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Comment by franciscoapinto | Hacker News Reader

I run the proprietary ATI drivers on my laptop. I can't run the libre ones because they drain my battery and heat my machine up like there's no tomorrow. They are bad. The tearing is more than just annoying; I simply can't watch flash videos nor use 3D graphics applications. Watching local media crashes X if I use anything other than OpenGL output.

I had vowed never to buy another ATI device until they got their shit together concerning GNU/Linux support. Maybe that will change.

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There are so many times I've considered an AMD CPU and just decided against it because the on-board GPU is radeon (I am not a gamer). Intel's GMA integrated graphics are not powerful but they are awesome, totally seamless install.

Really? AMD's only had on-die graphics for a little over a year.

I mean the motherboard combinations were ATI. Even Nvidia is not acceptable to me anymore, there is just no reason for a driver to be closed source.

have you tried using their catalyst software? http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Pages/radeon_lin...

I'm not a fan of binary blobs, but ever since I've installed catalyst, I have had no problems with video tearing/ X crashes. I even use compiz and its quite nice (there is a slight discontinuity if you move the windows very fast though. Its a small point, but I would have liked it to be smoother). I have also had no problems with projectors/external monitors after using catalyst. (using radeon HD4300 which is probably an old card by now)

Gnome 3 shell on OpenSUSE 12.1 and Fedora 16 regularly (at least 10 times a day) crashes when using catalyst drivers on my HD5650. Using the opensource drivers it works fine. Chrome blacklists the GPU/drivers so no WebGL without --ignore-gpu-blacklist, WebGL performance is ~ old TNT2 in chrome/firefox (although that can be simply because WebGL implementation/app isn't good). I used to buy ATI/AMD because they offered good price/performance ratios but I'm going to go with nVidia/Intel for my next PC, it's going to have to suck really bad to provide a worse experience than this.

perhaps I should have clarified a bit.... I use Debian Squeeze which uses gnome2, and on it I have had no problems for the whole of 2011 (and I run advanced visualization softwares such as VTK on large datasets, still no trouble). Maybe the problem has to do with gnome3? (No problems with chrome/WebGL either.)

>Maybe the problem has to do with gnome3

It certainly does - but it's also driver specific because on open source drivers it works without the crashing - but then the performance is terrible, even playing YouTube fullscreen lags (!?).

I suspect that by "I run the proprietary ATI drivers on my laptop", franciscoapinto does indeed mean he's running catalyst/fglrx.

Which card and distro are you using?

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