   ATI and OpenGL
  I found a cheap laptop that has a Mobility HD3450 on it. I don't have any experience with ATI so I'm here asking if it is fine coding shaders and some advanced stuffs on this video card. I heard that ATI's driver in opengl sucks so bad so I doubt if I should buy this laptop. I'm planning to buy a laptop that has a 9600m gt on it but it cost twice the cheap one. Do you think it is fine coding on a HD3450?   
  According to wikipedia, the Mobility Radeon HD 3450 does have OpenGL 2.0 support so it should be fine for writing shaders.   ;  I had a laptop (ASUS F5) with this chipset and it worked for me pretty well. That's where I learned glsl :)ATI's drivers used to suck ass, but since they got eaten up by AMD and opensourced the hell out of it* the situation's been improving rapidly. They don't accept new specs that fast (e.g. OpenGL 3 in Radeons came some time after it came in GeForces), but they do provide a stable enough learning ground.*they didn't really opensource the fglrx driver (yet), but the community involvement has increased and led to improvements especially around opengl, since that's what the linuxey folk wants the most   ;  So a Mobility Radeon HD 3450 is fine for large project like creating a FPS game? I'm choosing between the 9600m gt and HD3450 but if the cheaper is fine, I'll just spend the excess money on upgrading my desktop.   ;  I'm using Ati hardware (HD4870 and a HD3450, these are not the mobility ones though!) in my computers. They support OpenGL 3.0 in their current drivers, which covers pretty much everything you want (I think the HD3450 mobility graphics card is DirectX 10 hardware as well? In that case it should support OpenGL 3.0).Only (major) thing they don't support in OpenGL are geometry shaders (AMD drivers don't have the extension available). On the other hand, Ati provides a hardware tessellator, while nVidia doesn't (nVidia doesn't have a tessellator in their hardware). If I recall correctly tessellation hardware is a requirement for DirectX 11, so with Ati hardware you would be able to play with this piece of technology already (there is an OpenGL extension for using the tessellator, see: GL_AMD_vertex_shader_tessellator).Last weekend I created a basic OpenGL 3.0 program on Linux. Besides a bug that made glVertexAttribPointer result in an GL_INVALID_OPERATION in case I used a Forward Compatible context, everything worked fine (I disabled the forward compatible context for now, I suppose this will be fixed soon in their drivers).All in all... I'd say nVidia is a bit quicker releasing drivers with new technology (nVidia already has OpenGL 3.1 drivers, while AMD doesn't have them yet). nVidia also supports more OpenGL extensions, although I'm not sure whether that is a big issue because OpenGL 3.0 already has most functionality you'd want as a requirement. Probably the nVidia drivers contain lesser bugs, but from what I hear AMD is catching up nicely. Besides AMD promised to support OpenGL 3.1 soon. Lets hope they also provide support for OpenCL soon (they already showed a demo I think) and all what you'd like should be available.   ;  ATI are kinda strict in glsl.. for example:* you can't cast from mat4 to mat3 using something like myMat3 = (mat3)myMat4;* you can't type a float value as integer. This won't work on ATI: float myf = 10;* you can't use indirect addressing for varying arrays.All the above can be done with nVidia.Maybe ATI fixed the drivers and all the above I just wrote is bull**it.Can anyone confirm?Cheers   ;  Personal opinion.ATI drivers are the biggest pile of crap, they have had issues with them for months which still are not fixed. Just look at the ATI driver forums to see _some_ of the complaints. I have an old ATI card to test ATI compatibility, they have depreciated old cards which is understandable and not dissimilar to NVidia. The problem is I can not create an opengl 3.0 context (or any context) on windows using the latest supported drivers for the card. I use a 7.7 version driver which seeing they are currently on 9.3 odd is just madness.I would advise to avoid ATI if possible, although using Linux I have no problems ?   ;Quote:Original post by CmpDevPersonal opinion.ATI drivers are the biggest pile of crap, they have had issues with them for months which still are not fixed. Just look at the ATI driver forums to see _some_ of the complaints. I have an old ATI card to test ATI compatibility, they have depreciated old cards which is understandable and not dissimilar to NVidia. The problem is I can not create an opengl 3.0 context (or any context) on windows using the latest supported drivers for the card. I use a 7.7 version driver which seeing they are currently on 9.3 odd is just madness.I would advise to avoid ATI if possible, although using Linux I have no problems ?Ehm... driver Catalyst 7.7? You must have a really old card which isn't able to support OpenGL 3.0 anyway because that driver version is ancient (August 2007). All graphics cards starting at the Ati 9500 (R300 that is I believe, a graphics card introduced in 2002: wikipedia) are supported by driver version 9.3 which supports OpenGL 3.0. Driver 9.3 was the last driver to support non DirectX 10 hardware (so anything before the HD2xxx series isn't supported anymore in 9.4 which is the most recent driver).If you are using such an ancient driver I don't think you know anything about the progressions made since Ati was taken over by AMD. They really came a long way since then. OpenGL support is fairly good nowadays (check the forums). I think everybody saying that Ati OpenGL support is crap hasn't looked into it for the last 1.5 years.   ;Quote:Original post by TheFlyingDutchmanEhm... driver Catalyst 7.7? You must have a really old card which isn't able to support OpenGL 3.0 anyway because that driver version is ancient (August 2007). All graphics cards starting at the Ati 9500 (R300 that is I believe, a graphics card introduced in 2002: wikipedia) are supported by driver version 9.3 which supports OpenGL 3.0. Driver 9.3 was the last driver to support non DirectX 10 hardware (so anything before the HD2xxx series isn't supported anymore in 9.4 which is the most recent driver).I can not create any context with the card and it does support OpenGL 3.0.Quote:If you are using such an ancient driver I don't think you know anything about the progressions made since Ati was taken over by AMD.It is a driver which works, which is more than can be said for the newer drivers.Quote:I think everybody saying that Ati OpenGL support is crap hasn't looked into it for the last 1.5 years.If I had not looked into it, how would I know that the drivers do not work. I constantly get my hopes up that the latest greatest driver release will fix issues and each time I am disappointed and have to reinstall older drivers. I even go to the trouble of reporting the issues so that they are aware of them through the catalyst feedback but to no avail.As for suggesting I look at the forums are you joking me? I suggested looking at their forums to show how rubbish the drivers are!   ;Quote:Original post by CmpDevQuote:Original post by TheFlyingDutchman...I can not create any context with the card and it does support OpenGL 3.0.If your card supports OpenGL 3.0 it means it is an Ati HD2xxx or newer (older cards do not support OpenGL 3.0), that also means the newest drivers support your card (like I said, the 9.3 driver was the last driver to support older cards than the HD2xxx). So new drivers for your card are still released every month.Quote:Quote:...It is a driver which works, which is more than can be said for the newer drivers.I can't imagine what kind of things do work with the 7.7 driver and don't work with 9.4 (or any other driver since 7.7). Really, drivers have made such enormous progressions since the 7.7 driver. What is so important in that 7.7 driver for you that has not been working since? Is it perhaps a single application that doesn't work for you with any other driver than 7.7? In that case I'd say: fix the application, it might contain some work arround or things not following the specs that accidentally work with the 7.7 drivers. Really, I can't think about anything else for which you'd need the ancient (yes, I say it again, that driver really is ancient) 7.7 driver.Quote:Quote:...If I had not looked into it, how would I know that the drivers do not work. I constantly get my hopes up that the latest greatest driver release will fix issues and each time I am disappointed and have to reinstall older drivers. I even go to the trouble of reporting the issues so that they are aware of them through the catalyst feedback but to no avail.Again, what kind of issues are you talking about? I never heard anybody claiming they had to revert to such an ancient driver to get things working again.Quote:As for suggesting I look at the forums are you joking me? I suggested looking at their forums to show how rubbish the drivers are!No I'm not joking. On the OpenGL.org forums for example I've read enough claims that the Ati drivers are getting better, that they work well enough and aren't a big problem anymore. I know how much people are trolling about Ati/AMD on the forums, and most of them back that up by experiences that are more than 1.5 years old.I don't think it is honest to give your advise based on the 7.7 driver, which apparently is for you the only working driver, probably anybody else has absolutely no problems with the new 9.4 driver (or 9.3 if you have an older graphics card).   