ati drivers fail -- migrating to ubuntu

Bruno Wolff III bruno at wolff.to
Mon Sep 7 23:50:22 UTC 2009


On Mon, Sep 07, 2009 at 18:26:35 -0400,
  Kevin Abbey <kevinabbey at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> The opensource drivers work fine for a single monitor and 2D work.  I
> support bio-informatics and computational biology applications that
> require 3D and OpenGL support.  I understand that only the proprietary
> drivers support this.  Since AMD released the API for the Radeon chips
> it is expected that the open source radeon driver will get better in
> time.  It would be nicer if AMD just merged their code with a license
> that allowed external contributions.

That depends on what cards you are getting. r500 based cards should have
3d support in current Fedora. I don't know about dual monitor use. My
work machine has an rv530 based card and I get some level of 3d support.
(I don't actually use 3d in daya to day stuff, but occasionally I fire
up some 3d app just to see if it is working.)

> In addition to the need for 3d support, I am using two monitors with
> the Radeon 3850, 3870 and 4850 (each on a separate computer) so the
> proprietary driver makes this easier to setup also.

I think these are r600 based cards. Support for those is being worked on.
You might try a rawhide snapshot live CD/DVD with some 3d app on it and
see if at least some of what you want is working there.




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