Tons of laptops come with the Express 200M chipset( x200 based ) and ATI has been REALLY bad at supporting this. A year ago, their driver worked in full 2D and 3D glory but you had to patch their opensource driver code to get it to compile. The next release of the driver broke DRI support and its not worked since.
Well, DRI will work if you disable onboard video memory and use only shared memory. There are some systems that'll work with a combination of 128MB of onboard and 128MB of shared memory configuration but most can't use any onboard memory. The result is a 30% drop in video performance and the loss of 128MB of system memory.
So if you're looking for a laptop with Linux Video support, Nvidia is still the way to go. BTW, the latest ATI driver shipped with a daemon which will watch the GPU temperature and throttle the clock if it gets too hot. An HP service manager told me that they've had trouble with some ATI chips overheating so my guess is that this is ATI's solution.
The next thing you know, we'll be purchasing laptops ADVERTISED as having 5GHz CPUs and 1GHz GPUs only to find out that in actual use, they're getting throttled down to 2GHz CPU and 300MHz GPU to keep the unit from exploding in flames or burning legs.
I hope Toms Hardware does a test of Linux Laptops. Maybe ATI will fix this damn problem once people know about it. :-/
Well, DRI will work if you disable onboard video memory and use only shared memory. There are some systems that'll work with a combination of 128MB of onboard and 128MB of shared memory configuration but most can't use any onboard memory. The result is a 30% drop in video performance and the loss of 128MB of system memory.
So if you're looking for a laptop with Linux Video support, Nvidia is still the way to go. BTW, the latest ATI driver shipped with a daemon which will watch the GPU temperature and throttle the clock if it gets too hot. An HP service manager told me that they've had trouble with some ATI chips overheating so my guess is that this is ATI's solution.
The next thing you know, we'll be purchasing laptops ADVERTISED as having 5GHz CPUs and 1GHz GPUs only to find out that in actual use, they're getting throttled down to 2GHz CPU and 300MHz GPU to keep the unit from exploding in flames or burning legs.
I hope Toms Hardware does a test of Linux Laptops. Maybe ATI will fix this damn problem once people know about it. :-/
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