I was curious if the OSS drivers were "featureful enough" to run VO now.
I am one of the people who have a relatively new laptop with a chipset ATI isn't supporting with their proprietary drivers anymore so can't upgrade to the distros using the new x.org.
If noone has tried this yet, I will try to pickup a cheap/older ATI card later in the year and try it in one of my "spare" PC's (like the lonely one in the basement that hasn't been powered-on in several months.)

They probably won't work. From what I've heard, the free ATI drivers are horribly buggy and don't do 3d acceleration very well at all. If I were you, I'd set aside a small partition and install whichever distro you want to try alongside your current one and just give it a shot. You might get lucky.

But seriously, what kind of crap-ass distro are you using that won't let you revert to Xorg 1.5?

I tried the free drivers a year or two ago on a 9550. The game was playable as long as shaders were disabled. I'll give it a try on my newer chip.

AFAIK those unsupported igps are some weird in between thing. A modern chip with an old 3d engine. So the 3d part of the driver should be pretty mature. If you can get it working at all...

Okay.. got it working. On my overclocked 780g I get these framerates:

fglrx | radeon-git
180 | 50 - open space
90 | 30 - latos m7 flying through the field
50 | 20 - some storm in odia

That's at 1024x768 with video settings maxed out except shaders and compression off. Graphics settings on medium.

so yeah .. it's pretty slow compared to fglrx. But other than a crash and some messed up background texture after one jump it seems to be usable. I used to have those background issues with older cards too though ..so maybe it's the games fault.

Going to give it a go "for real" now. I recently did a bunch of PC changes (tried Manriva instead of Ubuntu to see if I could get my Atheros card to stop being flakey - no luck there.)
So, I decided to try the latest version of Ubuntu (64 bit version of 9.10 aka Karmic) and it runs. Not as nicely as the fglrx (I had to turn the graphics WAY down), but it it defintely playable and I am going to try it as my "permanent" solution.
I also saw that the latest kernel is supposed to include better/faster/etc ATI support, so when a mainstream distro comes out with that, I may give it a go too.

I think you're talking about Kernel Mode Setting. It doesn't necessarily mean that ATI drivers will run any faster, but it does cut the amount of time it takes to switch between X and console framebuffer.

Also, it's been available on Archlinux for a while now :p

Urk. I am trying it now.. At the login screen, vendetta is hoggin 100% of a core.. As if it were running in software rendering mode.. but it definitely is not.

Update: updated my mesa to git version, now it works. (as anyone online can tell the last day or two :P)

EZR

You make the fallacious assumption that anyone pays attention to whether or not you are online.

Congrats on getting it working though.