X.org free driver support for recent ATI cards [LWN.net]

X.org free driver support for recent ATI cards

Posted Aug 16, 2006 2:28 UTC (Wed) by nicku (subscriber, #777)
In reply to: X.org, distributors, and proprietary modules by mrshiny
Parent article: X.org, distributors, and proprietary modules

The sad reality is that there is no open source driver that meets my needs. If there were, I'd use it, but it JUST DOESN'T EXIST.

I use ATI Radeon 9250 cards on all our machines for which free 3D support is excellent, however these cards cannot plug into current motherboards.

At a recent SLUG presentation, an Xorg developer spoke of better support for some later ATI cards in Xorg. Is there free support for later ATI video cards (those that support “PCI Express” motherboards) in Xorg 7.1?

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X.org free driver support for recent ATI cards

Posted Aug 16, 2006 21:42 UTC (Wed) by droberge (guest, #10852) [Link]

I recently purchased a PCI Express motherboard and a Radeon X800 GTO card. The 'radeon' driver in X.org 7.1, along with the DRI kernel drivers in 2.6.17 and the latest Mesa support this out of the box, although I haven't had it long enough to see if the 3D is truly stable. AFAICT the 2D portion of the card is the same as earlier cards so the 2D portion of the driver works just fine. The driver supports the higher 9000-series Radeons as well as the X-series (but not the X1000 series).

It was a little difficult to find information on the status of the driver, but the documentation in the DRI Wiki (http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/) is getting better every day.