Which driver for ATI Radeon HD 4800?

English Hardware
#1

When I first installed openSUSE 11.2, it has no xorg.conf of course, but it detected the subject card and loaded radeon instead of radeonhd.

When I used Sax2 to create an xorg.conf for a problem, I noticed that it for the device it created:

Section "Device"
  BoardName    "ATI Radeon 4800 Series"
  Driver       "radeonhd"
  Identifier   "Device[0]"
  Option       "monitor-DVI-I_1/analog" "Monitor[0]"
  VendorName   "ATI"
EndSection

When I rebooted with this xorg.conf, lsmod says that it’s still radeon that is loaded:

rcbell@mymachine: ~> lsmod | grep radeon
radeon                386272  2
drm                   226304  3 radeon

Why didn’t it load radeonhd?

I know that radeonhd does cause some issues with KDE desktop effects, but according to Radeon - openSUSE, the cards above X1900 should be using radeonhd.

Instead of either of these, should I try to use the ATI driver fglrx? It seems from my gleaning of forum posts that these have some problems, but I am having some desktop effect issues that maybe would be addressed with that driver.

Thanks!

#2

Have you actually installed the driver by adding the ATI repo?
ATI - openSUSE

#3

No, I haven’t installed fglrx yet, partly because I don’t see good instructions for UNinstalling it (to go back to radeon), in case it is no good). If you tell me how to do that, I’ll give it a shot.

#4

I’m not sure. I don’t use or really have enough experience with ATI
I know if it were me, I would try it out. But I know I could get myself out of it - If you know what I mean.

Maybe someone with ATI and perhaps even the same device will see this.

#5

I don’t remember exactly how I did it, as it was about a month ago, but I’m pretty sure that I was able to switch from a non-working fglrx back to radeon (I have an x800) by replacing the xorg.conf generated by fglrx with a pre-install backup copy I made. I then got rid of it by totally removing it in YaST, and then made extra-sure it was gone by running:

rpm -e $(rpm -qa | grep fglrx)

Again, that’s off of memory… so I’ve probably forgotten something important. Though I don’t remember getting rid of fglrx to be a huge hassle, so it can’t have been much more complicated than that.

In regards to your question about why radeonhd isn’t loading, did you check any of your xorg logs for error messages? They’re in /var/log and usually have lots of useful information if something doesn’t load properly. Xorg.0.log would be the first one to check for any problems.