I give up. I officially hate ATI's video cards. I'm sick of messing with proprietary drivers in Linux that require X to be configured precisely as it wants.

When I was choosing the components for my computer, I'll admit, I was pretty new to the computer hardware scene. I chose a Radeon X1300 card just because it was in my price range, and had nice fast clocks. That turned out to be DOA. Nothing against ATI for that, but it sure was sour. I RMA'd it to newegg, and got a Radeon X1600 for about 20 bucks more, figuring I may as well upgrade. Whaddaya know, it works. Hooray. I install Vista Beta 2. Cool, it works, and it looks nice. I install Ubuntu. Hmm, no direct rendering. Install fglrx.. black screen.. sigh. Muck about with packages more. Ah, there it goes. Install XGL and Beryl.. sweet.

Fast forward to more recently. I install scorched3d under Vista, because it's just one of those great games. Hmm, it crashes. Probably just some minor Vista incompatibility. I install TA Spring, and it won't run, complaining it can't load some OpenGL extension. I see online that my card SHOULD support this extension. Somehow, I find out that ATI is not providing ANY OpenGL support in their drivers for Vista, nor do they intend to. This explains scorched3d crashing, Spring not loading, and my low framerate in armagetron. I'm mad. I want to try FretsOnFire! So.. reboot back into Ubuntu, get Frets. Hmm, low frame rate. That's right.. XGL. I decide to give AIGLX a try. Turns out I can't use it with fglrx, and the ati and radeon drivers won't work. Now, I've given up using Beryl, because I like playing Frets.

Point is, I totally despise ATI's drivers. I give up.

For sale: Excellent condition Sapphire Radeon X1600 Pro video card (512 MB).
No, I'm not kidding.

I would be extremely surprised if ATI doesn't support OpenGL on Windows Vista. How can they hope to be competetive when the popular Doom3 engine is OpenGL? If I remember right, most of ID's games are OpenGL, hence they end up with a linux port.

Hmm, didn't know that, but it's not good news either.

Ugh. It goes on to say:

And, just to top it off:

OK, so I didn't manage to find anything saying ATI wouldn't support OpenGL, but ATI sure wouldn't run it.
Anyway, what really spurred me to switch was their Linux drivers.

EDIT:
http://www.kgadams.net/2006/12/15/vista-comethbut-no-ati-opengl-yet/
just about sums up what I'm thinking.

how much? I could take that off your hands, my parents may not be real thrilled about me buying stuff across the internet, but I could probably figure something out.

I'm asking 100 dolla, but I'm flexible. (read: make offer)

Wow, so ATI is totally biting in the compatibility department. That means that Blockland won't run either... :/

Not really. Let me some it up:

OpenGL in Vista: Problem due to M$ choice, not ATI or nVidia's lack of driver support - this will come in the forum of a DirectX wrapper (think the reverse of Cedega). Hopefully a 'native' OpenGL driver will be released, hopefully...

OpenGL in Linux: Works great! ATI has excellent Linux drivers that are much improved. The ati-config tool (or whatever its called - I'm not sure, its been a while since I've used it) to auto-generate a proper xorg.conf file works quite well. The only thing that nVidia currently supports that ATI doesn't is the OpenGL extension needed for AIGLX and Xgl to work. HOWEVER, you must remember that this support only came in the very recent versions of the nVidia driver, so its not like nVidia has been supporting this forever and ATI needs to get with the program. I would give ATI at least another couple of months before really getting on them for it, as AIGLX and Xgl are both still very new, and programs that can utalize them (compiz, beryl, etc...) are also very new and in beta still.

OpenGL in >=XP: Well, thats obvious

If Tari is looking for wonderful roses and non-picky xorg.conf setups with nVidia, he is going to be sorely disappointed (note: I do love my nVidia card, though )

blockland has d3d support so no worries.

Yes, but Vista will only support DX10 - might that be a problem?

Uh... no, Kerm. Vista supports every DirectX that XP currently supports. The only difference is that now it is broken up into two different DLLS. The DirectX 10 one, and a DirectX9 one (that provides backwards compatibility)

Thats why you can run Windows Vista without needing a DX10 card (of which there are only two, and they are crazy expensive)

Actually, I found that they changed it so display drivers may install something (I think it was called an ICD) which will allow OpenGL acceleration independent of D3D. Nvidia's drivers have had this since Vista was in RC1. ATI, which claims to have superior drivers for Vista, has not even mentioned it.

I wouldn't judge ATI's drivers based on an OS that hasn't made its public debut yet (and don't forget that ATI is still calling their Vista drivers as Betas - you gotta be more patient if you are going to insist on running RC/beta OSes and drivers )

Perhaps.. but if there's no OpenGL by the time of the public release of vista.. ATI, NVidia

they have 20 days (M$ decided that the launch party will be on the 30th).

Well, it's February second, and still no OpenGL, and I was trying to get fglrx working in Linux again (insert story of how I wiped my root partition here). Not fun, that. Any takers for the card? (elfprince, I'm looking at you)

I might be interested in buying it. How much are you selling it for?

Tari, I'd hold off if you intend to stick with Vista. AMD's drivers are destroying nVidia's in Vista at this point...

And I did see in an AMD slide that they intend to improve OpenGL performance in vista - whether this is driver tweaking or their own OpenGL driver, I do not know

According to the release notes for Catalyst 7.1, the drivers have native OpenGL support in vista ( https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/catalyst_71_vista.html#192136 ) perhaps you should give those a try before you continue ranting about ATI's drivers (which are, at the moment, far superior to nVidia's vista drivers)

Heh, sweet. And since I got fglrx working in Linux again, the card is no longer for sale. Sorry, bfr.

You do know about the ati-config tool, right? It works very well at auto-generating the xorg.conf file (incase you should break something again)

Yeah, I had been using that, but it has a nasty habit of not noticing there are any monitors attached. Solution: --force-monitors=notv
Oh, and just for kicks:
Thar's mah OpenGL!