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ATI Sapphire HD 2400 Pro
I’ve been wanting to get a new, or at least different graphics card for a little while now. I have been using the onboard graphics chip that was included with my computer since I bought it a little over a year ago. I can’t complain about the performance I’ve been getting, I wanted “just a little more”.
I have a computer that has a built in NVIDIA chip, the 6150SE. It has always proven to be a great little chip for me. It handled every bit of Aero that Vista could throw at it, as well as any eye candy from Compiz. I don’t really game that much, but I do shoot it up a bit with Urban Terror, and my onboard graphics handled that game with ease.
Two days ago I was browsing through my local Craigslist and I saw an ad from a guy looking to either sell his graphics card or trade it for an external hard drive. I happened to have two external hard drives and contacted him offering to make the swap for my 80 gig drive. He agreed.
My past experience has been with NVIDIA cards and not with ATI so I figured I would be learning a thing or two with this card, especially with how it works with Linux. And learn a few things I did.
My NVIDIA chip never worked “out of the box” with Ubuntu. Until I installed the restricted driver my desktop was unusable. I would have half of my screen blanked out and if I auto-resized the screen from my monitor’s menu, it would size it up almost correctly but either the top or bottom panel would be out of view. And the graphical rendering was horrible. After a restricted install and reboot, everthing was back to looking great.
The ATI card did not have this problem. The default driver included with Ubuntu provided me with a beautiful looking desktop. The fonts were rendered correctly out-of-the-box and my screen resolution was perfect. I know it’s only been two days, but for the life of me I can’t remember if Compiz effects were working initially or after I installed the ATI restricted driver from the repositories.
My NVIDIA chip has not gotten along well with Ubuntu since Intrepid was released. When I installed 8.10 I was greeted with a system that was incredibly slow which is something I was not used to with Ubuntu. Ubuntu Hardy Heron was still nice and fast, but both releases since then have just trudged when on my system.
This is not the case with the ATI card. Ubuntu is much, much faster now with this card in use. While the system is much snappier, it is still not at the level I would consider optimal. Perhaps there are some tweaks that I could enable to optimize it.
While my ATI card works great in Ubuntu, I cannot say the same quite yet when I use it in my preferred Distro of Arch Linux. The driver install process is quite simple; instead of installing the “nvidia” package I installed the “xf86-video-ati” package. This gave me my usual looking snappy desktop. But as I learned later, ATI is not the most Linux-friendly piece of hardware out there.
I like to have a little eye-candy on my desktop, and that means I want some minor animation effects when opening, closing or moving windows around as well as a whiz-bang way of shifting through open windows. Nothing crazy, just a little bit of glitter if you you know what I mean. I had a devil of a time trying to get Compiz to work on Arch with this card. After installing the necessary packages I couldn’t start Compiz up without my screen turning white. I attribute this to my lack of knowledge with ATI drivers. I figure if it works in Ubuntu then it must be able to work in Arch Linux.
So I’ll continue to poke around explore the mysteries of Linux graphics and how it relates to me. And if anyone knows how to configure ATI cards in Arch Linux I would love your feedback.
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{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
I had an ATI (good but not cutting edge) card when I switched to Linux last year. Yeah, it has OS drivers, but with the OS drivers or restricted drivers it was buggy as hell. My video failed, the desktop froze, my system crashed. And often. Since I switched to NVidia a few months ago, I have had NO ISSUES at all outside of installing the nvidia driver before X will work. Sure, it’s annoying when I install, but I only do that twice or thrice a year and it works ALL THE TIME after that.
@Bill Stone – Ya know, when I installed the nvidia drivers for Arch Linux I never had any problems at all. Oh sure, when I wanted to change the theme for Gnome-Do it told me I had to modify something, but that was easy to do and it was done.
ATI is a whole other animal if you ask me. I’ve been told that ATI isn’t all that Linux friendly, but in Ubuntu it’s great. But then again, Ubuntu makes things a heck of a lot easier and in Arch it’s up to me to get the right configuration done.
Are you serious? look at phoronix forums and you’ll find tons of people asking ATI to deliver the same drivers quality as NVIDIA.
I’m running one box with 2.6.30 and NVIDIA drivers yet ATI as always is missing in action in kernel support.
Honestly NVIDIA still is the king in Linux support if you can afford proprietary drivers.
@Stu – The phoronix forums come up quite a bit when I was searching for help on this. I agree with you on NVIDIA being the king in Linux support right now, but since this is the new card I have I’m looking for a little love on it.
You say you’re running the 2.6.30 kernel? What distro are you running?
An HD2400 card should work reasonably well with open source drivers, but only if you have the latest. The open source drivers will still only provide 2d for HD3000 and 4000 series cards, when the 2.6.31 kernel and the new xorg is finalised all should work, but that is some months off.
In Ubuntu you can grab a 2.6.30 kernel from PPA and by activating the PPA xorg edgers repo you can get the very latest open source drivers. Great for ATI and Intel video. In Debian the latest drivers are usually in “unstable”. I can’t help with Arch.
