Linux ATI drivers faster than Windows!?

by e:n:i:g:m:a on 12/10/2004 15:36, 43 messages, last message: 01/23/2005 02:09, 6613 views, last view: 05/18/2024 22:10

Hmm, just going back to windows to edit my maps, and I seem to get at least 10-20 FPS slower than in linux: In metl2, the startup map, where the rocket ammo is up on the hill, if I look out from there to where the chaingun ammo and the teledest is, I get ~60 FPS in linux, and ~45 FPS in Windows!!

Unfortunately, ATI's linux drivers are still buggy (random lockups anyone?) so I'm just gonna have to wait untill they get better.

Anyway, has anyone experienced this too?

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#4: Re: ..

by D.plomat on 12/11/2004 16:12, refers to #3

Tested the ATI radeon driver on a Sarge, it's a pain to install (no single online 'procedure' works completely, hou have to follow parts of one, parts of another) but once installed they works very well (except for older binary games that can only use 16bit colors).

About the XFree generic radeon driver, i tested it on a Gentoo to make DRI work on my IGP320M (old mobile radeon, no linux driver), it works (also in 16 bits) but have a bug similar but different to the ATI linux driver bug solved by the workaround, and they give about 20% less fps.

Comparatively installing a GeForce on a gentoo is only a matter of 'emerge nvidia-kernel nvidia-glx' and changing one line in XF86Config :)

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#5: ..

by Grogan on 12/12/2004 02:36

I have a Radeon 9200 SE (cheapo sapphire atlantis). 128 Mb of memory.

I mostly use Linux, and mostly play cube (and now death illustrated) there. I just use the open source drivers. The DRM module included with the latest 2.6 kernels I use, and the drivers and DRI provided with xorg CVS. I build my own systems from scratch (loosely following the Linux from Scratch procedure). Including cube clients. Cube runs quite decently at 1024x768, and is just bearable at 1280x1024. This is rather poor support for this card. (I had a radeon 7500 that worked much better with the open source drivers)

OT: I tried a stage 1 gentoo install on a spare hard disk last week. That turned out to be a pretty slick setup when I was done. Thumbs up for those folks.

I did once try the proprietary ATI drivers on a test install of slackware 10. I got considerable improvement in games like Unreal Tournament 2004 (still nowhere near what I'd get in Windows), but cube absolutely bit the weenie with these drivers. Not only did I have to use an ati workaround cube client for the proprietary drivers, but performance was actually worse than the above. I'll not bother with ATI's drivers for this card again.

I have to say that cube (like most games) works better for me in Windows, using the latest ATI Catalyst drivers. Any that I've installed so far. 1280x1024, LOD set to 250, not a problem. (note: leave the 3D settings for OpenGL in the ATI control panel at "application preference" for cube. Custom antialias and anisotropic filter settings only do harm.)

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#6: ..

by >driAn<. on 12/12/2004 12:25

Grogan:
I had an ATI Radeon 9200 too. And the proprietary drivers for linux sucked, so i switched to DRI. The DRI driver seems to be a bit slower.
Now i have a Nvidia gf 6600 GT, that card runs fine on Linux, but the fan is damn loud ;)

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#7: Re: ..

by mikshaw on 12/12/2004 16:50, refers to #1

[quote]One one machine running XP SP2 the frame rate was also way lower on a TI 4200 than on linux, which is kind of weird. It's probably just a configuration problem though. The FPS should be the same on both platforms.[/quote]

That's not weird at all. XP, particularly with service pack 2, requires a hefty amount of resources just to run Windows. These are resources which in Linux are free to be used ingame. On top of that you can run a minimal graphics system (no graphical interface, just the X server and the game) which improves fps even further.

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#8: Re: ..

by Drakker_ on 12/12/2004 20:45, refers to #7

I'm talking 40 vs 130. My machine is an athlon xp 1800 with a ti 4200 128 megs, I get like 130 in most maps. The other system is a 2200+ with the same card and it gets 40. Thats the weird thing. the system was spyware free.

If it was 110 vs 130 I wouldnt have bothered posting heh. :)

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#9: ..

by Grogan on 12/12/2004 21:21

>drian<, the 9200 (Non-SE) shouldn't be quite as much of a problem. I needed a quick replacement and I didn't bother to find out what the "SE" in the model name meant: basically a 64 bit pipeline... half the bandwidth.

I was extremely disappointed with the proprietary ATI drivers. I couldn't get the kernel back end to compile against current Linux 2.6 so I had to build a 2.4 kernel, for starters. I was more speaking in terms of cube here, but yes those drivers were extremely buggy elsewhere in X and in other games. UT2004 ran well, but I had to first manually edit the .ini file because any resolution other than native was insta-crash. (and it defaulted to 800x600 after first installing the game). When I saw no improvement in cube (and perceived it to be worse, whether that was impartial or not) that made up my mind for me. Cube is what matters most. I never did like the idea of proprietary drivers but I wanted to see if it was worth it.

