ATI and Nvidia Broken on RHEL 6

Update: In the comments below, Sean Kane provides a detailed explanation of how to get NVIDIA to work. Thank you very much, Sean!

Second Update: For those of you using ATrpms Repo, the NVIDIA kernel modules can be installed directly, and kept up to date that way. You still have to modify the Grub configuration, but it’s about as simple as it gets.

I don’t know that any one person is doing this, nor any one focused decision of a group, but the net result of all the decisions involved have made it impossible to run either the Radeon or Nvidia proprietary drivers on RHEL 6.

First, there is no third party repository for the drivers as with Fedora 12. Second, all those Fedora 12 users who tried and failed to work with the provided package from the manufacturer have shown me no reason to expect any better for RHEL 6. It’s bad enough ATI and Nvidia don’t really care, but I detect an on-going trend among developers and project managers to sabotage what little possibilities are left.

For the past three days I’ve been spending a lot of time on the Net searching with various different search engines the various techniques. Most of them who succeed at all have to go through manually blocking kernel modules, mucking about with initramfs, and some have downgraded their X.org packages. The official setup pretty much forces the bundled inferior drivers early in the boot process. While this makes for a very nice boot display, with a good high resolution screen and all, it also means you have to fight tooth and nail to keep them from loading.

Having tried all the various tricks others claim work, I have struck out completely. With my onboard Nvidia chipset, the Nouveau driver offers no better than 280FPS for my GeForce 6150. With the Radeon driver, it’s about the same on my HD 4350 card (512MB VRAM), but adding the experimental glx drivers at least gets me about 800FPS on a card capable of some 3000FPS or better. It’s okay if that’s the best you can do, developers, but for goodness’ sake, stop making it so impossible to work around your puny results!

At any rate, this is probably my only real complaint about RHEL 6. Otherwise, try and take it from me. This is great!