Between outdated websites, lack of documentation on X.org official site, and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.
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/>
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?
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.)
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.
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 :]
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 :]