The reason I don't go NVidia is because I don't want to be tied down. At least I have some native support for hardware accelerated opengl with the radeons if I stay behind the curve. (I think the 9200 series is the last one supported by DRI)

Nvidia is definitely more on the ball with the Linux support but I confess to being too much of a purist to use any non-free software. I'm so silly... I mentally work around this for games like UT2004 and Quake 3 by keeping them on a storage drive that isn't really part of the system. I can run them from any Linux distribution that happens to be on the master. I only ever mount that filesystem if I need something on it.

With regard to Windows XP, I run a pretty tight ship. The installation is only there for fun and games and only used occasionally, so I've got all unnecessary services and annoyances turned off (especially after installing SP2... geeze). I just run minimal GUI effects, keep system restore disabled and I run no antivirus software in the background. I have one gig of RAM. While resources aren't a problem for me, I agree with what was said in general.

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#10: ..

by >driAn<. on 12/12/2004 21:48

"I confess to being too much of a purist to use any non-free software."

Heh, maybe you should buy open source _hardware_:
http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=9003

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#11: Re: ..

by J-C-D-P-C on 12/12/2004 22:04, refers to #10

looks like a pretty crappy card, but its open-source, so its pretty cool.

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#12: ..

by >driAn<. on 12/12/2004 23:41

jcdpc: hey java-user, come to irc!
;))

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#13: ..

by Grogan on 12/13/2004 00:23

Yes, I read about that with interest on the linux kernel mailing list. In the initial discussions, they were talking about making a good, open source 2D video card.

I hope that they pull this off. After the first prototypes and models, because it's completely open, it could turn into something decent.

Even though it will necessarily be more expensive than consumer based cards from nvidia or ATI, I'll probably buy one just to support the project if for no other reason. Kudos to them, for pioneering a project like this.

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#14: ..

by Drakker_ on 12/13/2004 03:46

You claim to be an open source purist... and you admit to use Windows XP... isnt it a conflict of interest or something? :)

Windows XP is kind of worse than the nvidia driver is you ask me. :)

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#15: ..

by e:n:i:g:m:a on 12/13/2004 05:46

Wow, this thread has become hotter than I expected...

Anyway, If you are trying to run ATI's Radeon drivers in linux, I highly recommend Gentoo Linux, They have a simple, no-nonsense way for installing ATI drivers that works EVERY TIME (at least for me)...

For the gentoo users out there already, here's what I did:

# emerge -v ati-drivers
# opengl-update ati
# cd /opt/ati/bin
# ./fglrxconfig
(this line is required if you have xorg)
# cp /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Restart X (or reboot if you use a DM) and you are set!

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#16: Re: ..

by Grogan on 12/14/2004 01:49, refers to #14

Drakker said:

"You claim to be an open source purist... and you admit to use Windows XP... isnt it a conflict of interest or something? :)

Windows XP is kind of worse than the nvidia driver is you ask me. :)"
----------------------------

LOL... that can't be helped in the Windows world, now can it? However, I still practice that there to the best of my abilities. I use free software wherever possible and I encourage its use. At the very least, it is with pride that I can say I don't have to use pirated software. (But that's easy for me to say, not using Windows for anything serious)

There are a few games that I like to play in Windows once in a while, and also I need to have it for one other reason. I may need to refer to it, for support or testing purposes. For example, before I roll out the latest free antivirus software to my clients (AVG7, Avast, Antivir etc.) I guinea pig it first. So I'm pretty much stuck with needing to be intimate with each new monstrosity from Redmond.

If Windows wasn't such a trap for people, I wouldn't have much work. Most of my work as a freelance on-site technician is fixing broken Windows rather than hardware.

Sorry I've gone so verbosely off topic.

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#17: Re: ..

by Drakker_ on 12/14/2004 12:45, refers to #16

Hehe, everyone has to face the devil when its timke to pay for the food... but courage, only a couple of years* left and you wont have to deal with windows anymore!







* a couple can mean anything between 2 and infinity

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#18: emerge ati-drivers

by grogan_otherbox on 12/14/2004 20:41

Taking advantage of a quiet day, I hooked up the Gentoo hard disk and decided I\'d try this since enigma made it so easy by spoon feeding us the commands.

LOL... I\'d like to warn gentoo users that emerge -v ati-drivers is in the process of downgrading my xorg installation to 6.7.0. It\'s compiling it all now. I hope I don\'t have to recompile any apps :o

Grogan... rolling with the punches after taking a blind leap of faith. I\'ve done a lot of that with Gentoo, just letting emerge do whatever it wants. It\'s kind of refreshing, when I\'m used to doing every niggling detail by hand.

