For months now Radeon/FireGL owners have been wondering whether or not ATI Technologies / Advanced Micro Devices is actively working on AIGLX support for their official drivers or whether they will even support it with their binary fglrx drivers. It has now been longer for ATI to add support for AIGLX than it took them for official Radeon X1000 product support, which also received a great deal of negative scrutiny for the belated product support. The lack of AIGLX support has without a doubt caused many disgruntled Radeon owners and thus some believing the fglrx driver is evil. For some Linux desktop users the lack of AIGLX support is more severe than the performance problems found within the drivers (see One Year With ATI X1000 Linux Support). But the question remains, is ATI working on this support?

Well, if ATI/AMD does not introduce a fglrx driver capable of handling AIGLX to support Beryl and Compiz (without XGL!) by the end of this calendar year (December 31, 2007), I will switch all my personal machines from ATI Radeon graphics back over to the green side with NVIDIA. Or I may also switch over to using Intel graphics in my notebooks and desktops. At the end of this year it will be roughly 18 months (and 18 releases) where they could have added this support. So either by the 8.44.x display driver (well, the naming convention could change with the introduction of the new AMD Linux driver) or I am out of using ATI graphics in my personal systems. There would continue to be coverage at Phoronix of these drivers and benchmarks, but I would be eliminating ATI/AMD graphics from my personal machines.

I am confident and believe that by the end of this year ATI can and will deliver adequate support for Beryl / Compiz / the-yet-to-be-named-package-if-Beryl-and-Compiz-merge. For those new to the Linux world, the open-source Radeon driver that ships with newer Linux distributions does support AIGLX for Beryl/Compiz, but the driver support only extends to the R300 and R400 series (up to the Radeon X850). The ATI Radeon X1000 (and X2000 R600) series are left in the dark when it comes to Beryl or Compiz support unless using XGL. NVIDIA users on the other hand were introduced with such support in the 1.0-9XXX series, and eventually the open-source Nouveau driver will add this support. Intel's Linux display drivers also support the desktop eye candy.

When do you think the Beryl/Compiz support will arrive for the fglrx binary blob drivers?

Why not start a poll on what users really think is important?
I for one think the availability of AIGLX is way more important than performance improvements. I have been using Beryl on my old laptop (ATI M7) for a long time now and I absolutely LOVE it. I also wouldn't call it eye candy since Beryl is much more than that, it's not just bling bling :-)

If Dell are true to their word, I believe ATi will soon follow with an 'AIGLX driver'. Their lacklustre support is alienating their user base and driving them to nVidia and Intel. When I bought a new laptop in October last year, I discarded ALL laptops with ATi graphics. If it listed ATi graphics, I clicked on 'Go Back'. It just isn't worth the hassle buying into a manufacturer with a proven track record of poor linux support. The same goes for VIA.

Nvidia is really no better. Their drivers, since the introduction of AIGLX support, have suffered from the "black windows bug". This is, according to Nvidia, caused by a memory managemeny problem in their driver. Other than occassionally reporting that they are still working on the issue, Nvidia users have no relief.

All of my future purchases will be Intel video - or any other video that has fully open source 3D drivers at the time. I'm am done with closed source drivers. Beryl works great on Intel video, and if it's not fast enough for some games, I'll just buy a console. It's cheaper than a new high-end video card anyway.

Moot point for me, I ditched my stinkpad with it's ATI Mobility last month and put an Nvidia card in my desktop because of the terrible state of their Linux support. I will never purchase another ATI/AMD GPU because of their total disregard for the Linux/OSS community. It is the only power I have to yield; I purchase someone else's product. If enough of us do that, they will change or wither.

I can't wait that longer.

Are you all mad? I've an ATI IGP 340m on my laptop. My girlfriend's got an ATI X700 on her laptop... and 3D efects work quite well and snappy. Oh wait... we're using the Free Software drivers... and not the fglrx crapware.

The sad thing is that ATI stopped supporting the community when they stopped providing spec's that allow programmers to write drivers.

