hows ati radeon driver support in linux

[walterh]

how is the driver support for ati radeon
and where can i get some good information on driver development
linuxvideo.org/gatos site is down at the moment that i am writing this so does anybody know of a backup site or any other site.

 

[terracon]

What exactly would you like to know? The radeon (r100) works with xfree 4.1.0. Most distros shipping now should have Xfree 4.1.0. Don't even bother with anything else. The card works for most things I have thrown at it. There are some problems in games like descent 3/fakk2/Soldier Of Fortune. Tribes 2 isn't bad but there is some things that don't show up perfectly but not bad. As far as performance goes you'll have to brute force things with a 1ghz+ cpu to get descent performance in things and I would say don't even bother with anything less than the 64meg ddr vivo card if you want to play games at descent framerate. Last time I checked q3a was about 10-15 fps slower. So in most things I say you an expect between 10 to 20 fps slower in linux. I haven't tested everything in both windows and linux. I only own the linux version of things and q3a is the only thing I have benchmarked. As for what features don't work there's no t&l/fsaa/s3tc . There's also the vivo or aiw cards. Vivo and capture is working in development gatos to some extent . I think gatos's stuff is going to be merged with xfree at some point so hopefully that makes it into xfree 4.2.0 which is slated for November they say. There's the 7200/7500/8500 line now. The 7200 is supposed to work same goes with the 7500. But the 8500 has only 2d support. Someone said they are working on the 8500 3d so at some point that will be included in xfree/dri. Just fyi ati did the 2d work for the 7500/8500 and is in xfree cvs so that will be in the next release. It's just 3d that is up in the air and being worked on and should show up sometime.

 

[Soccerman]

the Radeon has open source drivers, which means basically if you want to update your drivers, you update your kernel and XFree86 to get better support for your video card! the 'drivers' are integrated into XFree86 for the Radeon, becuase it is open source, ATi doesn't write the drivers.

as a consequence, the Open Source community loves ATi. also I haven't seen any comparison with the ATi Radeon in linux compared to the nVidia drivers (which are developed only by nVidia).

with all that said, even though my Radeon doesn't appear to be supported fully (or at all) in the XFree86 that comes with Mandrake 8.0 (which was released I think early this year if I'm not mistaken? all I remember is it was b4 summer, and I had enough time to DL it and try it out on my 56k modem, before I upgraded from the V3 to the Radeon LE, which I have now, and am running Mandrake 8.0 on) it still runs the GUI. I haven't bothered trying to check out 3D performance, considering I don't have any 3D games really for Linux, and second becuase I'm working on my Audio right now (I'm still new to linux).