I\'ll post back once I get this all sorted, and get cube going with the ATI drivers. I\'m hoping I can change my opinion.

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#19: Re: emerge ati-drivers

by Grogan on 12/14/2004 22:49, refers to #18

Well, I've got this working in Gentoo.

I am noticing the exact same behaviour with the ATI drivers that I did when I tried them last time in Slackware 10. I think this is a more recent version too. Same bugs, same performance. Ut2004 works reasonably well (much better than possible with the open source drivers that don't support the proprietary texture compressions). Horrible though on first run... I have to start it once, it freezes the machine solid with a black screen with garbage on it. I have to hard boot, and then edit ~/.ut2004/System/UT2004.ini to change to the same resolution I'm using in X. After that, as long as nothing happens to the user settings it's fine.

Cube (with both my client that doesn't work properly with the ati drivers, and the ati workaround binary) runs at the same horrible 20-23 fps at 1280x1024 (minlod 250) but it is indeed worse than using the open source drivers. The game is stuttering in places, like for example when a bunch of monsters appear on screen. This does not occur to this extent with the open source drivers (fairly recent Xorg from CVS)

I get 60+ fps with Cube in Windows with the Catalyst drivers and the graphics are smooth. I booted Windows last night and installed the new ones that just came out and all is still well.

Oh well, it was easy, and it was fun trying.

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#20: Interesting to note...

by Grogan on 12/16/2004 23:49

I tried a "game-knoppix" CD last night. (This CD did not have Cube, despite someone reporting that it did)

http://games-knoppix.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/

This detected my "ATI Card" and prompted me to enable hardware acceleration, which installs the fglrx ATI drivers.

I've found that the ATI drivers work MUCH better with the X implementation they are designed for. While they do work with xorg, there are fewer bugs (I did not notice any glitches) and better performance with XFree86 4.3.0. At least I think it's the X implementation responsible.

I mounted one of my Linux filesystems and played UT2004, Quake3 (demo) and Cube. While still better in Windows, I was getting 40 to 55 fps in Cube at 1024x768 which is better than the 30-33 I was getting at that resolution. (I can't use 1280x1024 in that LiveCD environment because it's not defined... and I can't make a change and restart X. It reboots the system when the session aborts.

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#21: ..

by e:n:i:g:m:a on 12/17/2004 06:48

Hmm, perhaps I should switch to Xfree? Do you experience random lockups when playing cube in linux?

Do you know if it's possible to have two different X implementations running happily alongside each other?

I've noticed that I get an extra 20 FPS easy in linux, even using xorg! I'm really dissapointed at the ATI drivers' buggyness.

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#22: ..

by Grogan on 12/17/2004 07:22

No, I've never had a lockup playing cube. I've got fairly sane and well supported hardware though (P4 system with Intel 845 chipset)

If you're able to, maybe you should give that game-knoppix CD a whirl to see if it's better for you in that environment. The kernel should support whatever filesystem you use on your Linux partition where cube is (e.g. it has reiserfs support)

No, I don't think you can run different X implementations along side each other (as in choose between them), but there is a procedure to preserve the old such that all you have to do is a bit of renaming (it uses symbolic links). This could be adapted.

http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/CvsPage

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#23: ..

by Grogan on 12/22/2004 10:05

A few more developments. I've been having lots of fun here since enigma sparked my interest in performance again :-)

I DID find a way to reconfigure X and restart it while booted with that CD. It does let you change runlevels (edit file or run fglrxconfig then do an init 2 then init 5 to start X again)

Cube wasn't too good at 1280x1024 (only marginally better than the open source drivers) and UT2004 had the same problem when the resolution wasn't 1280x1024 except instead of locking up, it just crashed the X server which promptly restarted. So the bug is still there with XFree86 4.3.0 but the consequences aren't as severe. I did have it lock hard on me once while playing UT2004 though which disgusted me to the core.

So I have to conclude that it was just a bit of wishful thinking that the ATI drivers were so bloody great with Xfree 4.3.0. Obviously some of the bugs exist. Sorry for the bullshit. (one that doesn't though, is that I can quit X and still have the framebuffer console... locks hard under xorg 6.8.0 in Gentoo).

Also, I had the need to test an Nvidia Geforce4 FX 5200 based card to see if it was working so I popped it in my system and booted up with the game-knoppix CD and let it load the nvidia drivers and had a go at Cube. Cube and other games worked rather well.

I've now given up my Sapphire/Atlantis Radeon 9200SE card and went back to an ATI Radeon 7500. This card is SO much better with the open source drivers (good thing too, because it's not supported by fglrx). I'm getting Cube fps between 60 and 100 and even seeing 120 for brief periods (depending on map and scenery I'm running through) at 1280x1024 in Linux. This is how I remembered Cube in Linux. Unbelievable difference, almost dizzying. I'd gotten used to the shitty performance of the 9200SE.

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