Difference between revisions of "Fglrx"

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== ATI drivers for Linux ==
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== ATI fglrx driver ==
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Linux ATI driver for select Radeon, FireGL and Mobility boards
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This is a binary-only driver which supports 3D acceleration.
  
 
How much is the speed gain versus the opensource drivers?
 
How much is the speed gain versus the opensource drivers?

Revision as of 10:36, 16 September 2005

ATI fglrx driver

This is a binary-only driver which supports 3D acceleration.

How much is the speed gain versus the opensource drivers?

- On the old drivers, I've noticed appx 40% speed gain with ATI fglrx vs open source drivers. However, there are issues with freezing/garbage after suspend, garbage when resizing desktop (ctrl-alt-plus, ctrl-alt-minus), and garbage while using VMware. The current 8.14.13 has shown 400% improvement over using "radeon" or "ati" in xorg.conf. 1200FPS glxgears! (note that glxgears isnt a benchmark tool, its so simple that its value is without any meaning... you can only compare glxgears using the same drivers/machine, if you change any of then you can have higher/lower values and in real life programs/games happend the opposite. Think in the car engine rpm, higher rpm in the same car usually its a faster car, change anything and its meaningless. ie: gears, truck, wheel size, etc make it useless)

NOTE: 2D acceleration may be disabled when 3D acceleration is enabled. This comes from the Xorg.conf file the fglrx driver provides 

  # === OpenGL Overlay ===
  # Note: When OpenGL Overlay is enabled, Video Overlay
  #       will be disabled automatically
      Option "OpenGLOverlay"              "1"

--- Just a note to the above. The 2D acceleration for that option refers to video overlay. You can use either regular Xv video overlay or make the video an opengl texture and let the OpenGL engine scale your video. It has nothing to do with 2D drawing primitives. Further, your mileage on performance may vary depending on what card you have. The open-source drivers don't support newer cards, while the ATI drivers don't support older cards. My 9200SE is supported by both and with ATI 8.12.10 drivers (newer drivers aren't always faster) my meager machine gets about 512 fps and changing ONLY the driver (and OpenGL lib) to the open source radeon driver (from Xorg 6.8.2-r2) I'm getting 707 fps. So - that 40% gain is going in the open-source favor not ATI's for my setup.

Project Homepage / Availability

http://www.ati.com/support/drivers/linux/radeon-linux.html

Status

Current version: 8.16.20 (17th August 2005)

Problems & Help

Driver Version 8.16.20: The switching between internal and external display doesn't work, because the driver blocks messing around with the chipset via ACPI. If you want to use this feature (f.e. during presentations), you should use the VESA server instead (Experienced with a R52, Kernel 2.6.11, xorg 6.8.2).

Driver Version 8.8.25: The following patch may be needed for kernels >= 2.6.10: http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33798874

Driver Version 8.8.25: For kernels >= 2.6.11-rc1 try the following patch: http://www.gehirn.org.uk/wiki/images/8.8.25-kernel-2.6.11+.patch

If the ATI driver works only without the hardware acceleration, take into consideration that fglrx_dri.so was linked against libstdc++.so.5 which may not be present if your system uses gcc-3.4. To fix this, compile gcc-3.3.5 and copy libstdc++.so.5* to /usr/lib and update the dynamic linker cache.

Troubles using software suspend : when the computer comes back of suspend, X only displays a garbaged image and the computer is frozen. You have to install vbetool and use it to save/restore the video card state. If you use swsusp2 scripts you just have to uncomment "EnableVbetool yes" in /etc/hibernate/hibernate.conf. Tested with kernel 2.6.10, Debian packaged ATI drivers and swsusp2 patch on a IBM Thinkpad T42p.

This does not seem to work on the T43: The machine displays a sligthly garbaged image and is frozen upon resume. (It does work as long as the fglrx kernel driver is not inserted.) (Tested on kernel 2.6.12-rc6 with suspend2 2.1.9 and ATI driver version 8.14.13.)

Works on the T42, tested with SuSE 9.3, kernel-default (2.6.11), ATI driver 8.14.13 (for instructions see: /usr/share/doc/packages/powersave/contrib)

Troubles with large RAM : The driver (version 8.14.13 tested on a T43) does not seem to be able to cope with large amounts of RAM: with 512 MB it works, with 1.5 GB it crashes the machine as soon as X is started. The problem is present only if the fglrx kernel module is loaded, but independetly of whether "CONFIG_HIGHMEM" is enabled (I.e. the actual amount of RAM available to the system does not seem to matter, but rather how mauch RAM is physically installed.).

A workaround is to limit RAM by kernel option mem=864m in lilo.conf (lilo) oder menu.lst (grub).

Version 8.16.20 of the driver seems to fix the problem.

Packages

Useful links

ThinkPads that may be supported

Supported chips, as found in select IBM ThinkPads:

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