[S-99]

The ATI proprietary drivers on my laptop on Linux for some reason result in my computer not shutting down properly; I have to force shutdown and that's no good to me for my case. Though the driver loaded does not match the exact card model, only the closest equivalent.

Give the opensource ati driver a try. Fglrx has sucked for a while, even to the point of not being able to do compositing without modifying a bunch of system files.

the Intel chip lags horribly in heavy work, can't play games and it screws things up horribly when going into projector mode, video streaming sites take a total crap and irritating screen switching with the resolution also taking a crap among other things (I've done project presentations on it, it sucks to take the flak from the Windows/Mac masses, but that's the life of it), but in normal use it's better.

I think it's just the fact that it's an intel chip period. They are made for pretty basic things when it comes with a motherboard. The intel chip in my netbook was really tossed in there strictly for meager desktopping and for watching dvd's. It's just the fact that it's pretty ok at playing games like openarena at medium settings was pretty cool for what it can also get away with (netbook is good for older games).

What makes me happy about a driver going opensource is that it gets included in the linux kernel. When it gets included in the linux kernel, that's another device that fits the description of "works right out of the box" with linux. So, you can imagine how much i love the ati and intel opensource drivers because after i'm done installing linux, all my hardware really is working without needing to grab extra drivers. Opensource ati drivers are cool even further, i believe it works on a one driver works for all ati cards basis (no planned obselescence, they're going to go ahead and have compatibility for older ati cards too). I know for the new nouveau nvidia opensource driver that's how it is (i still use the nvidia proprietary driver still because nouveau isn't what i'd consider usable right now).

I've been pretty happy with nvidia for a while. I use to use ati after nvidia bought 3dfx. Ati wasn't much to balk at during the day until the radeon 9xxx series came out (those were good). And then ati pretty much dropped the ball with radeon x300 x400 x800 etc(the next gen radeon cards after the 9xxx series). The geforce 6 and 7 series were spectacular for performance and price back in the day. Also, because nvidia was way better for running linux with for a long time. Before the ati opensource driver, you had the nvidia and ati proprietary drivers. The nvidia proprietary driver was and still is that much better than the ati proprietary driver.

To recap, the ati driver going opensource is awesome, this means that ati is now an actual solution for 3d acceleration under linux whereas previously it was mediocre and now ati people can hold something pretty major over nvidia people (opensource driver being it). For nvidia, there's the proprietary driver which is still a really good and made nvidia a long time the preferred choice for compatibility and 3d acceleration under linux (still a good solution it is, and it works great, but i want the nouveau driver to mature so i don't need to rely on the proprietary driver anymore).

It's good to know ati picked up the ball again in two areas instead of just one (gaining better performance than nvidia and opensource driver).

[Ghostavo]

And then ati pretty much dropped the ball with radeon x300 x400 x800 etc(the next gen radeon cards after the 9xxx series). The geforce 6 and 7 series were spectacular for performance and price back in the day.

I have to disagree with you on that.

The first cards in ATI's x series (as you referred, the x800, x700, etc...) were top notch and went head to head with the GeForce 6 series, even having better performance/price in some cases. The only downside to them (and this can only be said in hindsight) was the lack of shader 3.0 support which would be used extensively a few years later.

Where ATI really dropped the ball was with the x1000 series and NVidia started having jumps in performance with the GeForce 7 series.

[Klaustrophobia]

i was playing America's Army when the x800 came out.  everyone flipped their **** over it.  at that time it was "Nvidia who"?  and then they struck even harder in the price/performance category with the XL version, which was essentially an underclocked XT at almost half the price.

[Grizzly]

You really see the difference between nvidia and ati driver sets when you use linux. The ati driver going opensource for linux has been surprisingly good. The nvidia proprietary driver on the other hand is another matter since it's proprietary, but it's also of good quality. What really sucked in the beginning was the ati proprietary driver for linux. Then the opensource driver sucked when it first began. But, it's all good, you have ati hardware, no need to install a driver anymore when you install linux. The linux intel driver is also awesome.

My intell 855 does not work all that well under Ubuntu Lucid Lynx...

[S-99]

Try not using ubuntu, that might fix your problem (ubuntu sucks). Lucid lynx uses a hybrid version of x.org. It's a hybrid of the old and the new version (the old version got patched all to hell and works questionably when instead ubuntu devs could have gone with simply the old version or the new version...now they get to support this abomination for years...and yes x.org may not be your problem).

After that ubuntu sucks, fedora sucks, opensuse is a wierd smattery of slackware plus rpms, mandriva sucks. Really all i can recommend is starting from scratch with debian stable or arch (maybe gentoo also), or use pclinuxos or mepis (pclinuxos and mepis are not start from scratch linux types).

