything I want it to, today. Heck, *Linux* doesn't do everything I want it to, today. But changing to Linux was my choice. Wiping my dual-boot, and my continued refusal to dual-boot are my choices, too. Not truly believing all the voices that said that the ATI drivers were as bad as they are was my mistake. I do believe ATI is really committed to improving the drivers (or rather, I believe in the committment of the Linux team, even though they may be under-supported for the amount of work that needs to be done to get these drivers to something like 'decent'). I don't know if they will succeed, or whether they will succeed before my very thin patience wears out. But being a Linux user helps me be more patient, and more flexible-- I've got *tons* of other games (native, emulated, and old) that work perfectly well, which I can use to take my mind off the fact that the ones I really want to play (The Sims[2] and Morrowind) don't work properly specifically because I'm using an ATI card. So I don't have composite. I'm sure I'll love it when I can use it, but I'm not hurting for it, and I doubt my lowish-spec PC would handle the load well anyway. Of course, the laptop users have a more serious issue (the suspend/resume thing) than any I have with these drivers, and I'm not saying that if you came to me wanting advice on how best to upgrade your (I dunno) i810 onboard video, that I would suggest an ATI card. That would probably be cruel, depending on the desired use. I'll grant that if you want to play Half-Life 2 or KotOR 2, you're probably *better off* with an nVidia card, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you're home-free, from what I hear. I don't want to be such a game junkie that I'm going to twist myself into a pretzel trying to come up with the cash to buy a new video card out-of-season (in terms of my long-term budget)-- or install Windows because the ATI drivers work there-- just so that I can run the latest-and-greatest and be a l33t geek game grrrl. I'll likely have to wait before I can run NWN2 or Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, and that hurts, but I'm already waiting to run the Sims2 and Morrowind (properly; Morrowind is buggy enough anyway, and the graphical corruption I get under ATI is just the last straw)-- in the meantime, NWN, Daggerfall (via DosBOX), ZSNES, DeusEx (Wine), Septerra Core (Wine), Pretty Good Solitaire (Wine, with massive configuration overrides), Lose your Marbles (Wine), Betrayal at Krondor (DosBOX), SiN, and a legion of other games that I never finished, will just have to do. We can all list a great number of things that didn't work under Linux this time last year, that do now, and I can list at least a couple of things that work under the ATI drivers that didn't work last month (KotOR runs; the driver compiled cleanly for the first time in my recollection-- and I've been using these drivers since 3.2.8; the new installer, even if Gentoo doesn't use it, but it apparently helps a lot). So what does that mean, ultimately? I don't know. That's why I'm not participating in this discussion :-D . Holly -- [email protected] mailing list
