I’m not sure how many have seen this, but a bunch of independent video game developers have put together a fundraiser for the EFF and Childsplay charity. Basically, you specify how much you’re willing to pay for a set of five (though it seems to have gone up to six now) video games, and how you want the money to be divided between the developers and the charities. The fundraiser finishes in two days.

The best part is that the games are cross-platform and work natively under Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. My personal favorite is World of Goo, but all of the games have their strong points.

All of the games work under Fedora 13 (x86_64), though a couple of them needed a bit of finessing to get them to run. There seems to be some weird issues with the bundled SDL libraries, so I just removed all of the bundled libraries and installed the corresponding Fedora libraries.

I’m just glad that there are game developers out there that are focusing on Linux.

Last May I bought an ATI Radeon HD4830 video card for my music/gaming system. I would have gone with nVidia, but my last laptop had an nVidia graphics driver and I got quite frustrated with trying to keep the binary drivers up-to-date on it (even using RPM Fusion, I would run into odd problems every now and then).

I wanted a card that would have open drivers. Now, I knew when I bought the 4830 that it wasn’t supported by the open radeon driver, but I also knew it would be ready soon, and I figured I could use the closed drivers until then.

And that’s when I found out that ATI’s closed-source binary Catalyst driver is so poorly maintained, it makes Windows 95 look up-to-date. It took several months for AMD/ATI to put out a Catalyst driver that would support Fedora 11, and they still haven’t put out a Catalyst driver that supports Fedora 12.

The driver also is extremely buggy. Any release after 9.8 wouldn’t work with my original motherboard (see this bug), and after upgrading to a new Intel motherboard and processor a couple of weeks ago, I had random crashes that ranged from once every couple of days to once every fifteen minutes.

If I could ssh into the computer (which was only about half of the time), I’d see some message about an “ASIC hang”. Googling it didn’t give much information. I originally thought it had something to do with the power supply, but even a brand name power supply didn’t fix the problem.

Yesterday, I finally had enough. I wiped the hard drive and did a clean install of Fedora 12. Yeah, Catalyst won’t work, but I’d been hearing good things about mesa-drivers-experimental, so I decided to give it a go.

So, first the down side to switching:

• Nexuiz runs much slower. With the binary drivers, I was able to run the game at 1920×1080 ultimate quality at 50-60 fps. With the experimental driver, it’s down to 3-4 fps (though medium quality works great at 50-60 fps).
• XBMC ProjectM visualizations are slow. Again, with the binary drivers, the ProjectM visualizations ran at full speed, while with the experimental drivers, they run at 5-6 fps.

But, the good news is:

• I can play my 3D games just fine. Even though I can’t run them at full quality, I can still play my games.
• XBMC movies run at full speed. Even with the cool effects that XBMC uses for its controls, movies work perfectly.
• XBMC slideshows work fine, with panning and zooming. The slideshow work the way they are supposed to with no delays at all. In fact, I may be imagining it, but I think there was the occasional slight delay in catalyst that isn’t there now
• THE SYSTEM DOESN’T HANG/CRASH. I haven’t had a single system hang since switching. And that is worth far more to me than the best Nexuiz framerate ever.

Using the open experimental drivers brings me back to the reason I bought ATI in the first place, and I can finally say that I’m glad I bought ATI. Binary drivers are a pain to keep up with, and I’m so glad I don’t have to deal with that any more. I’m hoping to see things running even better in Fedora 13.

Update: The story continues here.