Now... for new ATI cards, only ATI can help (if they're interested at all), so it's quite clear, to me, that fglrx is EVIL. NVidia is actually worse. No NVidia card has 3D support, and projects like nuveaux work very hard for little achievement because... well, writing in the dark is really quite hard.

ATI and NVidia are being quite EVIL, indeed.

ATI could give two shits about Linux. How many YEARS are you guys going bitch and moan before you stop supporting this company? There is absolutely no reason to do so anymore. nVidia has good mobile penetration now and there is no reason to buy ATI and then piss and moan about lack of driver support.

Hi Guys

Please check Linux Format Magazine March 2007 issue. If I'm not mistaken the DVD includes ATI and NVDIA drivers. I haven't tried these, but I'm sure they work.

I spoke with my wallet 2 months ago, and will sell my ati card to some windows user. The nvidia drivers may be a pain in the ass to reinstall everytime I boot a different kernel, which may be several times a day, but they, once installed, Just Work(TM).

Goodbye ati, its not been nice knowing you.

I fully agree that the level of linux support from ATI is far from satisfactory. That being said, both my desktop (with x1300pro) and my laptop (with X700) work flawlesly under linux, when using recent fglrx drivers. Actually, Beryl works much faster on these two machines (even though it has to rely on XGL) than on the Geforce 7400go on my second laptop...

""If you just care about making your UI look better then Intel is a fine choice. However for most moderate to high end games they are a terrible choice. Even under low settings most modern games have quite bad FPS. Also, forget about combining them with a high resolution LCD and turning any effects on. Sorry guys, still only two gamer graphics cards on the market. ""

Yes. It absolutely depends on what your requirements are.

If you want inexpensive hardware, good feature support, good stability, good battery life, etc etc. then Intel is the way to go.

If you require high performance 3d support for whatever reason then your only choice is Nvidia.

Hopefully this will change in the future.

The Santa Rosa 'Centrino Pro" laptops are coming out and those should have improved versions (or at least DirectX 10-level support) of the GMA X3000 chipset, that while is still using shared memory they will support hardware T&L, shaders, and other hardware features that current GMA 950, 945G chipsets lack.

I don't know how mature those Linux drivers are going to be with that.

( Anybody with Ubuntu Feisty and a G965 chipset care to comment? )

But if those drivers are descently optimized then those should be powerfull enough to drive Doom3 or Quake4 more or less with playable framerates.

In the more distant future your going to have discrete Intel graphics cards aiming squarely for the high-end market. Compete head to head with Nvidia, more or less.

Last I heard about it was aiming for late 2008 release.

I don't have any idea about Linux driver support for that, but Intel claims to be commited strongly to having open source Linux drivers aviable at the same time they release hardware.

Intel wants those things to be realy x86-based graphics cards, more or less. So that you could program regular applications for x86 and use extensions to take advantage of GPU's power. So that would point to a no-brainer for good Linux 3d support since it would have to be so open.


I don't know. It's mostly speculation at this point. Who knows? Maybe Microsoft will choose intel to power their next Xbox and we will see support evaporate away like Nvidia (Xbox) or ATI (Xbox360) ?


http://www.intel.com/jobs/careers/visualcomputing/
http://www.theinq.com/default.aspx?article=37548
http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=4605
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=38011

""When do you think the Beryl/Compiz support will arrive for the fglrx binary blob drivers?""



I bet 4 months after ATI releases their next generation OpenGL drivers for Windows.

I am an unluky owner of a radeon x1100. I somehow managed to use XGL and beryl in edgy but now in feisty its just impossible, even with the downgrade thing. IT is for SURE that im discarding any ati stuff if they dont do something for aiglx. A computer with intel graphics is cheaper and has better performance for beryl. As someone said before, if i want to play ill stick to my wii and ps3.

um, sorry but i don't see any hint as to when ATi will finally support AIGLX... so what relevancy does this have apart from the Vista Mumbo-Jumbo ???

I know, i'm writing this from a WindowsXP Machine, my Laptop is the one with the Problem not being able to run AIGLX.