laptops with ati mobile gpu

I was curious about those who installed Linux with newer ATI gpu cards in their laptops.

Also, there are probably two wireless cards to choose from or to deal with, let's say:

Intel 5100/5300
or
Broadcom *1515 etc. in Dells especially*

The third one is Atheros but probably not a lot of those out there in the newer laptops?

I know the Intels work fine but what about the Dell Wireless 1515 agn?

The other question regards the ATI cards. You have the HD Radeon mobile line of HD3000 and HD4000 series. I guess it's 3670 and 4530 and others but how is it going with those cards? I have read various stuff but it seems you have to use open source drivers right now but don't get all the features. The proprietary fglrx drivers are a mess right now for ATI cards or at least, mobile ATI cards? I am just wondering about this since I want to know whether I can include all laptops as choices or restrict choices to those with either Nvidia or Intel graphics.

I'm not particular to any one distro as I would use whatever provides easier 'fixes' or installs for the graphics cards. I probably would go with a more known distro, though, such as Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE...etc. I think either of them would handle the ATI driver as well as ATI provides the quality of driver. If it works, it would work in either distro but that is the question: do you expect the driver will improve and are you willing to wait or just say, forget it, and go for a dedicated GPU or choose Nvidia mobile GPU?

Linux users (of laptops), what do you think?

 

I'm using the fglrx drivers on a mobility 3410. They work fine for me as long as I don't enable compiz effects. As soon as I do, video playback and Open GL rendering gets screwed up.

 

Same experience here. Without Compiz it worked just fine. HD Video playback was much better than under Windows, but unfortunately that was the only thing that was better so i had to switch back. If you're only using the laptop for multimedia you should be happy.

Atheros wifi works, Broadcom wifi works too. Both can run aircrack too.

 

If you want 3D, install the fglrx/Catalyst drivers. If you're wanting to do video, use the open-source drivers. They're much better at video. Wait a couple months and all the distros will start shipping with kernel mode setting for ATI chips, and OpenGL 1.4 (or later) support for all ATI cards.

 

My understanding is that fglrx are much better at power management and increse battery life too.

 

Yes, but due to the hate of Linux coders on proprietary software, they also crash a whole lot more often.

 

Nvidia and ATI both have 3D binary drivers, how can it be that Nvidia can maintain and release better quality and less buggy drivers than ATI?

 

Got the 4670 in a sxps 1640 & gfx could be a lot better. The intel chip in my Acer Aspire One gives far superior desktop performance.

The ati (radeon) driver doesn't support this card.

The RadeonHD driver works, even offering 3d acceleration & hdmi with sound. The caveats are no VC access & poor performance in both 2d & 3d.

The Catalyst (fglrx) driver offers better (10x) 3d performance over RadeonHD & has no issues accessing virtual consoles. The 2d performance is still terrible tho.

I keep hearing that there's being a lot of progress being made but nvidia were better than this 3 years ago. That's a lot of catching up imo.

 

No. It's just poor quality on the fglrx drivers. Even the ATI driver devs will tell you that.

 

The progress being made isn't in the distros yet. It's all very, very new and it's dependent on a lot of infrastructure changes in the kernel and so on. If you want to read more, check out the Phoronix ATI forums.. agd5f and bridgman are both ATI employed developers working on the open-source ATI drivers. You can take anything they say as gospel.

There is certainly catching up to do. But having open-source drivers will mean it should work better on Linux than the proprietary drivers that Nvidia has, especially with things like kernel mode-switching coming to fruition, and Nvidia hemorrhaging cash.

 

However they do offer full functionality of the card. That's a fact. What i don't like about the open-source ATi driver is that they focused on 2D performance only and there is zero 3D support. This isn't a S3 Virge.

 

fglrx does not offer the full functionality of the card if it doesn't work with compiz and so on, the Xv acceleration is sub-par compared to the open-source driver, and so on.

As for "focusing" on the 2D performance, you have to start somewhere. The 2D drivers are the base for the 3D drivers. The graphics subsystem of Linux is being overhauled, so they're designing the updated ATI drivers to work with that. If you want to compile code, you can use open-source ATI drivers to play Quake3 right now. You don't seem to realize that writing drivers takes a long time and a lot of work, and that this is non-trivial software. Go write a program, and then come back here with that attitude.

 

fglrx worked just fine with compiz. It did not work with compiz+windowed video (very slow), but worked alright in any other case. As for Xv acceleration, i could still play 720p video flawlessly with my CPU downclocked to 400MHz. That's much better than under Windows.

See my sig before you make such affirmations. Especially read the "fine print" in "Conexant HD Audio". Thank you. And btw... Before "overhauling" the graphics subsystem like you say, they better focus on fixing the damn sound. I really wish that the makers of the bloated mess called pulseaudio would help ALSA developers instead of pointing fingers and saying "it's their fault" when their "sound server" turns into a "fart server".

 

I compiled the RadeonHD driver from GIT & noticed no improvements over the 1.2.5 release. Adding NOPAT to Grub's kernel line has made the 2D performance a little more acceptable while using the FGLRX driver tho. For my card at least, FGLRX seems to be the only option atm...

Th3_uN1Qu3, regarding XV I notice the reverse, Vista is both smoother & uses less CPU. I'm quite stunned by the 3D performance which will be useful for Blender but 2D is seriously lacking, videos tear & resizing windows is painful.

My current xorg.cong contains:

Code:

Section "Module"
	Load        "GLcore"
	Load        "glx"
	Load        "dri"
	Load        "drm"
EndSection

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "aticonfig-Device[0]-0"
	Driver      "fglrx"
	Option	    "VideoOverlay" "on"
	Option	    "OpenGLOverlay" "off"
	Option	    "TexturedXrender" "true"
	BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Section "DRI"
	Group        "video"
	Mode         0666
EndSection 

There's also several AIGLX warning messages within xorg.0.log, tho the module does load:

Code:

(WW) AIGLX: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x23
...
(WW) AIGLX: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x72
(II) AIGLX: Loaded and initialized /usr/lib/dri/fglrx_dri.so

I'd be greatful if anyone could share any configuration tips with a long time Nvidia user.

 

That's strange, maybe support for the Radeon 4*** series isn't as good as for the 3***. I didn't need any xorg.conf tweaks.

 

Brand-new laptop with an Atheros wireless card. Ubuntu and my graphics card did not get along. I switched distros and now everything seems to work. My wireless is also much better. I believe this is due to different drivers, otherwise I can't explain it.