Games doesent work in Fedora test 3

[Mike A. Harris]

On Wed, 22 Oct 2003, joe wrote:

>There seems to be a HUGE step in price going from radeon 8500/9100 to 
>FireGL 8800 ($60-70 vs $350-400) - is there a corresponding 
>performance/functionality step, or would I be paying a sharply higher 
>price for slightly better performance?

Shop around.  I've seen FireGL 8800 prices as low as $125 USD on
sites linked off of www.pricewatch.com.  If you're seeing $350,
you're shopping at the wrong store.  I do not have any URLs or
recommendations of any particular store or website however so
you'll have to research a lower price yourself.

As for the performance differences, I have not personally done 
any benchmarking of performance between any 2 pieces of hardware 
for a long time, as that doesn't aide development at all.  It's 
more of something people do for fun, or when comparing hardware 
to purchase it for gaming or other tasks.  I haven't purchased a 
video card since 1997 or so, so I haven't needed to benchmark 
them to find out which one is faster.  ;o)


>Also, I seem to remember some discussions about the danger of
>buying an ATI card that was not actually "made by ATI", what is
>the guideline - only buy official ATI cards, stay away from 3rd
>party cards using ATI chipset?

In XFree86 4.2.x era, ATI opened up their chipsets to 3rd party 
vendors to make the Powered By ATI cards, however the video 
drivers weren't prepared for the types of customizations and 
variations from ATI's reference hardware implementation that some 
3rd party vendors made.  That didn't mean that those cards were 
"bad" in any way, just that they might not work with the XFree86 
drivers, as those drivers were developed completely on real McCoy 
Built by ATI hardware and never tested on any other hardware 
because it simply didn't exist at the time.

Nowadays however the Powered by ATI hardware has been out for 
quite a long time, and most of the incompatibilities were due to 
hard coded assumptions in the driver that happened to be true on 
Built by ATI cards, but not necessarily true on the Powered by 
cards.  Not surprising since the drivers were developed on the 
Built by hardware as mentioned above.  Most if not all of those 
incompatibilities have been found and fixed I believe, as I 
haven't seen bug reports in a long time which only occur on 
Powered by ATI hardware.

So to summarize:  I believe that all Built by ATI and Powered by 
ATI hardware should work equally well with Red Hat Linux 9 and 
XFree86 4.3.0-2 or later due to the lack of bug reports that are 
specific to any particular brand out there.  Of course I can't 
guarantee there wont be incompatibilities, as I only have a 
couple of the Powered by ATI cards, and they're PCI.  So 
basically your chances are good that all hardware should work ok 
now, but if you have any doubt whatsoever, before making a 
decision, test the card out first if you can.

</DISCLAIMER, because I don't want anyone to come back and say 
              "But you said it would work dammit!">

Hope this helps.
TTYL


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat