Thinkpads Forum

i have a couple games, going to buy a t400, How are the ATI cards from the t400 on Linux? any major issues? are there ati drivers? or are they junk?

Hi dux5,

I'm sorry games - Linux?!?! Games are the only reason I have Windoze in my house!

The ATI drivers for Linux have come along way and are fairly stable, although I do still prefer Nvidia for Linux.

Having said that, I would not be expecting the same level of performance that you would get from my desktop Nvidia GTX 670. You will be on a GPU that's at least 5 years old, so performance for gaming will not be that great.

Most Linux games can be installed from your distros repositories, using apt, yum or whatever installer your distro uses, (I still prefer to compile from source).

BTW, If the games that you have are for Microsith Windows, then you will need to install WINE, http://www.winehq.org/ , in order to install the games, (or any other MS application), under Linux. Be advise that your Windows games may or my not work, you can check here to see if your games will run: http://appdb.winehq.org/ .

I hope this helps.

zog

most of my games are older then 5 years, they are all supported on Linux

steam is now on Linux..

One issue might be that the proprietary ATI driver (fglrx) has dropped support for the ATI 3470 chip a while ago. I still run Debian Squeeze on my T400 and the version of fglrx still supports it though. There is also a free driver but when I checked a year ago its performance wasn't up to par with the ATI driver by a long way if I recall.