How hard would it really be to download a mepis livecd and test your video card with it for ****s and giggles? I'd be interested to know of the details (i don't have too much of a low down on intel graphics aside from what gets soldered to a motherboard). For now, the intel driver for my meager simple task intel pos in the netbook is performing and functioning as expected.

[asyikarea51]

I don't even feel safe moving to 10.04 without screwing something up somewhere ala 7.xx and I don't have backup media to spare right now, urgk... and everything is already set up pretty nicely...

I tried one of the earlier pclinuxos versions once (not on the laptop) but didn't really get into it for some reason despite sound working straight out of the box. Maybe sooner or later when I move everything and do a reformat... and the whole ALSA-OSS issue is almost like kicking a dead horse in some ways...

[Admiral LSD]

Try not using ubuntu, that might fix your problem (ubuntu sucks). Lucid lynx uses a hybrid version of x.org. It's a hybrid of the old and the new version (the old version got patched all to hell and works questionably when instead ubuntu devs could have gone with simply the old version or the new version...now they get to support this abomination for years...and yes x.org may not be your problem).

The reason they did it that way is so they could implement certain features from X.org 1.8 (such as 3D/KMS support for the 4000-series Radeons, for example) without breaking compatibility with binary drivers that only work with 1.7. It would be such a big problem if the X and kernel guys didn't make something of a sport out of breaking things every other week...

As for Intel support, they've changed the way things work meaning only IGPs newer than the 915 work right now. That's probably asyikarea51's problem, not his choice in distro.

[S-99]

I normally blame ubuntu for one big thing, instability.

I don't even feel safe moving to 10.04 without screwing something up somewhere ala 7.xx and I don't have backup media to spare right now, urgk... and everything is already set up pretty nicely...

I tried one of the earlier pclinuxos versions once (not on the laptop) but didn't really get into it for some reason despite sound working straight out of the box. Maybe sooner or later when I move everything and do a reformat... and the whole ALSA-OSS issue is almost like kicking a dead horse in some ways...

As much as i don't feel safe moving my mom to 10.04 myself. If you didn't quite like pclinuxos, you could try mepis instead, of course when you get some burnable media. But why use burnable media? Use . It lets you extract the contents of an livecd iso onto a fat32 formatted mobile storage of any kind (in this case usually thumb drives, but i usually use an sd card) in a very easy fashion, so you can bootup with said mobile storage.

As for the alsa oss issue. Look in the repositories for a package called "alsa-oss". This package is a compatibility layer that lets oss applications work through alsa. Invoking the wrapper is super easy for any applications that only use oss. But for the most part, oss is dead and has been for years, everyone has been and is still using alsa. So this should be easy, use alsa, and for any program that uses oss and has no functionality for switching to alsa, you use the alsa-oss wrapper.

[asyikarea51]

Not so much on OSS programs through ALSA but rather OSS itself. I actually prefer using OSS over ALSA... kinda... (as in the current v4, but then again I'm not recording) but like plenty of things out there, they all have pros and cons...

My integrated GPU is a GMA45 if I remember correctly. And the other reason I'm hesitant to go up to 10.04 is because of the Studio package...

But plenty of that is going off-topic and I'm elsewhere right now so that's it from me for now XD

[Admiral LSD]

Use unetbootin. It lets you extract the contents of an livecd iso onto a fat32 formatted mobile storage of any kind (in this case usually thumb drives, but i usually use an sd card) in a very easy fashion, so you can bootup with said mobile storage.

unetbootin kind of sucks, but if you're already running a *buntu then the Startup Disk creator that comes with that isn't too bad. I've been using it to put various ISOs on to SD cards for booting my Eee PC and it works fairly well.

[pecenipicek]

Use unetbootin. It lets you extract the contents of an livecd iso onto a fat32 formatted mobile storage of any kind (in this case usually thumb drives, but i usually use an sd card) in a very easy fashion, so you can bootup with said mobile storage.

unetbootin kind of sucks, but if you're already running a *buntu then the Startup Disk creator that comes with that isn't too bad. I've been using it to put various ISOs on to SD cards for booting my Eee PC and it works fairly well.

which is actually the same damn thing if i remember correctly. (unetbootin/*buntu startup disk creator that is)

[Admiral LSD]

That may have been the case at one point, and may still be in the back end, but the latest versions of the Startup Disk Creator in *buntu have a far better UI than unetbootin.

[Mikes]

I got a recent 'good' ATI card, like all other ATI cards I've owned it's had, what I am assuming is, driver issues, I can't get video to play in full screen reliably and games randomly grey screen, were the GPU puts it's self into a reset loop and I have to turn the computer off to get it working again.

