As of openSUSE-11.3 Milestone6 Novell/SuSE-GmbH have announced this driver superseded by the radeon driver, so it is possible the radeon driver may function better on RadeonHD hardware than the radeonhd.
checking in yast I can see the driver xorg-x11-driver-video-radeonhd is already installed. But as per the above quote - would I be better off removing this and using the radeon driver that is part of xorg-x11-driver-video ?
Haven’t installed the card yet - just doing a bit of research before I do to make sure things go smoothly.
both of the drivers I noted above are the opensource drivers - not the ATI driver. The quote above suggests that radeon opensource driver has now superseded the radeon-hd opensource driver as of OS 11.3.
Just wanted to confirm this is correct and if so I would use the radeon over the HD driver for my HD card.
I know what you had written, I was just adding extra detail.
Radeon-HD would be my guess, but I would just try and see.
Of course someone with intelligence may come along and provide you with the answer that I can’t
Just because the rpm is installed, does not mean the driver is loaded. I use a nVidia card, with a nv (and also on different PC nvidia) driver, and on both PCs I also have the xorg-x11-driver-video-radeonhd rpm installed.
As you probably noted, you have a choice of FBDEV, VESA, radeon, radeonhd, and fglrx (the Catalyst 10.8 driver). My recommendation is to try each of the last 3 and see which one’s work best for you in 2D and in 3D.
For an alternative R500/R600/R700 driver see radeonhd. Radeon has some features not available in radeonhd and vice versa, but generally they are starting to be quite close while radeon supports all the cards and radeonhd only r5xx-r7xx.
The differences between radeon and radeonhd with r5xx-r7xx series:
radeon supports the kernel mode-setting (KMS)
radeon supports tear-free video playback
radeon supports TV-out
(radeonhd was for long the one with HDMI audio support, but 2.6.33 kernel now has HDMI audio support for ati as well)
The reasons for two different drivers are historical, and starting to be a thing of the past as all the new DRM (direct rendering manager), 3D and KMS (kernel mode setting) work is done in a single place. radeonhd driver will be continued to be developed as long as it is useful.
Which I guess kind of indicates either of the drivers is fine for use with my card at the moment.
I’ll have a play round and see which works best - if any difference at all.
The radeonhd driver is now officially dead. It always lacked a lot of important functionality compared to radeon, and the few
distinct features it had, have been meanwhile added also to radeon. If you need to use an open source driver, radeon will
give you the best experience, preferrably with a 2.6.35 or newer kernel (to get initial power management support, which is
still experimental though).
If you need fast 3D and/or efficient power management there’s (unfortunately) no other way than to install fglrx (i.e. Catalyst).