Talk:ATI Mobility Radeon 7500

Hi, is there a way to use dri, drm and opengl with this card?

Functionality of ATI Mobility Radeon 7500

I have a Thinkpad R50 with the ATI Mobility Radeon 7500, currently running Gentoo Linux. (and dual-boot with WinXP)

Direct rendering works with both radeon and ati (gatos) drivers, though the radeon is significantly (20%-30%) faster. I have not tried fglrx.

TV-out works with both VESA and ati (gatos) drivers, though both have problems. Using the VESA driver there is no acceleration, and the system is not fast enough to act as a mythfrontend without dropping frames rather badly. Using the ati driver performance is acceptable, but the colors are washed out (practically gone) and the contrast is "odd". The image looks kind like the old "posterization" photo process, where contrast is mostly reduced, but past a certain scale becomes extreme.

In either case, I had to use atitvout to activate the svideo. It complained about VBE, but did the job. I was not able to get both displays working simultaneously.

Only use external display

I can't figure out how to configure X.org to only use the external VGA display. Xinerama works fine, but I don't want both displays enabled. Also, it turns off both when I close the lid. Anyone figure this stuff out? Kkinder 21:57, 24 August 2006 (CEST)

HAL bug

According to this bug report, Ubuntu is not giving the radeon video card its proper permissions. Using:

Section "DRI"
 Mode 0666
EndSection

Does not work anymore.

Check your own permissions under /dev/dri/card0 . If it reads crw-rw----, then you need to set your permissions to 666.

Create the file: /etc/udev/rules.d/45-dev-dri-permissions.rules and add:

KERNEL=="card[0-9]", MODE="0666"

Restart the X server and you should get better 3d performance!

Alternate xorg.conf

Using a Thinkpad T30 with an ATI Mobility Radeon 7500, the recommended xorg.conf file gives me an average of 250 FPS with glxgears on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron). The following xorg.conf setup gives me about 1200 FPS. The major trade-off is a reduced default depth of 16.

Section "Device"
  Identifier "ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500]"
  Driver "radeon"
  BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
  Option "AGPMode" "4"
  Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps"
  Option "AGPFastWrite" "true"
  Option "EnablePageFlip" "on"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
  Identifier "Generic Monitor"
  Option "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
  Identifier "Default Screen"
  Device "ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500]"
  Monitor "Generic Monitor"
  DefaultDepth 16
  SubSection "Display"
    Depth 16
    Modes "1024x768"
  EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "DRI"
  Mode 0666
EndSection