[Wine] Re: ATI in Ubuntu?

[DaVince]

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Pages/radeon_linux.aspx contains release notes and other info for the proprietary graphics drivers (as well as the driver itself; however, it is recommended you try installing the proprietary driver through your distro's package manager first, if it's available there). It should list what's compatible with their drivers.

There's an older free/open-source driver that can only do some simple 2D stuff. I believe current Ubuntu actually uses it. However...

There's also a few Gallium-based open-source drivers in development for ATI cards, which at this point perform about 30-60% of the proprietary drivers. There are advantages, though: it is less buggy (generates less graphical glitches), it is still in heavy development and thus will improve a lot, and over time it will probably support a much broader range of ATI card than the proprietary driver, which occasionally drops support for older cards.

My personal experiences with an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330 (in a laptop) are:
- With the free driver, expect some things to be slow. Also, there is no OpenGL 1 support yet, so don't expect to be able to run Minecraft (or anything else requiring OpenGL 1). However, window compositing is nice and fast (for the most part).
- With the proprietary driver: performance is good, but there are awkward bugs. It is fairly crash safe, but some wrong settings may cause a lot of stuff to have crazy graphical glitches. It's also not so fast with window manager compositing.

Wine generally handles my graphics card well. Games have always run decently enough.

These are, of course, personal experiences. ATI support for Linux really has been improving, so the future looks a bit better. For more experiences and info on running the Gallium driver, check the Ubuntu forums instead, I'd say, because this isn't strictly Wine-related! ;)