I have an HD3450 sitting on my desk that swaps in and out of my number two machine as I get frustrated, the onboard Intel Graphics work better at the moment. Next week or next month, who knows? My main workhorse has on board Nvidia 8300 and the proprietary Nvidia driver and it just works.
I find that with ATI you must really tinker with X.org. But with that tinkering you can get just about anything to work, especially with older cards such as my mobile chipset. Though, i must admit that NVIDIA has very good proprietary drivers, there are no real open source ones, which can make just installing the proprietary driver a hassle. With ATI, i have to argue that the new open source drivers are getting better and better.
With Arch it might be helpful to look at your ubuntu X.org settings and basically copy them over. I think that will get you the desired results.
You got it all wrong! Why don’t you people just read something first and then act?! If it works in Ubuntu it must work also in Arch! There are two tipes of ATI drivers: the comunity open source stack “xf86-video-ati” and the proprietary one which comes from AMD. This is the driver you install in Ubuntu with the Restricted Drivers manager. So if you want the same performance, uninstall the open source driver and install the “catalyst” stack. you won’t find it in Arch repos but in AUR. Istall first “yourt” with pacman and then use yaourt to install the catalyst driver. Good Luck!
@Adrian – The “xf86-video-ati” driver was the first thing I installed when I did a clean install of Arch and it worked fantastic for normal things. Yaourt is one of the first things I install on a new Arch system, but it’s entirely possible that I may have committed a big boo-boo and not uninstalled the original open source driver before installing catalyst. Actually, let me just come right out and say that I didn’t uninstall it first. Now that that is out of the way, I guess I can try installing the catalyst stack the proper way and then give an update on it.
A few comments:
- ATI has released a heck of a lot of documentation for OSS driver devs to use, they could at least get some credits for that, since it’s ALSO a form of “Linux support”, honestly the best we could hope for in the long run
- The Phoronix forums do have more problem reports in the ATI section than the nVidia section, however AFAIK there is no ATI equivalent to the nV News boards, so it’s apples to oranges
Both companies simply have different strategies for their Linux support. I happen to prefer ATI’s approach.
Just to point something out that may not be obvious (it wasn’t to me): There are two open-source drivers available for ATI GPUs: radeon (xf86-video-ati) and radeonhd (xf86-video-radeonhd). If you are using the former then you need to have Driver “radeon” in your xorg.conf file; if you are using the latter then you need to have Driver “radeonhd” in your xorg.conf file. And of course if you’re using the closed-source AMD Catalyst driver then you would have Driver “fglrx” in your xorg.conf file. You can read in detail about the two open-source drivers and their differences in the X-Org Wiki articles: http://wiki.x.org/wiki/radeon and http://wiki.x.org/wiki/radeonhd
One final tip.
You do not need to uninstall the open source driver to use the ATI fglrx driver, the driver is loaded by xorg.conf.
BUT, if you want to go back to the open source after using fglrx you must uninstall it to remove all the symlinks it creates to it’s own lib files.
With an HD2400 you should be able to achieve reasonable 3d performance now with the open source stack. If you are a gamer then fglrx is still the way to go.
All my “PC Life” I’ve been using ATI graphic cards.
Now I have ATI Radeon 4870HD graphic card working perfectly with the property drivers with Ubuntu 9.04 64 bit.
The thing about the property ATI drivers is once a new drivers is released it fixes many things but introduce new bugs that weren’t an issue on older releases.
Unfortunately the free ATI drivers aren’t suitable for newer video cards.
@MaximB – Did you have to do any extra configuration with the proprietary driver or was it simply a case of just installing the restricted driver and that was it?
On a side note, how has your experience been with Ubuntu 9.04 and that card? Does the system seem to be snappy or is it slightly sluggish for you?
@ROB: I run Debian Sid.
@others: it’s a shame that if you need proper OpenGL support with tons of extensions for professional software or games you need proprietary drivers, truth is that the open source driver stack lacks extensions and performance (currently). Having used both proprietary drivers extensively in the past (as I’m a gamer) I can tell you from my POV that NVIDIA proprietary drivers are the best.
Thanks.
For now proprietary graphic drivers are the only solution when it comes to performance indeed. But after Galium3D is released with Mesa 7.6 I think a few things are going to change…Loking forward to the future of opensource graphics which I am sure will be a great one.
I have a laptop with a Radeon 4850 chipset. There is no acceleration for this series yet with the open source drivers, but it is on its way. I may end up using those drivers when acceleration becomes available. The proprietary drivers that you can load work great for games and general desktop support, but I have an issue with full motion video. Whenever playing a movie or video clip on at least some sequences I get what I believe is referred to as “tearing” or horizontal lines where parts of the picture are out of sync with each other. If someone has a solution for this, I’d love to know what it is. I am using a 64 bit Ubuntu variation (Xubuntu).