Member Avatar for Insomaniacal

What do you guys think? I have a ATI Radeon Xpress 1150 in my Laptop. I know in the newer versions of Ubuntu and such, you can no longer use the proprietary driver, which I remember to be fairly good, when it worked at all.

However, I know you can no longer use it, and there is an open source effort to bring limited 3D acceleration to this generation of cards. I'm thinking about switching back to Linux (It's been a bit of a back and forth for roughly 2 years now), but I really need this graphics card to work, as I absolutely love playing games.

So, anyone have any good experiences, bad experiences? Other reasons why I should, or shouldn't make the switch? Please, no "Well, if you need this this and this, go with "x" " type posts. Just reasons for and against switching.

Thanks for your advice.

P.S. - I know my way around linux fairly well, and consider myself intermediate to advanced, so if you're going to suggest a distro, don't hesitate to throw out some obscure ones. Thanks again xD

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Member Avatar for Excizted

A week ago I bought an expensive ATI HD5870 card. I started up the drivers in Linux, prepared for some bugs or whatever when using compiz - that was the issues I was aware of.

The performance was worse than with my old Nvidia card which today costs 1/6 of the ATI card! Horrible, just horrible. I tried it out for some time.

I was ready to ditch the card, but I made my way over to Windows. I got totally in love with this extreme performance. Crysis on full settings on 3840x1050 (just tested eyefinity).

I was almost ready to buy Windows just to keep the card, but when I made my way back to my Ubuntu installation, I of course chose to ditch the card. I've traded it for some cash + nVidia GTX 285.

My advice is: stay away from ATI on Linux. It is sad, really sad. I suppose that ATI will stand up and put whatever silly small amount of money into some developers and make proper support soon - now that Steam may be coming, opening gaming on Linux.

Edited by Excizted because: n/a
Member Avatar for crivion

Hi,
Please use a serious brand, when it comes to the Linux & Ati video cards combination you will never want to use one of them (either linux or ati).
The `built-in` drivers are not that bad but of course we want prop drivers :)
Check for Nvidia, they seem to have a better support for linux

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