I’m using openSuse 11.3 with KDE 4.4.4.
My graphics card is an Asus EAH 5450 with an ATI radeon HD 5450 GPU.
I’m using the opensource radeon driver.
When I open sysinfo:/ in Konqueror, I see the following info:
Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc
Model:
2D driver: radeon
3D driver: swrast (No 3D Acceleration) (7.8.2))
How do I switch on 3d acceleration without installing the proprietary driver from ATI/AMD?
I know this must be possible because on another computer, I have also openSuse 11.3 with KDE 4.4.4
and an ATI radeon HD 4350 installed and it has 3d enabled directly after installation of openSuse with the opensource radeon driver.
If you type “man radeon” on your openSUSE-11.3 you will note your HD 4350 listed as being supported. But your HD 5450 is NOT listed.
openSUSE-11.4 users who type “man radeon” will see the HD 5450 listed as a CEDAR chipset (and supported).
I suspect to get 3D on that ‘newer’ hardware you need a newer driver that does not come with openSUSE-11.3. I possibly you need Mesa-7.10 (instead of Mesa-7.8 that comes with 11.3) and also libdrm-2.4.24 (instead of libdrm-2.4.21 that comes with 11.3) and probably also need version 6.14.0 of the open source ATI driver in the xorg-x11-driver-video rpm (instead of version 6.13.0 that comes with 11.3).
If you really want 3D in your HD5450, maybe its time to consider updating to openSUSE-11.4 ? [note installing 11.4 with a Radeon open source driver on radeon HD hardware is a bit tricky, as one needs to boot with either x11failsafe boot code (FBDEV) or nomodeset boot code (radeonhd driver), and then edit the 50-device.conf file so that the ‘radeon’ driver will be loaded with ‘nomodeset’ boot code. Without the 50-device.conf file edit in 11.4 I doubt that the ‘nomdeset’ will work as I do not think the radeonhd driver supports an HD5450].
I’ll consider installing 11.4 or wait till 12.1 has arrived.
In the meantime I installed the proprietary driver which was very easy because of simply adding an extra repo.
In the past I always used nvidia based graphic cards because the support for Linux was better.
Nowadays ATI/AMD’s support for Linux is better (because they provided detailed hardware info
to the community which NVidia is still refusing) so now I prefer ATI’s graphic cards.
I installed openSuse 11.4 and now 3d acceleration works without the need to install the proprietary driver.
The opensourcedriver is installed by default and I didn’t need to do any manual configuration.
Excellent work!
Display Info
Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc
Model:
2D driver: radeon
3D driver: R600 classic (7.10.2)
All desktop effects work. I also tried some games like Doom, Quake and Quake III Arena.
WRT my views, a couple of years ago, for laptop computers, I preferred the AMD radeon hardware over the nVidia hardware, because nVidia were going through a phase of MAJOR quality problems on their graphic hardware. Many people (some of whom I know) experienced annoying failures of nVidia hardware, and this was most disturbing for those with laptops. (as opposed to those with desktops who can easily ‘slap in’ a replacement graphic card). nVidia took a massive financial write-off on their financial statements, to pay for the high quantify of exchange/replacements/refunds they had to support due to those problems.
Hence I purchased a Dell Studio 1537 laptop over 2 years ago, specifically with AMD radeon hardware (HD3450) so as to not be bitten by those nVidia card quality issues (which I believe has now/since been solved). I also like AMD radeon hardware in a laptop because both the radeon open source driver, and the proprietary AMD Catalyst fglxr driver, provide excellend ‘xrandr’ support which is good for driving an external monitor/projector from a laptop. (Still having typed that, I note there are a couple of applications that provide external monitor/projector support with nVidia hardware).
For a desktop, I still have a preference/affinity for nVidia.
On my mother’s desktop PC in Canada (which I support remotely from here in Europe) she has AMD Radeon hardware instead of nVidia hardware. … and since I do not want to risk her running into an X window display problem when a new proprietary driver is installed, I have kept her on the Radeon openSource graphic driver. And that has been working well for her and thus far she has not had a problem with many different kernel updates.
… and since I do not want to risk her running into an X window display problem when a new proprietary driver is installed, I have kept her on the Radeon openSource graphic driver. And that has been working well for her and thus far she has not had a problem with many different kernel updates.