Gonna call bull****. I've had a X1800, HD3850 and now HD4870x2 and every card worked flawlessly.

Not every driver release worked perfect, but it was never an issue finding a driver that worked just great that you could stick with (forums help a lot).

And Nvidia ain't any different there either. I've used a 8800GTX between the X1800 and HD3850 and had drivers that caused grey/yellow triangles to appear until i changed them and my girlfriend with her Geforce 285 fondly remembers the DX10 shadows bug in Lotro that made everything look like crap until the drivers finally got updated.

If you just go to the webpage and install whatever driver is the newest right now.... then driver support is definitely an issue with Nvidia AND Ati (LOL).
If you take a minute to look around and ask people which drivers actually work, then both company's cards usually run without issues.

Obviously, the newest card(s) in either lineup may have spotty driver support in the first 1-2 months (while there is only 1 or 2 drivers that may or may not work well ), but after that it's pretty much always been smooth sailing.


What should be kept in mind however is that Nvidia isn't "just" Nvidia and "Ati" isn't just "Ati"... you gotta pick a decent card manufacturer too.
What i said above comes from experience with Sapphire/EVGA/Asus cards....  if you always buy the cheapest offer from whatever crap company that got their hands on Nvidia or ATI chipsets then yeah, .... your experience may vary 

[Admiral LSD]

What should be kept in mind however is that Nvidia isn't "just" Nvidia and "Ati" isn't just "Ati"... you gotta pick a decent card manufacturer too.
What i said above comes from experience with Sapphire/EVGA/Asus cards....  if you always buy the cheapest offer from whatever crap company that got their hands on Nvidia or ATI chipsets then yeah, .... your experience may vary 

The thing here though is that all of them copy the reference designs set down by nVidia and AMD/ATi, they just add their own branding (which usually entails little more than replacing the AMD/ATi/nVidia stickerage on the cooler with their own). What you get as a result of this is next to no differentiation between cards all sharing a common (stock clocked) GPU. In other words, it doesn't really matter who's card you get since they all work out mostly the same at the end of the day. Several companies sell overclocked versions, sometimes with a beefier cooler than the reference design, but they're all still based on the reference PCB layout. Very few companies (Sapphire being one. My preference for Sapphire aside, it's why I bought their dual slot 4850. It was the only 4850 card on the market that was 8" long and would fit neatly in here.) actually go to the trouble of designing their own custom PCB layouts.

[QuantumDelta]

That's definitely not true, there have been a few articles about which manufacturers to go with - more important with ATi/AMD (general rule of thumb for them, go Sapphire).
Can't remember nV mattering as much.

[Admiral LSD]

I'll admit you get what you pay for to an extent, but as long as you avoid the overly cheap brands as well as the overly expensive brands then everything in the middle is more or less the same.

edit: let me put this another way: If someone asks me what GPU they should get then, at this point in time I'll recommend something from ATi and when they then ask me which of the over 9000 brands of card featuring said ATi GPU they should buy, then I'll recommend Sapphire. If they then turn around and say they have a preference for Gigabyte, MSI, PowerColor, XFX, HIS or whoever, I won't object assuming the price isn't that much different from the Sapphire. If on the other hand they said they were looking at a Biostar or ECS built card then I would insist they choose another brand.

[pecenipicek]

dont be dissin ECS, they're cards are more solidly built than most low price cards.


i've got a 2 year old nvidia 9600GT which was ****ed with so much its a wonder it still works. also, it got a full cup of coffee spilled on it, and only gracefully shut down.



on the other end, i thought that ECS pulled out of retail market and went pure OEM or something?

[Admiral LSD]

I keep hearing about how ECS have cleaned up their act in recent times, but I'm still not inclined to trust them. In part because they operate in the cheap and nasty end of the price spectrum, but mostly I suspect because I'm old enough to be familiar with the kind of **** they used to pull when they were PC Chips: http://www.redhill.net.au/b/b-bad.html

[CP5670]

I would say XFX is the best brand for ATI due to their support and warranty. Sapphire and HIS had crappy warranty setups a few years ago, although they are said to have improved since then.

Note that most of these card companies don't actually make the cards themselves. The cards all come from the same one or two manufacturers. The various brands mainly differ in the choice of cooler, the clock speeds, and the length and quality of the warranty.

[QuantumDelta]

The reason Sapphire stand out from the rest is because they are basically 'inhouse'.
Sapphire used to produce what was the official ATi cards. ie; they're not really third party.

and official ATi cards are no longer made. (I don't remember why, think Sapphire wanted too much money from ATi)
Either way it means they tend to produce slightly higher quality boards, Even now.