Radeon Driver (OSS) Tweaks?

English Hardware
#1

I am running openSUSE 11.1/KDE 4.2.0 on a Dell D531 with an ATI Radeon X1250 card. For several months I have been using the fglrx driver from radeon. However, performance was severely lacking; just recently, another ATI/KDED4 user informed me that the OSS Radeon driver was working much better for him than the fglrx driver, so I figured I’d give it a try. I reconfigured my hardware with sax2 -r -m 0=radeon.

So far, it’s working fine, but there’s no hardware acceleration. I keep hearing conflicting reports on this. Some say the radeon driver does not support 3D, others (like the guy I mentioned above) say it works fine.

Does anyone know the current status of the radeon driver? Does it support 3D or not? I suspect it may, because the Kubuntu LiveCD runs KWin effects just fine, and I don’t think they included the non-free fglrx on the LiveCD.

And if radeon does support 3D, does anyone know of applicable tweaks to make in xorg.conf for better performance?

Thanks

#2

Okay, now I’m really confused. In my xorg.conf I have the following for the device:

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "Device[0]"
	Driver      "radeon"
	VendorName  "ATI"
	BoardName   "Radeon X1200"
	Option	    "DRI"
	Option	    "monitor-PANEL" "Monitor[0]" 
        Option      "RenderAccel" "on"
        Option      "AccelMethod" "EXA"
EndSection

Looks okay. But lspic -vv returns the following entry for my card:

01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RS690M [Radeon X1200 Series] (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])                                                                                                
        Subsystem: Dell Device 0206                                                                      
        Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx-                                                                                                     
        Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx-                                                                                                      
        Latency: 64, Cache Line Size: 64 bytes                                                           
        Interrupt: pin B routed to IRQ 19                                                                
        Region 0: Memory at e0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256]                                  
        Region 2: Memory at fe9f0000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64]                               
        Region 4: I/O ports at ee00 [size=256]                                                           
        Region 5: Memory at fea00000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1]                                
        Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2                                                    
                Flags: PMEClk- DSI- D1+ D2+ AuxCurrent=0mA PME(D0-,D1-,D2-,D3hot-,D3cold-)               
                Status: D0 PME-Enable- DSel=0 DScale=0 PME-                                              
        Capabilities: [80] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask- 64bit+ Count=1/1 Enable-                  
                Address: 0000000000000000  Data: 0000                                                    
        **Kernel driver in use: fglrx_pci**[/size][/size][/size]

What’s going on here?[/size]

#3

You must reinstall Mesa.

#4

You didn’t mention uninstalling the fglrx driver. You must do that as i think it interferes with the opensource one.
For your card, RS690, i think you can use either the “radeon” or the “radeonhd” driver. I was under the impression that the radeonhd driver was the recomended one for chipsets >R500, but according to this webpage X.Org Wiki - RadeonFeature they are in the same state.
You can always try and see which one works better. No 3d acceleration yet for your card though.
regards,
Carlos