ATIRadeon (original) (raw)

Summary

This page contains information about Radeon chipset naming, and some other, possibly outdated information.

The main portal for 3D acceleration on Radeon is aptly named Radeon.

  1. Summary
  2. AMD/ATI Radeon chipset 3D support
  3. AMD/ATI Radeon chipset 2D support
  4. Radeon card naming and support information
  5. Configuration
  6. Other drivers

AMD/ATI Radeon chipset 3D support

Note this tables mainly applies to x86 machines. We make a best effort to support PowerPC/Sun cards with ?OpenFirmware, but we cannot always support these due to Apple/Sun hardcoding most of the details in their drivers.

driver radeon/radeon_dri.so

Stable.

rv100 / M6

Original Radeons:

R100

Original Radeons:

rv200 / M7

driver radeon/r200_dri.so

Stable.

R200

Radeon 2:

The amounts of memory on these cards differs eg the 8800 has twice the memory as the 8700.

All are based on the R200 chipset (this is why they can all use the FireGL drivers) and have DDR.

The Radeon 9100 is a rerelease of the Radeon 8500 because it is faster than the Radeon 9000 (see below), the windows drivers offer "pixel shader supported video deblocking filtering" for this card.

rv250 / M9

Radeon 2:

rv280 / M9+

Radeon 2:

The 9200SE is a toned down version of the 9200 and has half the memory bandwidth (64 bit versus 128 bit) and lower clock speed (200 MHz versus 250 MHz).

One problem with the 9200SE is that some older XFree86 servers will not detect the chipset. To make this work, you can manually set the

You may also read http://users.actrix.co.nz/michael/radeon9200.html

driver radeon/r300_dri.so

Status (see also the r300 portal) Unstable.

Started as r300 project, currently maintained in Mesa 3D, 3D driver for r3xx-r5xx cards. To build the latest version see Building.

R300

Radeon 3:

The main difference between the 9500 cards, and the 9700 cards is the bus width, 128 bit for 9500's, 256 bit for 9700's.

The difference between the 9700 Pro, and the 9700 is clock speed. The 9700 is made by third party manufacturers.

All are based on the R300 chipset (this is probably why they can all use the FireGL drivers) and have DDR.

rv350 / M10

Radeon 3:

R350

Radeon 3:

The difference between the 9800 Pro and the 9800 is clock speed.

rv360 / M11 / M12
R360
RV370 / M22
RV380 / M24
RS400
RV410 / M26
R420 / M18
R423/R430 / M28
R480/R481
RV505
RV515 / M52 / M54 / M64
RV516
R520 / M58
RV530 / M54
RV535 / M64 / M66
RV550 / M71
RV560
RV570
R580 / M59

driver radeon/r600_dri.so

Experimental. Support has been merged to mesa 7.6 but still a lot of features are missing.

R600
RV610 / M72
RV630 / M76
RV670
R700 series

AMD/ATI Radeon chipset 2D support

Driver "radeon"

stable

All radeons have open source 2D support. Note that R600/R700 series chips (X2300, X4650 etc.) are only recently supported by the "radeon" driver.

As of September 2007, 6.7.194 driver may give better results with EXA output, instead of XAA. This will change DRI rendering performance also.

ati/radeon development

Driver "radeonhd"

under development

The new radeonhd driver was initially to offer the sole support for R500/R600/R700 cards, but nowadays also the radeon driver supports those. It's therefore overlapping with radeon's card support, and radeonhd might be merged to radeon at some point if there's no use for a separate "newer" driver.

radeonhd development

Driver "vesa"

stable

The vesa driver can be used on most cards (no acceleration).

Radeon card naming and support information

You also get fancy versions of most of these cards, e.g. VIVO, AIW, etc. This is just added functionality, i.e. stick on a TV tuner, a couple of chips.

The reason for the renaming is to simplify matters for end users i.e. bigger number = better / faster. However rv#00 chipsets are cut down and thus slower versions of the R#00 chipsets with the same model number (and are often even slower than lower-numbered chipsets). The exception is the rv200 which is actually a faster version of the r100 core.

Furthermore:

Legend:

IGP

The Radeon IGP chipsets do not have discrete video ram. They share system ram much like the Intel i8xx chips, and VIA/S3 ProSavage/Twister chips. There is support for 2D and 3D acceleration for the IGP chipsets in DRI and Mesa CVS. There is experimental 3D for Xpress 200M Northbridge integrated GPUs (june 2007).

Dualhead

All Radeon's except the 7200 (r100) have two crtcs and a built-in LVDS/TMDS controller. Not all OEMs connect these to actual ports so you may see boards that only support 1 head.

Until driver version 6.7, if you wanted to use HW accelerated 3D on both heads of a dualheaded radeon card, you had to use the Radeon MergedFB option by AlexDeucher. Since version 6.7, the driver supports Randr 1.2, which allows screen hot (un)plugging, and dynamic multiheads. Just try "xrandr --auto" to get to biggest possible mode. A big "Virtual" option is needed to allow big multiheads.

Configuration

Also see 'radeon' and 'xorg.conf' manpages.

Section "Module"
 ...
 Load  "glx"
 Load  "dri"
EndSection

Section "Device"
 Identifier "name"                 # your alias
 Driver "radeon"
 Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"
 # XAA/EXA
 Option "AccelDFS"    "1"
 # 1/0 On for PCIE, off for AGP
 # Manpage: Use  or  don't  use accelerated EXA DownloadFromScreen hook
 # when possible.
 Option "AGPMode" "1"
 # 1-8 Does not affect PCIE models.
 Option "AGPFastWrite" "1"
 # 1/0 Does not affect PCIE models. Not recommended.
 Option "GARTSize" "64"
 # 0-64 Megabytes of gart (system) memory used.
 # Wrongly defaults to 8MB sometimes, see your logfile.
 # Bigger seems better.
 Option "EnablePageFlip" "1"
 # 1/0 Increases 3D performance substantially
 # seemingly in XAA mode only
 Option "ColorTiling" "1"
 # 1/0 Increases 3D performance substantially
 # affected stability only positively on my system
EndSection

Section "DRI"
 Group        "video"
 Mode         0660
EndSection

Further finer, and per application, user-space configuration is achieved with DriConf

Other drivers

Alternatively proprietary non-libre 2D and 3D support is available through ATI/AMD's Fire GL linux driver "fglrx"