Help with ATI HD2600

panosk · 2009-09-04 07:22:03

Hello,

So my brother finally decided to switch to Linux and he asked me to install Arch on his machine, with KDE and all the eye candy. Installation was a breeze until I had to mess up with 3D acceleration. Unfortunately, I had no previous experience with ATI cards, and I must say I was very disappointed by the chaos that currently exists in the ATI world.

To make a long story short, is there a way to achieve the following?

- 3D with compositing. Games is not a priority, but kwin and hd movies must run flawlessly.
- No git packages.
- Preferably no need to use xorg.conf.

I tried all the available drivers and followed the excellent wiki, but couldn't get the results I want. Right now his system uses the git version of xf86-video-ati and all the related packages, with good 2d and excellent hd movie playback, but no compositing. Most probably I will reinstall Arch because dependencies got messed up with git. However, I am not willing to spend much more time on this, and neither is my brother who is willing to buy an nvidia card to avoid all this mess.

TIA

djszapi · 2009-09-04 18:31:23

Hello Panosk!

Which ATI card do you use exactly ? Which driver/kernel/X do you use ? Did you try with other version of them too ? What's the concrete error output ? Can you see any related errors/warnings in log files, like xorg.log, errorlog, syslog, etc. ?

Perry3D · 2009-09-05 11:24:12

Hi panosk,

you will not get good 3D acceleration with the open driver (ati and radeonhd) for cards higher than r500 chips. At the moment this is very experimental: Compiz works, but with a lot of artefacts. But 2D and video works perfectly: smooth and stable. There are plans for kernel 2.6.32, which will bring official 3D-acceleration for your card.
http://wiki.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature

For compositing use the catalyst driver.

panosk · 2009-09-05 14:59:12

Thank you for your replies. As I said, it is my brother's machine I am struggling with, and since he don't live together I don't have access to his PC anytime. I will do some maintenance and upgrades to his machine through ssh, but first I want to set up compositing and check the performance. Tomorrow I will give another try to the catalyst driver, which seems the most straightforward approach to achieve compositing, and if it still gives us trouble my brother will get an nvidia. Sorry for not providing any log files, but as I said we won't spend countless hours just to make the graphics card work the way it should, and that's why I am only asking for a working combination of drivers/packages. It is unfortunate that I only spent about an hour to fully install arch with kde, codecs, apps, etc and then spent another 3 hours trying to make compositing work.

@djszapi: The card is HD2600 (R600), stock kernel and X. First I tried the stock open source drivers. radeonhd couldn't detect the correct resolution and no compositing, ati detected correct resolution but no compositing and bad 2d performance (windows tearing, trailing marks while moving windows, etc). Then I tried catalyst from aur, which locked the system completely after I created the xorg.conf and rebooted (maybe my fault since I didn't spend time to check xorg.conf, and that's why I will give it another try). I had to start the machine with the live cd and delete xorg.conf. Right now, I have installed xf86-video-ati-git, with all the related packages (libdrm, etc), which give good 2d performance but still no compositing. I haven't created any xorg.conf with the open source drivers.

Last edited by panosk (2009-09-05 15:01:33)

flamelab · 2009-09-05 15:07:35

If you want 3D, but with xf86-video-ati, follow this thread:

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=79509

Catalyst is a piece of garbage, it barely works, but still, it has 3D (hurray!).

As I saw, Catalyst 9.10 beta has been leaked for Ubuntu, as always. Try it if everything else fails.

panosk · 2009-09-05 15:34:40

flamelab wrote:

If you want 3D, but with xf86-video-ati, follow this thread:
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=79509
Catalyst is a piece of garbage, it barely works, but still, it has 3D (hurray!).
As I saw, Catalyst 9.10 beta has been leaked for Ubuntu, as always. Try it if everything else fails.

Thanks, will try that.

Arch Linux

#1 2009-09-04 07:22:03

Help with ATI HD2600

#2 2009-09-04 18:31:23

Re: Help with ATI HD2600

#3 2009-09-05 11:24:12

Re: Help with ATI HD2600

#4 2009-09-05 14:59:12

Re: Help with ATI HD2600

#5 2009-09-05 15:07:35

Re: Help with ATI HD2600

#6 2009-09-05 15:34:40

Re: Help with ATI HD2600

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