Sorry for the delay hitting this thread. I understand the frustration, but we had some unexpected requirements crop up that needed attention immeadiately. This has resulted in a number of stability improvements on the AGP, PCIe and AMD64 fronts for the new drivers.
This unfortunately resulted in a delay for the drivers. We have completed the work, and now must wait for the web-posting train for ati.com for the drivers to be posted officially. With Christmas/New Year, this will most likely be before the middle of January.
Not as a teaser, but as an answer to the questions, the new drivers will have a number of major new features...
o AMD64/EM64T Support o XOrg 6.8 Support o GLSL o PCIe stability improvements
And of course we have bumped the major.minor version of the driver to match the Windows driver.
Once again, apologies to the Rage3D community for not being responsive for the last month. Some of the members on the Beta Program can probably make comment on the new drivers as well.
Getting an ATI card working under most Linux distros is something that I would categorize right next to raising the dead, under the "impossible" column.
I will *never* buy an ATI card for just this reason. nVidia all the way.
hi...actually i think you are being a bit unfair to ATI. I have a radeon 9600 and ever since i first installed the drivers (ver 3.10.something iirc) i have had no problems other than the one time I didnt RTFM good enough. As a matter of fact i hade some problems installing NVIDIA drivers on one computer. As with stability, i have had no issues whatsoever with my card or drivers.
What i am trying to say here is that i _think_ peaople only hear that ATI drivers will mess up both your head and computer and decide that ATI sucks without trying for themselves.
And, with the new drivers coming soon (yeah i know we heard it before ;)) with xorg 6.8 suppart and GLSL and stuff i really think ATI is back in the linux "market".
ATI's problem has been simple allocation of resources, I mean go back a few years and their windows drivers sucked, they've improved greatly over the years and its only really recently they have turned their attensions back towards Linux and part of that is due to the extra attension going into the OpenGL section of the driver (iirc they were unifying bits of it as well).
People who say 'never' based on a current feature are frankly stupid. Sure I wouldnt try ATI with Linux right now, but after this driver release it might be more viable, much like I said I wouldnt by an ATI card in the past coz of shoddy windows drivers, but they improved those and I jumpped ship.
Oh, and in my experiance NV's drivers have some fun issues as well on linux, such as REALLY slow start up with a GF3 is you dont use a perticular switch to turn off detection on the TV port, took me AGES and a few reinstalls to work out the problem so gg there NV [grin]
So we now have an official release date - it will come out with the posted next monday - the 17th January.
Once again, the development teams and web teams have procedures that we must go through. This unfortunately creates a delay between completion and posting, Christmas didn't help. Since our projected post date (mid January) ended up being right beside some other ati.com work - the two have been folded intogether.
Informing the web team to 'post the drivers now' doesn't serve to accelerate the process.
