Decent Graphics card / 64 bit system / imaging

Arc Riley arcriley at gmail.com
Fri Jun 13 17:40:27 EDT 2008


On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 2:16 PM, Stephen Ryan <stephen at sryanfamily.info>
wrote:

> I looked up the drivers for this last night, because Arc seems so
> positive that these cards are fully supported


Not fully supported.  Many of the newer drivers lack features.  Some of
those limitations come from Mesa and other parts of the big puzzle which is
OpenGL-support on GNU/Linux.  Others just because the more fundamental
features were worked on first.

The wiki pages have lists of the basic (non-OpenGL) features lacking.  Most
of the OpenGL features that are lacking are not used by any GNU/Linux driver
yet and require expanding Mesa to use.


a FireGL V5250, is basically a Radeon X1600 with some tweaks,
>

It may help to know that the FireGL V5250, is not basically a Radeon x1600.
The x1600 is a rv530 chipset, which is also used with the FireGL v5200.

The FireGL v5250 is apparently similar to the Mobility Radeon x1700, both
based on the m66 chipset.  It's a fairly uncommon chipset mostly used in
laptops, and like many things for laptops, support is unpredictable.

To clarify, my statements regarding Radeon are specific to desktop video.
This does not extend to ATI chipsets for laptops, PDAs, game systems, etc,
however:


Arc, where are you getting your drivers from?


Your chipset is apparently supported by the radeonhd driver:

http://wiki.x.org/wiki/radeonhd

Give it a shot, see if you can't get it working.  It is new, so if you run
into trouble there's the #radeonhd channel on freenode, their mailing list,
and their bug tracker.  They're extremely energetic, and many are being paid
by Novell and AMD to work on it.  I'm sure they'd be happy to help work out
any issues you run into.

I work on an OpenGL game engine, not drivers.  All I can say is that neither
I nor anyone I work with have not been able to get a desktop Radeon to
work.  We've had to ask questions a few times, sure, but that's to be
expected from new code.

Remember, AMD only released the specs a few months ago, and as I said
they've been developing these drivers at an astonishing pace.  If it just
doesn't work, file a bug report and wait a week.
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