DRI for recent ATI cards
Nicolas George
Between outdated websites, lack of documentation on X.org official site, and
so on, I am a bit confused.
Does anyone know the status of accelerated 3D for recent ATI cards with Free
drivers? Is there anything working? With a snapshot of X.org? third-party
patches?
I am mostly interested in the Radeon Mobility X700 PCIE case, but any
information would be useful.
Mikko Rauhala
<nicolas$geo...@salle-s.org> wrote:
> Does anyone know the status of accelerated 3D for recent ATI cards with Free
> drivers? Is there anything working? With a snapshot of X.org? third-party
> patches?
>
> I am mostly interested in the Radeon Mobility X700 PCIE case, but any
> information would be useful.
There's good and bad news; the good news is, X700 is covered by the
r300.sourceforge.net driver, which is a part of the X.org tree nowadays.
The bad news is, it's not that stable at this point. Progress seems to
be made, though.
Personally, I have an X800 XL PCIE which is supported by the free X.org
radeon driver shipped with Ubuntu Dapper (so I suppose it comes standard
with late X.org releases, though I'm not positive that the Ubuntu guys
haven't reached into CVS for r300/400 support). Some applications seem
to work fine, while some may trigger even crashes.
--
Mikko Rauhala - m...@iki.fi - <URL:http://www.iki.fi/mjr/>
Transhumanist - WTA member - <URL:http://www.transhumanism.org/>
Singularitarian - SIAI supporter - <URL:http://www.singinst.org/>
Nicolas George
<slrnecfau...@sbz-30.cs.Helsinki.FI>, a écrit :
> There's good and bad news; the good news is, X700 is covered by the
> r300.sourceforge.net driver, which is a part of the X.org tree nowadays.
Thanks, that is good news indeed. I had a bad experience with the ati-2
driver for older cards, until the merge to the XFree86 tree, so the merge in
the main tree is very encouraging.
> Personally, I have an X800 XL PCIE which is supported by the free X.org
> radeon driver shipped with Ubuntu Dapper (so I suppose it comes standard
> with late X.org releases, though I'm not positive that the Ubuntu guys
> haven't reached into CVS for r300/400 support).
I see on packages.ubuntu.com that Dapper uses xserver-xorg-video-ati 6.5.7.3
(I do not see the corresponding tag in the CVS, though), and I have a 6.5.8
from Debian, so it should work for me without upgrade.
May I ask what the DRI-related sections of your xorg.conf look like?
Mikko Rauhala
<nicolas$geo...@salle-s.org> wrote:
> I see on packages.ubuntu.com that Dapper uses xserver-xorg-video-ati 6.5.7.3
> (I do not see the corresponding tag in the CVS, though), and I have a 6.5.8
> from Debian, so it should work for me without upgrade.
>
> May I ask what the DRI-related sections of your xorg.conf look like?
Nothing really special, here's the main parts:
Section "Module"
Load "GLcore"
[...]
Load "dri"
[...]
Load "glx"
EndSection
Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection
You may also have to spesify the radeon driver directly instead
of going through the "ati" driver; I've gathered that the ati one
doesn't properly defer to radeon for the newer cards. (Well, that
one might be fixed already, but something to keep in mind.)
Nicolas George
> Nothing really special, here's the main parts:
>
> Section "Module"
> Load "GLcore"
> [...]
> Load "dri"
> [...]
> Load "glx"
> EndSection
Thanks. I was only missing GLcore and dri. I do not know why I disabled them
in the first place -- probably for older versions of X.org. The result is
not really satisfactory, speedwise, but at least I know it works, and I can
keep an eye on the progress (or lack of thereof).
And I just realised that the PCI id of my card was added to the kernel
between the 2.6.16 and 2.6.17, and I am still running 2.6.16, so I should
try and upgrade.
> You may also have to spesify the radeon driver directly instead
> of going through the "ati" driver; I've gathered that the ati one
> doesn't properly defer to radeon for the newer cards. (Well, that
> one might be fixed already, but something to keep in mind.)
That was not necessary for me.
Thanks for the details.
Nicolas George
> Thanks. I was only missing GLcore and dri. I do not know why I disabled them
> in the first place -- probably for older versions of X.org. The result is
> not really satisfactory, speedwise, but at least I know it works, and I can
> keep an eye on the progress (or lack of thereof).
>
> And I just realised that the PCI id of my card was added to the kernel
> between the 2.6.16 and 2.6.17, and I am still running 2.6.16, so I should
> try and upgrade.
Hum, I spoke too fast, I did not notice that I was still with software
rendering. I rebooted with a 2.6.17 kernel, and the result was
significatively faster: I tried with Celestia and Stellarium, and it is much
smoother than with software rendering, although Celestia textures are
somewhat garbled at some zoom level.
Thanks for your help.
Mikko Rauhala
<nicolas$geo...@salle-s.org> wrote:
> Hum, I spoke too fast, I did not notice that I was still with software
> rendering. I rebooted with a 2.6.17 kernel, and the result was
> significatively faster: I tried with Celestia and Stellarium, and it is much
> smoother than with software rendering, although Celestia textures are
> somewhat garbled at some zoom level.
>
> Thanks for your help.
Sure. Interesting that Celestia works for you, since for me it caused
a hard crash pretty quick. 'course, we've different chips, but the
driver may be getting some love too in the meantime :]
Mikko Rauhala
<nicolas$geo...@salle-s.org> wrote:
> Hum, I spoke too fast, I did not notice that I was still with software
> rendering. I rebooted with a 2.6.17 kernel, and the result was
> significatively faster: I tried with Celestia and Stellarium, and it is much
> smoother than with software rendering, although Celestia textures are
> somewhat garbled at some zoom level.
>
> Thanks for your help.
Sure. Interesting that Celestia works for you, since for me it caused
a hard crash pretty quick. 'course, we've different chips, but the
driver may have been getting some love too in the meantime, since you
appeared to have a slightly newer version :]