[Wine] ATI ready for Linux? Not quite. was: Re: WINE and older games

[M.Kiesel]

On Wed, 10 Dec 2008, English_Mohican wrote:

> I know that up until about 6 month ago, ATI drivers were not considered 
> as good as NVidia ones.
[...]
> Does anyone have views based on current real data or is it all just the 
> collected wisdom of the ages

ATI driver quality certainly has improved recently. However, I just bought 
an ATI card and as much as I'd like to recommend ATI (with the fglrx 
driver) I cannot.

1) Gaming compatibility in Wine is mediocre at best [1].
2) 2D support is quite bad [2]. Even konsole/gterm feel slow.
3) Instability is definitely still an issue. For example, while Xine does 
not _generally_ crash anymore with fglrx (google for "xine fglrx"), I 
experienced more than one system crash when using Xine for video playback. 
mplayer looks better but still this doesn't exactly raise confidence.

I tested with both the HD 3200 and HD 3850 chipset and fglrx 8.11.
For older cards that are supported through the "radeon" X driver 2) and 3) 
probably do not apply. free3d.org even recommends X800/X850 cards if you 
want true OSS spirit. Still no good Wine gaming experience with that 
though.

I really hope that things keep improving since I'm definitely not a fan of 
NVidia.

Regards

[1]
http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#head-a96989ff3303c1f6c35a1f85e0680b7f6bcfd16f

[2]
http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7#c24
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fglrx#Criticism