Screen corruption on Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB

English Hardware
#1

I’m getting some weird corruption on the screen in openSUSE 11.4 or Ubuntu Natty and wondered if anyone has seen this or could offer some suggestions. My config: Athlon XP 2400+, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB (R350NH), 1GB RAM, fresh install of either OS. It manifests as evenly spaced columns of discolored pixels, which change as different windows are drawn on the screen. At first I tried compiling the latest radeon drivers from git, but that didn’t help. I’ve also tried nomodeset, x11failsafe, turning off desktop effects, turning off dri/dri2, and nothing seems to help. The corruption appears even if I switch to the vesa driver or fbdev. Any suggestions? This has got me stumped.

lspci
dmesg
Xorg.0.log
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#2

*The corruption appears even if I switch to the vesa driver *
possible hardware problem.

#3

When you turn on your computer do you see it on BIOS screen? If so, the problem lies within the memory of your graphics adaptor, most likely problems with the smoldering.

#4

I think the Radeon 9800 Pro is considered legacy hardware by AMD and it is no longer supported by them for MS-Windows nor for Linux.

I note this bug report: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=678264

See post #29 which has this:


Workaround for R5xx users (Radeon X1xx series)
-----------------------------------------------

- disable KMS by adding 'nomodeset' to kernel boot options 
  (/boot/grub/menu.lst).

- add the following section to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-device.conf

  Section "Module"
    Disable "dri"
    Disable "dri2"
  EndSection

- use this "Device" in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf./50-device.conf

  Section "Device"
    Identifier "Default Device"

    Driver "radeonhd"
    Option "AccelMethod" "xaa"
  EndSection


Workaround for R3xx/R4xx users (Radeon 9600/X300/Xxxx)
------------------------------------------------------

- disabled KMS by adding 'nomodeset' to boot options. 

- add the following section to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-device.conf

  Section "Module"
    Disable "dri"
    Disable "dri2"
  EndSection

I note when I type ‘man radeon’ that for the 9800 PRO I get:


R350        Radeon 9800PRO/9800SE/9800, FireGL X2

suggesting that the Radeon 9800 PRO is an R350.

Hence I recommend you do the following:

  • disable KMS by adding ‘nomodeset’ to boot options.
    .
  • add the following section to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-device.conf

  Section "Module"
    Disable "dri"
    Disable "dri2"
  EndSection

Then reboot and test.

#5

Thanks for the replies, guys. I think this is a hardware issue after all, because at first, Windows looked fine, but after a while I started getting the same thing while at the login screen or while playing games.

#6

That usually happens when you have problems with the video memory, and most times it’s problems with the smoldering… Since the card will not get any better, you can always try the heat gun trick in an attempt to fix it :slight_smile:

It’s more or less the same used in the YLOD PS3 fix :slight_smile: